How could we help our studients with listening activities?

Teaching is fun and learning with listening activities is fun

“…and now we’re going to listen to…” these words would always make my learners sweat.

I do believe that teaching is fun and learning is fun as well. The main question is how can we make it fun for our students, right?

My goal is to make it as stress-free as possible. It motivated me to become a certified Neurological Therapist. It helped me understand how I could create a positive experience in listening activities plus how my learners could benefit more from them. 

Needless to say that we will apply different approaches to different lessons depending on our goals and what we are focusing on in the lesson.

First, we should identify the level of difficulty, which our learners have. Even if our client has got a C1 level he/she might not fully understand a recorded talk or a recorded conversation (speaking from my experience).

Tips about helping students with listening activities

One of the possible difficulties is that people do not recognize all the voices they hear

You may be super surprised if I tell you that not all students are able to tell you how many women and how many men are talking in a conversation. This task may sound super simple and perhaps not necessary but it is important. It may be challenging too. We are talking about a foreign language and let’s assume that your students got used to your voice and the voices of the group/classmates.

What about the other voices and accents? Ok, we will not go into accents now. Just the voices, just the simple question:

How many women and how many women can you hear?

According to Linjun Zhang, Yu Li [1], people better recognize our native voices than foreign voices. This study was conducted with bind people. But let’s imagine that our students are blind and that they can only listen to the recordings and they cannot see the speakers or a speaker. In the same study, they found out that people who could see had better results.

What else could be done?

If you have an opportunity to work with a video file, and not an audio file, it may be easier for your learners. Also, I’d like to share an interesting exercise with you. You ask your students to sit back to back and perform a speaking activity. It is a good way to practice speaking/listening skills. In addition, you may encourage your students to act out some phone calls. Usually, many people get terrified when it comes to speaking a foreign language over the phone.  

This is one more scientific proof that listening without seeing people’s faces is more difficult than listening to people and being able to see them. 

Boundaries between words

Another issue can be not understanding clear boundaries between words, i.e. where one word finishes and the next one starts. 

Example #1

While I was watching a Danish-Swedish TV series, I couldn’t understand the main character’s name – Saga Norén. I heard it as Saganorén /ˈsɑgɑˌɲœʀɛɴ/. I knew all the sounds, although, I could not tell the 1st name from the 2nd name. At the same time, I was not sure if I had decoded all the sounds precisely. Besides, I was not sure whether I heard /n/ or /ɴ/. I could not focus on it fully as his name was used within the dialogues and I was trying to understand further information. 

Example #2 

I had a client, a non-native English speaker, who lived in London. Her level of English was B2. However, she could not decode three words – “it’s in it”. When we are speaking, we do not pause after each word, we have connected speech. The problem was that she could not recognize those words in connected speech. And she even could not tell how many words she heard. 

Example #3

During a Spanish class, a learner was sure that she heard the name Danna. Whereas, the speaker said “de Anna”. Again, the learner had a B1 level in Spanish. 

That is why a more powerful question is “how many words can you hear?” and/or “which sounds can you hear?”. Because very often learners simply say: “I don’t understand” and my goal is to identify what exactly they cannot understand. 

Using a visual pattern

If students do not know how many words they hear, I draw a pattern:

|___ represents a word, which starts with a capital letter

___ represents a word, which starts with a small letter 

_ – represents a proposition 

The sentence – I live in Vienna – would look like this: 

|___ ___ _ |___.

If you still do not have the correct answer, you could prompt with some words: 

|___ live in |___.

What else could be done?

We could pay more attention to connected speech, even when we teach grammar or vocabulary in our lessons. And even when we teach beginners. 

As early on as when teaching Present Simple, it’s a good idea to introduce connected speech, pronunciation, and intonation. 

For instance, “Do you like books?”

Do + you = can also be pronounced as /dju:/ or /d͡ʒju:/.

Or when the 3rd person “s” is pronounced as /z/, e.g. She lives /ˈlɪvz/ in Vienna. 

Paying attention to small things (which are not small and they are important) is essential. You will see positive results very soon. It is rewarding for teachers and also for learners. 

By Tetyana Skrypina

Tetyana is a Ukrainian English teacher, teacher trainer and a certified neurological speech therapist.

Bibliography:

Zhang, Linjun & Li, Yu & Zhou, Hong & Zhang, Yang & Shu, Hua. (2021). Language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 1. 055201. 10.1121/10.0004848.