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Texto 1 - Listening and elementary learners

Sue Leather, Freelance trainer and writer

This article is about making the listening experience in the classroom more similar to what we do in real life. It's
about giving our students some choice in what they listen to and what they take from it.

• Why we listen
• Our students' interests
• Allowing students choice
• Getting feedback

Why we listen
Just the other day I listened to the BBC radio news online. I wanted to hear the swimming results from the
Olympics. I specifically wanted to hear whether a British swimmer had got a medal in the men's butterfly.
Swimming is a sport that I'm very interested in, as I swim myself, and as I'm British, I am particularly interested in
the results from the British team. In other words, I had quite a bit of personal investment in my listening. I listened
to all the news, but I can't tell you what I 'heard,' apart from the fact that yes, a British swimmer did win a bronze
medal in that race.

Now it seems to me that the experience described above is not unusual.

• Firstly, when we listen to something as native speakers, we almost always have an intense, or at least
fairly strong, interest in what we are listening to.
• Secondly, we usually choose which specific piece of information we are interested in.
• Thirdly, we are able to 'blank out' or ignore the other information so that we don't even hear it.

When I think about my elementary students, I feel that I'm asking a lot if I make no effort to find out what their
interests in the texts are and ask them to register information from different parts of the listening piece, without
allowing them to 'blank out' or ignore what doesn't interest them.

Our students' interests

I always like to gather information about my students' interests. What do they like to do in their spare time?
Sports? Play or listen to music? Politics? Chess? Fishing? Secondly, what do they listen to most in their own
language?

One way of gathering this information is by using a questionnaire at the beginning of term. Though my students
are sure to have varying and different interests, this information helps me to cater to individual interests better. I
can then start looking out for appropriate listening materials, and even recording them.
Download sample questionnaire >> 48k

Allowing students choice

I believe that we listen better if we have a personal investment in what we are listening to, as in my example
above. This would be easy to create in the classroom, if I knew that all my students were interested in swimming
or urban music, but this is unlikely. What I can do, however, is to allow students to choose which piece(s) of
information they would like to listen for from any given listening task.

Here is a possible sequence for doing this pre-listening with upper elementary students who can already write
simple questions. I have chosen the news as an example.

• Brainstorm content of listening from topic 'Today's News'

• Elicit list of possible content and write on board e.g. Elections, Sport results, Weather etc.
• Elicit possible order of content.
• Make groups of four, with one 'chairperson.'
• Each student has to choose one topic from the list and think of 2 things they would like to know. They
write questions. (teacher monitors)
• Students listen to the text and answer Qs.
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• Listen again if necessary.

• Individual members of the group tell the chairperson the answers. (teacher monitors)
• Chairperson collects all the information and gives feedback to class.

A more controlled way of allowing choice with lower level students is to prepare a set of questions yourself, write
them on the board, and get them to choose the two questions they would like to know the answers to.

This is fine with authentic listening taken from radio or other sources, but what about course book listening
material? Here also you can give students an element of choice. Below is something I do with a short flight
departure announcement from a well-known elementary course book.

• Collect some pictures of the cities mentioned in the announcement.

• Students look at them in groups and try to work out which cities they are.
• Write up the names of the cities on board.
• Each student has to choose one city s/he would like to visit. Why? Give three reasons.
• Then write the name of the city on the form below.
• Pre-teach airline names
• Students listen and complete the information they hear in the departure lounge announcement on the
form.

City
Airline
Flight number
Gate number

This is a very adaptable piece of material. With very low level students you can just collect the basic information.
With slightly more advanced students you can expand on the discussion about the cities. If your class is not too
big, you can actually place the 'gates' on posters around the room and students can then actually go the right gate
for their destination.

Getting feedback
As I've already mentioned, it's important to get feedback only on what a student has listened for, not on every
detail of the listening piece. This selection really helps the student to zone in on information he or she is interested
in, thereby mirroring what we do in real life. Different feedback from different individuals needn't be problematic.
One way round it is to use the group format suggested above.

If we can create an element of 'personal investment' in listening, either by tuning into our students interests or by
giving them some choice, I believe that they will have more and better reasons to listen. The result of this will be
that their listening skills will improve.

