Teaching Listening Skills

[birdy]

I read a book chapter (Brown) on how to teach listening skills effectively. It is important to integrate all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) with a special focus on the intended objective. Additionally, the listening activity should be intrinsically motivating and authentic. The responses that the listeners provides need to be somehow noticeable, like through doing a physical command, through answering a question, drawing of a picture,… etc. As a student myself I always found it helpful to learn listening strategies. One example is that in the Cambridge Advanced preparation course I had to look and underline key words in the questions and in the answers. Teaching listening strategies is also highly recommended in the book chapter, because it helps listeners of all proficiency levels to be successful by the listening tasks.

[smantrach]

I believe that teaching listening is a fundamental aspect when learning a language. It is by listening that students can hear and analyze the spoken language around them. As teachers, we have to be aware of how to teach listening skills amongst the other skills to our English language learners. When planning an activity, there should be an appropriate focus on the listening response of the students. It is what will allow us to see if the students comprehended the content learned. Also if we motivate our students and teach them listening strategies (when doing listening activities) will enable them to develop their listening skills. Some of these strategies and techniques are to ask the students to look for key words or to look for non verbal cues when listening to an audio text. Finally, we have to be aware that we have to vary listening techniques and strategies across the proficiency levels of the students that we teach.