Wanna know how to do engaging and active listening activities with your students? Let me tell you! By using Bloom’s Taxonomy to plan your lesson! If you do that, you ensure that all the cognitive levels are used and that learning is optimal. Bloom’s Taxonomy distinguishes six different levels, and below, I will give you some examples for each.
Listening to the target language a lot helps students understand every part of the language better. Not only will they become better at listening to the English language, but they will also be able to read, write and speak it better. And you can make the process of listening practice boring, like textbooks sometimes do, or you can make it interesting. How? I will tell you.
Before you read on, I also have a freebie you can grab, my Lush Listening Lesson Cheat Sheet! Click here to get it in your email now and plan a great listening lesson immediately!
Why make listening activities interesting?
If you use Bloom’s Taxonomy to create listening activities for students it means that they will practice their lower-order thinking skills as well as their higher-order thinking skills. And this will make their learning, in this case listening, deeper and more complex. It also helps teachers explain to students what they want them to do with newly acquired knowledge from a spoken text in a practical way. Which is why you would listen to anything in real life: because you have an objective.
Listening activities in the classroom
So what activities can you do if you want to use the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy? Here we go, a listening activity example for each level:
- Remember: Ask students to summarize the main points of the video or audio text, using the 5W and H questions (who, what, when, where, why and how). Get them to make a list or create a mind map.
- Understanding: Choose a number of challenging vocabulary words that are used in the video or audio text, and get students to explain their meaning.
- Applying: Get students to use the information from the video or audio text to do a task. For example, ask them to write a letter or create a presentation.
- Analyzing: Get students to examine each part of the video or audio text. What structure is there or do they see any patterns? How are the different parts connected?
- Evaluating: Ask students to evaluate the video or audio text. Is it effective? Have them comment on structure, style and content and how it can be improved.
- Creating: have students create something new based on the information in the video or audio text. They could create a poster, brochure, or even a talk show to incorporate what they’ve learned.
I think these are great listening activities for ESL students! They will give students a reason to listen to a text in the target language that isn’t just ‘fill in the correct answer’. Give them a try!
Listening activities worksheets
I have created a set of exercises that can be used with any spoken text, be it audio or video. The set includes exercises for before the listening takes place, exercises for during the listening, and ones for after listening. It’s a complete set, and you can use it to work through together in class, or you can give it as homework. I like giving it to students to use with any show or movie they like to watch on Netflix. Click here to grab these exercises from my store!
Or would you like listening activities ESL students would really love? Get them to find videos and create exercises for their peers! My Youtube Tuesday Listening Practice Unit Plan and Podcast Pandemonium Unit Plan detail how you can start doing this with students so that you get student-led active listening activities that every student will enjoy! Click here to get these unit plans from my store!
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Why doing activities for Bloom’s Taxonomy will help your students learn more
