Is planning lessons for listening practice English learners will enjoy not your strong suit? Let me help you out, because I’ve come up with a structure to use in my listening skills lessons to make them engaging and active, fun, and very educational. And, not importantly, I will tell you how to integrate the other language skills as well, as I think that’s so fun.
If you want to skip ahead on planning lessons, grab my free Lush Listening Lesson Cheat Sheet here to guide you. It will help you plan a well-structured listening lesson.
Listening practice of English done the right way
The best way to approach any skills lesson is to do a before, during and after part. The before part of the exercises to improve listening skills that I do are to help activate students’ prior knowledge and enthusiasm for the topic, the during part is for checking comprehension, and the after part is for transfer of learning.
The pre-listening part
Start by introducing the topic to students and activating their prior knowledge about it. I love using word webs for this. Just get them to tell you anything that comes to mind. Ask them what they expect will be in the spoken text. What do they hope will be in the text? Then direct their attention to anything but the text itself: visuals, colors, titles and subheadings, source; what do those tell them? Once you’ve grilled them on all this, you can start listening to an audio or video text.
While listening
While students listen, they can do several types of activities.
- You can ask them comprehension questions about the information in the text: true/false-, open-, and multiple-choice questions are all good options to check their understanding of the text.
- Gap-fill exercises are great for language study: take a word out of the text and then ask them what word would fit in this context.
- Questions about the tone of the text, the message the speaker is trying to convey, or how two parts relate are great too.
- Vocabulary study is a fun activity. Get them to infer the meaning of certain words from the text, or even look them up later on.
- Ask them the 5W and H questions: who, what, where, when, why and how?
- Getting them to do a drawing of something important they learned from the text is cool too.
You can’t and shouldn’t do them all, so choose the ones that fit your text.
After listening
This is where students should transfer what they’ve learned from the text and show their understanding. They should produce text here, in response to what they listened to. This may be a spoken or written text. They could send a letter to a speaker; they could do a review of a broadcast, or write an extra scene, beginning or end, or character into it; or they could write a diary entry for someone related to the text. It needs to be something that helps them transfer the info that they’ve learned in a text to a real-world reaction in the target language.
Listening to practice English with the right tasks
Now try and create your own exercises for listening practice in English using Bloom’s taxonomy! In this blog post, I explain the benefits of using Bloom for meaningful tasks that are a variation of lower and higher order thinking skills to challenge your students on all levels. It’s super fun to use it and come up with wonderful tasks for them to do.
For a recap of this article, as well as a clear checklist to plan a great listening skills lesson, download my Lush Listening Lesson Cheat Sheet here for free!
Ready to go exercises
Or do you need ready-made exercises right now, because you don’t have time to create your own lessons? I have created a set of exercises that are applicable to any spoken text, audio or video, that a student might use to practice their listening skills, either at home or during the lesson. It’s 6 pages of exercises that follow the structure I outlined above. You can use them in class, either with a spoken text that everyone listens to together, or you can set it as homework for a spoken text of the students own choice. Either way, it works really well! Check them out HERE.
Check out my other articles on listening practice:
5 fun lesson ideas to use YouTube with your students
5 cool ways to use podcasts for listening practice
