Teaching Listening Skills
Listen! But how?
“Be as passionate about listening as you are about wanting to be heard.” -Brene Brown
TEACHME TEFL
Listening is your students introduction to the English world. As native speakers, you listened to your parents, family, friends before you started speaking. If you are an advanced English speaker, you may remember that your introduction to English was through listening.
While listening is usually the first skill, students need to work hard to improve their listening, you can help your students in the following ways.
More and More
You may see your student for 30 minutes, once a week. This is not enough time to teach listening. The more your students listen to English the greater their listening skills will become. Think of a musician, they train their ear to hear the correct notes, your students too need to become attune to the English language.
You can help your students by encouraging listening. Most songs, movies and TV shows are available in English. Encourage your students to download English material to listen to in their spare time.
Help your students choose music and entertainment that appeals to them. If they have a favourite artist in their native tongue, find someone with a similar sound in English. There are countless TV shows and movies, you will be sure to find something that will appeal to your student. Also if your student is a beginner, you could suggest that they use subtitles in their native language so that they are able to grasp the concepts of the entertainment.
Listen, listen, then listen some more!
Speak some more
Often homework or assignments are written, why not record your instructions for your students. Most students will have access to a smartphone or tablet, with the voice recording application, record your instructions and send to your students.
This is a simple way to include additional listening opportunities. With beginner to intermediate students, be sure that they understand the spoken instructions and it may be best to also provide written instructions for further clarity.
But how?
While we want our students to listen as much as possible we also need to be careful of accents. There are many different countries that speak English, and all with a different accent. As an English teacher, your goal is to teach your students ‘English’ not an accent.
Try to minimise your accent when speaking to your students so that they don’t pick up any of your accent habits. A good way to neutralise your accent is by watching mainstream movies and TV shows, generally the actors speak with a neutral accent. To practise, try repeating lines that the characters say, even record your own voice and you can hear the accents and differences.
Pay special attention to the vowel sounds and also the endings of each word as this is where accents often differ. Also watch the speed that the characters speak, you will notice they will generally speak slower than we would in general conversation. As an English teacher, you too will need to slow down your speech so that your students have ample opportunity to listen and understand.
But why?
We generally listen to either gain specific information or for general understanding.
When teaching listening, you want to make sure that your students clearly understand why they need to listen. Think of yourself, why do you listen or pay attention? Generally it is to gain information or understanding.
A simple way to help your students is to ask questions. You can ask questions before you speak, so students know what information to listen for.
You can ask questions after speaking to check your students understood what they heard.
You can even stop throughout speaking to ask questions to check understanding.
Either way, questions will help you to see that your students know why they are listening, and are in fact listening.
Preparing to listen
Like all receptive and productive skills, it is important that these are taught in three stages. Pre-listenting, while listening and post-listening. When using a listening resource to teach your students you may want to consider these factors during the listening exercise.
Pre-Listening
If your students don’t know why they are listening then they are not going to understand what they are hearing. You need to provide context for your students. This is especially important when introducing a specific listening material. Be sure that you also cover any vocabulary that needs to be taught or understood before completing a listening task.
While Listening
Listening is for understanding or information, be sure your students understand why they are listening before the exercise begins. Also students may need to listen more than once to be able to grasp the material presented. If you notice students are not understanding the material, add in additional short questions to check comprehension and add additional information as needed. Just be sure to keep these questions simple and brief so as not to take away from the material being presented.
Post-Listenting
Use activities to check that your students have understood what they have heard. Then you need to make this material relevant to your students. Ask them what they liked or disliked from the material, do they agree or disagree with what is being raised. Help them to integrate the information they have heard into their exisiting knowledge and show how they can apply this to themselves. This will also motivate your students to continue to improve their listening skills.
Listening is just one skill, to find out more and how to teach, sign up to the TeachMe 120hr TEFL course using this link below.