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/listening-elementary-learners
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Texto 2 - Making listening an authentic experience

Nik Peachey, teacher, trainer and materials writer, The British Council

In this article I would like to focus on two key areas of developing our students' listening skills.

• The type of listening tasks we choose

• The way we prepare our students before listening

I would like to challenge some accepted beliefs about the way we prepare our students to listen and the types of
tasks we give them in an effort to encourage teachers to adopt an approach to dealing with listening texts that
approximates more closely to an authentic experience.

• Types of listening tasks

• Preparing students for listening
• Making listening more authentic
• An authentic approach
• Some problems with an authentic approach
• Conclusion

Types of listening tasks

Comprehension check questions are by far the most common type of listening tasks our students are given in
class. Look at almost any language course book listening activity and you will find these. Sometimes they will be
multiple choice questions, sometimes true false statements and sometimes open W/H questions. In many ways
there is nothing wrong with this, but how often do we really do these kinds of tasks in our everyday lives? Do you
sit down to watch TV or listen to the radio with a set of questions in front of you? I very much doubt it. As such
these types of activities aren't developing our students' abilities to understand and process what they've heard in
any meaningful kind of way.

Preparing students for listening

Over many years I have taught lessons that so thoroughly prepared students to listen for the sole purpose of
getting the correct answers to a set of prescribed questions that they could hardly fail to get a question wrong. I
prepared the students by thoroughly pre-teaching all possible unknown words, checked that the students
understood the context of the listening and then made sure that they and had predicted the possible answers to
all the questions. Results were generally good, so what's wrong with this?

Well the problems begin the moment the students step outside the classroom into the real world. They are
surrounded by a vast range of spontaneous and unpredictable language. They have no control over the range of
vocabulary they may encounter or the kind of things they will hear or need to respond to. This is why many times,
even higher level students who do very well in the classroom find it so difficult to cope when faced with a 'real'
situation. We simply haven't taught them in a way that will help them cope with this

Making listening more authentic

Firstly we should select tasks that are 'authentic', by which I mean real tasks that real native speakers would do if
they were listening to a similar text. In the course of my daily life I never listen to anything for the sole purpose of
answering true false questions or multiple choice questions or any other kinds of questions. These are all sound
means of testing ability, but we don't improve our students' ability by testing it, we only ascertain their level of
development.

As I said 'authentic' tasks should be ones that resemble as much as possible the original purpose for which the
text was intended. If we listen to a train announcement we do so in order to make sure we know the time of the
train we want to catch, if we listen to someone giving directions we do so in order to be able to find a destination.
As teachers and designers of teaching material we should try to bear this in mind when we set tasks for our
students. The purpose of the text should define the task we assign our students and in so doing we develop our
students' abilities to understand and process what they hear rather than just achieving a score.

Below are a few suggestions that link types of text to possible tasks:
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Listening text Purpose Possible task

A lecture Gather information Take notes and produce an essay/summary

Plane announcement Check time and place of departure Find correct place on airport map
The news To be informed about current affairs Express opinions on what you have heard
Fictional story Entertainment Decide if you believe it
Directions To find a destination Draw/follow a map
Gossip Entertainment Pass the gossip onto someone else
An anecdote Social Give advice
Music Entertainment Decide if you like it

An authentic approach
Language is a constantly developing form and when we listen in our native language we still hear words that are
new to us or that we may not fully understand. This doesn't however lead us to check lists of unknown words in
dictionaries or learn word lists before we listen. We have evolved a process of deducing the meaning of new
words. This is a process we also need to develop in our students. By constantly pre-teaching and preparing
students we are undermining the development of this process. Students need to be challenged and to struggle to
find meaning for themselves, with our guidance and support, in order to develop this ability.

To make this happen we need to do less pre-teaching and more developmental and post listening work so that
students' first listening to a text is as close as possible to an 'authentic' experience. We can then use this first
listening experience diagnostically to assess the problems that they are having and what we need to do to
overcome those problems. We can also gauge the degree to which they are succeeding with their listening and
build on this.

Some problems with an authentic approach

Students can easily be demotivated when faced by tasks that are very challenging, particularly the first few times,
but if you show them that you will gradually lead them to an understanding of the text, they will gradually start to
relax more about dealing with more difficult texts. And once you have shown them a few times that they can
gradually understand a challenging text, then, in the long run they will develop a much greater sense of
achievement and experience far less stress when dealing with challenging situations in the real world.

