Listening activities

When you as a teacher want to apply different activities, you have to:

1. Explain before or after the activity which is the objective.
2. Introduce the topic, for example with questions like: Do you know about...? What kind of...? What is your favorite...? Did you ever hear about...? What do you thik about...?...
3. Give correct instructions.
4. The activity has to be organized and clear.
5. Show confidence about the topic.

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

• Fast Foward: The teacher presses the play button and then fast forwards the DVD or video so that the sequence shoots past silently and at great speed, taling only a few seconds. When it is over, the teacher can ask students what the extract was all about and whether they can guess what characters were saying.
• Silent viewing (for language): The teacher plays the film extract at normal speed but without the sound. Students have to guess what the characters are saying. When they have done this, the teacher plays it with sound so that they can check to see if they guessed correctly.
• Silent viewing (for music): The same technique can be used with music. Teachers show a sequence without sound and ask students to say what kind of music they would put behind it and why. When the sequence is then shown again, with sound, students can judge whether they chose music conveying the same mood as that chosen by the film director.
• Freeze frame: At any stage during a video sequence we can “freeze” the picture, stopping the participants dead in their tracks. This is extremely useful for asking the students what they think will happen next or what a character will say next.
• Partial viewing: One way of provoking the students´curiosity is to allow them only a partial view of the pictures on the screen. We can use pieces of card to cover most of the screen, only leaving the edges on view. Alternatively, we can put little squares of paper all over the screen and remove then one by one so that what is happening is only gradually revealed.
  A variation of partial viewing occurs when the teacher uses a large “divider”, placed at right angles to the screen so that half the class can only see one half of the screen, while the rest of the class can only see the other half. They then have to say what they think the people on the other side saw.

Bibliography:

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