Teachers' Tip

Here are some helpful tips we've compliled about teaching. We hope they prove useful. If you have any other suggestions of comments, please contact us.

Making listening tasks easier, part 1

There are several ways to alter a listening task to make it easier. First you have to decide what the problem is, and then come up with a workable solution.

 

 

Problem

It's too long; students can't keep up the level of concentration needed to complete the task

Solution

1. Don't use all the listening passage. Read through the teacher's copy and decide what would be a good place to stop. You may of course have to alter the task set as well, but that's better than getting all the students depressed because they can't do what's asked of them.

2. Make it a split listening, where the students get to listen to part of the text in groups, and then put the various parts together to recreate the entire text. This approach also introduces speaking skills and group work to add to the effectiveness of the listening text.

3. Give students information about the listening passage, so that they don't go into it 'blind'. Knowing that a listening passage is about X and is an argument between A and B will make students aware unconsciously and they will expect two sides of an argument and have some idea about the lines along which the speakers will speak.


Making listening tasks easier, part 2

There are several ways to alter a listening task to make it easier. First you have to decide what the problem is, and then come up with a workable solution.

Problem

It's too difficult; students find it difficult to understand what the speakers are saying.

Solution

1. Give students the tapescript. They will then be able to understand the speakers and follow the words as they listen. Their listening skills will still be tested, but they will have a crutch to help them. Make sure you don't give them time to read the whole passage before they listen to it, otherwise you will partly defeat the object of the listening exercise. If you feel uncomfortable giving them the tapescript with the listening passage, you can adapt this by giving them the tapescript for three minutes, or the tapescript with every second line missing, or part of the tapescript etc.

2. Adapt the exercise. You can still make it a worthwhile exercise by, for example, asking the students to identify numbers or words, asking them how the speakers feel, from a list of adjectives written up on the board, or even, when there are more than two speakers, by asking them how many people are speaking. The other thing that you can do is split the exercise up, by giving one question to each student, rather than getting each student to answer each question.


Making listening tasks easier, part 3

Problem

The listening task is too easy.

Solution

  1. Make the task more difficult. If you were going to give the students a true or false, which is essentially a 50-50 exercise, as students have a 50% chance of getting it right, make it a true or false or not stated exercise, where they must tick not stated if there is nothing specifically said in the exercise.
  2. Make the listening a lesser part of the lesson. Ask students questions, the answers to which aren't specifically given in the passage. What was the man wearing? What had he had for breakfast that morning? What did he wear to bed last night? They might seem like silly questions, but at least it's getting the students to use their imaginations and talk to each other.
  3. Split the listening up into at least four parts. Divide the class into four groups and then play one group one part of the passage and so on. In addition to answering whatever questions you have, the students then have to get together and put the parts in the right order.
  4. Instead of making the listening a general comprehension exercise, make them listen more intensively, by asking them to write down all the examples of, for example, the present perfect, or all the contractions that are used. It's virtually impossible for this to be too easy, and they get very worthwhile grammar/pron practice from it too. It can even be a springboard to grammar or pron analysis.


Radio news

A very useful source of authentic listening material is radio news. Most countries have an English-language news service that can be recorded, otherwise the BBC World Service or Voice of America can be picked up with the right equipment. One way of exploiting this material is to right a summary of the news with eight factual errors. Students listen to the report and have to identify the errors. Of course, the errors can be grammatical as well, focusing on a structure that you have been working on in class, but the laws of nature dictate that the structure you are presenting doesn't come up in the broadcast, or that the examples directly contradict what you have taught your students about the structure in class. "C'est la langue."


Television news

At the start of a news broadcast, there is usually a preview of what is to come, along with pictures of the first few news stories. Video this, and prepare the following worksheet:

 

 

 

News Item What? Where? When? Who? Why? How?

 

1

 

 

2

 

 

3

 

 

4

 

Now give the sheets out to the students. Give each student one of the question words. They must watch the opening preview pictures with the sound turned down, and just write a few words to say what they think is happening. They can write in their own language if necessary. So student one will answer the question 'what' four times, for the four different stories, student two will answer the question 'where' four times, student three 'when' and so on. Sometimes it may clear what's happening on the screen. So much the better! They must use their imaginations. Play the preview as many times as they want to hear it, and ignore their protests about "It's too hard!" When they have finished writing their brief notes, you put them together in groups of six and ask them to share their knowledge and come up with the news story in less than 50 words. This is the fun part. They will probably have written about events completely different from each other. They must use use their imaginations, along with a healthy dose of arguing and persuading, to write out the news stories. What you have as a result is usually very funny and very different from what the story really is about. After the groups have finished and read out the full previews, error correct and play the real previews, with the sound up, to see how close each group is to each story.