Many students expect us as their teachers to make things easy for them and to help them. This is also our instinct
on seeing our students struggling, but we must try to resist this urge to do the work for them and help students to
see that by doing the work for them we undermine their potential to achieve for themselves.

Conclusion
I have for some time been adopting this approach, and while it does have its initial drawbacks for students that
come from an educational culture that puts emphasis on testing and teacher dependence, if as teachers we are
prepared to persevere, in the long term I have fond that the students do understand, appreciate and benefit from
a more authentic listening experience.

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/making-listening-authentic-experience
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Texto 3 - A framework for planning a listening skills lesson

Nik Peachey, teacher, trainer and materials writer, The British Council

Listening is one of the most challenging skills for our students to develop and yet also one of the most important.
By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability to become more independent learners, as
by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of
grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your
students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.
• The basic framework
• Pre-listening
• While listening
• Post listening
• Applying the framework to a song
• Some conclusions

The basic framework

The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

• Pre listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen.

• While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the
development of their understanding of it.
• Post listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their
existing knowledge.

Pre-listening
There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are
motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.

• Motivation
It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to
select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest
and curiosity.

• Contextualisation
When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that
environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear.
Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from
its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening
and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.

• Preparation
To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that
students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within
the lesson to be act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening
When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen
that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a
number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a
text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.

Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that
the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes
a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.

The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of
the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they
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listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some
sort of graphical response.

The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead
students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.

Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for this reason I think it's very
important that students should have 'breathing' or 'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to
compare their answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the
listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.

Post-listening
There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text,
and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content.

• Reaction to the text

Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most important. Again this is
something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a
following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or
disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information
they have heard.

• Analysis of language
The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the
text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of
developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of
the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the
students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that
express those meanings much easier.

Applying the framework to a song.

Here is an example of how you could use this framework to exploit a song:

• Pre-listening
o Students brainstorm kinds of songs
o Students describe one of their favourite songs and what they like about it
o Students predict some word or expressions that might be in a love song

• While listening
o Students listen and decide if the song is happy or sad
o Students listen again and order the lines or verses of the song
o Students listen again to check their answers or read a summary of the song with errors in and
correct them.

• Post listening
o Focus on content
▪ Discuss what they liked / didn't like about the song
▪ Decide whether they would buy it / who they would buy it for
▪ Write a review of the song for a newspaper or website
▪ Write another verse for the song
o Focus on form
▪ Students look at the lyrics from the song and identify the verb forms
▪ Students find new words in the song and find out what they mean
▪ Students make notes of common collocations within the song

Conclusion
Within this article I have tried to describe a framework for listening development that could be applied to any
listening text. This isn't the only way to develop our students listening or to structure a listening lesson, but it is a
way that I have found to be effective and motivating for my students.

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/a-framework-planning-a-listening-skills-lesson
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Principles for Teaching Listening Tasks (Brown, 2007)

• Include a focus on listening in an integrated-skill course.

• Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.
• Use authentic language and context.
• Carefully consider the form of listener´s response
- doing – the listener responds physically to a command
- choosing – the listener selects from alternatives such as
pictures, objects, and texts
- transferring – the listener draws a picture of what is heard
- answering – the listener answers questions about a passage
- condensing – the listener take notes on a lecture
- extending – the listener provides an ending to a story heard
- duplicating – the listener translates the message into the
native language
- modeling – the listener orders a meal, for example, after
listening to a model order
- conversing – the listener engages in a conversation that
indicates appropriate processing of information
• Encourage development of listening strategies
- looking for key words
- looking for nonverbal cues to meaning
- predicting a speaker´s purpose by the context of the spoken
discourse
- associating information with one´s existing cognitive
structure (activating background knowledge)
- guessing meaning
- seeking clarification
- listening for the general gist
- various test-taking strategies for listening comprehension
• Include both botton-up and top-down listening techniques
- botton-up: from sounds, words, grammatical relationships,
lexical meaning, etc., to the final “message”.
- top-down: prior knowledge, expectation, global
understanding, interpretation of a text.