Enhancing Listening Skills in the Classroom

Posted on Feb 26, 2025 in Pedagogy

Teaching: In general, students and teachers do not usually take into account the ability to listen in language class. Surely we do not dispute its importance, but in practice, not enough special attention is devoted to it. Students listen, and we know that we should apply our efforts more to other subjects: reading, writing, grammar, etc.

The Paradox of Listening

  1. Children arrive at school understanding the most basic things, but they have shortcomings.
  2. It’s a skill practiced more often, but not worked on in a specified and determined way.
  3. It is assumed that good listeners develop naturally.
  4. There are gaps that can lead to school failure, and both in school and in society, we spend a long time listening.
  5. It’s one of the most relevant instrumental procedures for achieving other learning.
  6. Global practices are conducted that differ from the process of understanding.

General Guidelines for Listening Activities

  1. It takes much practice to develop listening skills, so exercises should be frequent, brief, and very useful. Intensive activities are short, varied, and active, lasting 5 or 10 minutes.
  2. Another important point is to put emphasis on comprehension and not the result of the exercise. That is, it is not as important that students correctly solve a task as it is that they realize their mistakes and correct them.
  3. It is not necessary to understand every single word that forms a speech to fully understand its meaning.
  4. Selectively focus on understanding by exercising any of the required micro-skills.
  5. Students practice understanding the teacher’s explanation, but the original text can present difficulties.
  6. Understanding material must be real and varied. It has to use authentic language and must include a natural dose of noise. Recordings and spontaneous, real exhibits are better than exercises prepared for the class.

Finally, to put into practice the exercises of understanding, you can follow these steps:

  1. Introduce the theme of the text that is going to be listened to and present the situation.
  2. Present a concrete and clear task that the student must complete.
  3. Play the oral text. The students work individually.
  4. Have students compare their answers in small groups.
  5. Play the speech again.
  6. Compare answers in pairs, in small groups, or at the class level.

Resources and Activities

We need much practice to develop the ability to write, so we present some examples of oral comprehension exercises. Keep in mind that these exercises involve expression, and vice versa. They are:

  1. Mnemonic Games: Some popular games are very useful for working with comprehension, especially with younger students. Examples include games of repeating words, riddles, memorizing tales and repeating choruses, popular literature, or tongue twisters. Others are useful for the elderly, such as broken telephone, dictation secretary, or data retention.

  2. Write and Draw: The result of understanding can be translated into a drawing. For example, each student draws a picture of the distribution of their room and then, in pairs, instructs the other to draw it. The final designs are compared; they should be similar.

  3. Complete Tables: The pupils have to complete a table after oral presentations. Examples: interviews with people about their favorite sports, from the biography of a character, and so on.

  4. Transfer Information: From the oral text, we have to complete an outline, a text with blanks, or a drawing to which data is missing. Useful for adding names and specialized topics: natural and social sciences, physics and chemistry, etc. You can order students to write down information on paper: take notes.

  5. Choose Options: Students have three or more photographs and have to discover which corresponds to the description they hear.

  6. Identify Errors: It is about finding the errors or lies that an oral discourse contains.

  7. Cooperative Learning: This replaces individual work and competitiveness in the classroom with cooperation between pupils who form authentic teams.

Regarding the characteristics of the comprehension exercises, they should involve:

  • Students must have a reason to listen, which has to be the task of the exercise.
  • They must make their comprehension visible and observable, so that they can discuss, improve, and evaluate it.
  • Students have to listen more than once to the oral text, to concentrate on certain points: the pronunciation, the meaning of a word, intonation, etc.