Listening activities (Second Part)

There are some listening activities, that you can apply during your English classes.

• Pictureless listening (language): The teacher covers the screen, turns the monitor away from the students or turns the brightness control right down. The students then listen to a dialogue and have to guess such things as where it is taking place and who the speakers are. Can they guess their age, for example? What do they think the speakers actually look like?
• Pictureless listening (music): Where an excerpt has a prominent music track, students can listen to it and then say – based on the mood it appears to convey - what kind of scene they think it accompanies and where it is taking place.
• Pictureless listening (sound effects): In a scene without dialogue students can listen to the sound effects to guess what is happening. For example, they might hear the lighting of a gas stove, eggs being broke and fried, coffee being poured and the milk and sugar stirred in, they then tell the story they think they have just hear.
• Picture or speech: We can divide the class in two so that half of the class faces the screen and half faces away. The students who can see the screen have to describe what is happening to the students who cannot. This forces them into immediate fluency while the non-watching students struggle to understand what is going on, and is an effective way of mixing reception and production in spoken English. Halfway through an excerpt, the students can change round.
• Subtitles: There are many ways we can use subtitled films. John Field suggests that one way to enable students to listen to authentic material is to allow them to have subtitles to help them. Alternatively, students can watch a film extract with subtitles but with the sound turned down. Every time a subtitle appears, we can stop the film and the students have to say what they think the characters are saying in English, with DVDs which have the option to turn off the subtitles, we can ask students to say what they would write for subtitles and then they can compare theirs with what actually appears.
  Subtitles are only really useful, of course, when students all share the same L1. But if they do, the connections they make between English and their language can be extremely useful.

Bibliography:

Harmer, J. (2007). The practice of English Language Teaching (4th Edition). Pearson Longman, Pearson. Page 309.