Page 227 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Here a few suggestions for you to try in your listening skills lessons:
✓ Working with a picture. Students can examine a picture to see if it matches up to the listening text. Does the picture show the correct number of people in the right place? Is each person in the picture wear- ing the clothes the listening text described? In a picture story students can choose the picture that doesn’t fit. They may have four pictures that show scenes from a story but one picture shows the same characters doing something that doesn’t happen in the story. By listening carefully the students can weed out it out.
✓ Labelling: Students put labels on various parts of a diagram based on what they hear. Suppose the listening text describes a machine with four of five distinct parts and only one part is labelled on the diagram. As the students listen to the text they hear that Part A is rectangular not round, or that Part D is the only one connected to Part C on the right. By listening to the text the class can identify and eliminate the various parts.
✓ Following a map: After a description or directions, X can mark the spot.
✓ Short teacher monologue: Tell a story about an episode in your life while students take notes. They can ask you questions about it afterwards or retell the story to each other.
✓ Traditional stories: Folk tales and fairy stories are great because there are often similar
ones in other cultures so the students may want to tell their own afterwards. If you can’t find a professional recording, get a friend to read and record it for you.
✓ Songs: Music is great for fixing words in your mind. It’s a painless way to practice grammar. I recently used Beyonce’s ‘If I Were a Boy’ to practise the second condi- tional tense.
✓ Physical response: Get students to follow instructions through movement. They can practice words like prepositions and parts of the body. They can also manipulate objects in accordance with the listening text.
✓ Dictation:Thistraditionalactivitycanbeliv- ened up by dictating a diagram for students to draw.
✓ True or false: Have a series of true or false comprehension questions after listening for detail.
✓ Gap fill: Leave gaps in the tape-script or in the summary you prepare.
✓ Putting information in order. The listening text may describe a process such as baking a special cake. On the students’ worksheet you list all the stages in the wrong order. As they listen, the students can number the stages of the process from first to last.
✓ Complete information on a timetable or schedule.
Listening activities to try
Students don’t need to understand every word. After all, in real life we often just let phrases go over our heads. You may understand a particular expres- sion only after hearing it many times – this is a natural way to acquire lan- guage. So instead of analysing the text to death, just choose specific things you want to highlight.