Listening practice

In real-life situations, there are often no opportunities to ‘play it again’, so practising, and learning strategies for, listening is an important part of feeling competent with English. Listening is a usual part of every lesson, but there are particular ways you can help your students to listen better.

In the classroom:
1 Make sure your students know and can use phrases for clarification: Can you repeat that? What do you mean by xxx? What was that word? To show how this should work, tell a story which is higher than the level of the class and encourage the students to ask clarification questions.

2 Take notes: Play a transcript (or read a chosen text) and tell students to make notes while they listen. In pairs, students discuss what they have heard. (A simple recipe might work well here, as there are clear steps to follow.)

At home:
3 Encourage your students to listen to any English language audio books or podcasts particularly 6-minute English from the BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/6-minute-english

4 If your students are using a coursebook, Let’s Enjoy English, Network Now or Great!, for example, play some of the earlier listening exercises, to reinforce listening competence. (You could set this for homework, rather than making it an ‘extra’.) In the following lesson, students report on which recordings they listened to.

5 If your students are happy to do this, suggest they make phone calls to each other in English (or use a message app); this is a great way to rely on listening.