204 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Come Again? Repeating the Text
In most cases you play listening texts twice within the lesson. The first time
students get the idea of what the text is about and on the second occasion
they listen for more detail.
Listening for the basic idea
A task or activity aimed at getting the gist should be relatively easy but not
obvious. So if you’re presenting a Madonna interview, there’s no point asking
‘Who is Madonna?’ It’s not even necessary to listen to the text to get the
answer. However, if the students had previously predicted which questions
the interview would cover, the task may be to listen to the interview and
check whether they were right.
Listening and responding to a visual image is a useful way of exercising lis-
tening skills because students don’t get tangled up with reading and writing,
which may create anxiety or distraction.
Listening activities should practise just that, listening. Avoid trying to test
reading or writing skills at the same time by using complicated grammatical
structures or unnecessarily difficult vocabulary in the questions.
Figure 14-1 is an example of a business English activity I devised along with
part of the tape-script. The organisation charts in the figure accompany a
listening text about the structure of a company. Students listen for gist and
decide which chart best fits the description they hear.
The tape-script is here:
Mrs Smith: Have you prepared the letters?
Paul: Yes Mrs Smith, but I gave one to Mike.
Mrs Smith: Well, you’re a manager too, Paul. You should be doing your
own paperwork.
Paul: I know but the client wanted a 35 per cent discount and I’m only
allowed to offer 25 per cent. Only you and Mike can agree to bigger dis-
counts so I passed it on to him.
Mrs Smith: I see. Well I’ll speak to Mike later. Don’t forget that he and I are
coming to see you and John tomorrow to discuss the sales figures.
Allow students to get the point through what the speakers infer rather than
what they say explicitly, as long as it’s not too subtle.
