Pre-listening activities
My favourite pre-listening activities
are based on brainstorming. Actually there are dozens of ways we can use this
technique in the EAL environment. Students may generate ideas on their own and then share them with others;
students may work in small groups and create mind maps; students may call out
ideas for the teacher to write them down on the board. It’s also interesting to
use SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), which usually
reveals ideas learners may not be aware before. Adding attribute change to the
brainstorming process leads to brand new ideas, for example, learners think
about how they would deal with the problem, if it took place in a different
time period (100 years ago) or in a different place (another country).
A great way to activate learners’ schemata is to add visuals to pre-listening
stage of the lesson. Learners look at the pictures related to the listening
text and try to make guesses about the main topic or about what is going on in
the picture. The teacher can also use learners’ imagination and ask them to close
their eyes and to create mental pictures related to the topic of the listening
text, and then to share them with others.
My students always enjoy group drawing activities. They take turns to draw something
on the whiteboard (usually I write down elements to draw on the slips of paper)
and at the end we get a complete picture related to the topic of the text.
It is very motivating when the teacher brings realia to the class: from
personal photos to soda cans. I like the idea, suggested by J.J.Wilson, to
bring in objects that form part of a story for learners to guess
what the listening text is about. I’d like to develop this idea: in advance,
the teacher may ask each student to bring in one particular object (related to
the text). Students do not know the purpose of bringing this object and they
have no idea what other students will bring (the teacher may assign objects via
email). During the pre-listening stage learners demonstrate their objects to
the class and tell few words about in what situations people usually use them. And
then they discuss how all these realia relate to the text.
There
are numerous pre-listening activities based on using texts and words: various
gap-filling activities; key words activities, etc. The teacher suggests a list
of key words and learners in small groups make short stories using these words
(it’s also a way of pre-teaching vocabulary). After listening to the text
learners compare whose suggestion is the closest to the listening text. Likewise
learners may be given a title of the text.
While-listening activities vary depending on
what learner’s skill or ability the teacher would like to practice.
When students are required to listen for gist,
they are asked some basic questions What? Who? Why?
When they listen for details, they
practice selective listening: an ability to ignore most of what we hear and
focus only on what is relevant. Among such type of activities I want to point
out writing down some specific information (dates, numbers, etc.) and spotting
the difference (learners look at a picture and listen to its description and
spot any differences). Another activity I like is listening to directions and tracing
the route on the map. Or
students can complete a diagram or drawing based on what they hear.
An important and useful skill to practice while
listening is inferring, a thinking skill in which we make deductions by going
beyond what is actually stated. For this purpose the teacher can pause the
recording from time to time and asks students what they think will come next
and why. It can be quite a distracting activity
though.
Post-listening activities
First of all, post-listening activities are oriented to check the degree of
comprehension of the text. I think almost every teacher uses summarizing for
this purpose. To add some fun to the process of summarizing the teacher can ask
learners to create a group summary.
Secondly, we need post-listening activities to arouse
a discussion and make a transition to speaking activities. The teacher can ask
learners to personalize the problem touched upon in the text (What would you do
in this situation?), to dwell upon pros and cons, to agree or disagree with
some statements related to the text, etc.
Two ideas I thought were particularly interesting and engaging were having students bring in realia without knowing the purpose or what other students were bringing, and adding unusual attributes to brainstorming (e.g. taking place in another time period). Thanks for sharing these and your other ideas.
ReplyDelete-Linda