Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Chapter 14: In One Ear, Out the Other: Learning To Listen 205

Figure 14-1:

A business

English

activity.

Owner Mrs Smith

Manager Richard Taylor Manager Paul Jones Manager Mike Smith

Owner Mrs Smith

Area Manager Mike Smith

Manager Paul Jones Manager Richard Taylor Manager John Jones

Other simple forms of questions to get at the main idea of a dialogue may be:

✓ Do the speakers in the dialogue agree with each other or not?

✓ How many speakers are there?

✓ Where do you think they are?

Get students to tick off the things they hear, using words or pictures.

I had a class of children listen to the story of Red Riding Hood. They knew the

story but didn’t realise what it was because they weren’t able to translate the

title. They were very keen to find out if the English language characters did the

same things as the characters in their version. I gave them a worksheet with

the words grandfather, wolf, big ears, big teeth and big feet on it and told them

to tick the things they heard in the story.

Listening for detail

After the students have a chance to listen to the text once and get the gist of

it, you can prepare to go a bit deeper by setting a more detailed listening task

for the students to tackle while listening to the recording a second time. This

time the students can listen for more specific information based on particular

expressions the speaker uses.