How to teach listening skills

Are you wondering what you can do in the ESL/EFL classroom to help develop your learners’ listening abilities in English? In this post, let’s look at how to teach listening. You will learn how prepare and teach a listening skills lesson step-by-step and the rationale behind those steps. This framework is optimal for teenage and adult learners at basic and intermediate levels.

Teaching listening skills

Before we look at how to teach listening skills, we need to consider this:

What exactly are we teaching when we teach listening skills and why?

In a listening lesson, we aim to help our learners develop the so-called listening sub-skills, such as listening for gist (general idea), for specific information (numbers, names, addresses, etc.), for inference, etc.

When we listen to something or someone in real life, it is always with a purpose and within a context, for instance, we listen to a friend to understand their opinion or problem and respond accordingly, we listen to someone on the phone to confirm details of a meeting or appointment, or to the weather forecast to plan a trip, or maybe to a politician to infer their views and attitudes, and so on. To emulate real life, our learners will need contextualised reasons for listening in the classroom too; therefore, we need to create those reasons.

When you prepare a listening lesson, its objective should be something like this: learners will practise listening for gist and specific information in the context of x (x = a phone call, a meeting, a doctor’s appointment, listening to the news, etc.).

But how do we do that?

Typically, a listening lesson is divided into three main parts: pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening. Let’s look at each stage below.

Pre-listening activities

Pre-listening activities usually comprise a stage called the lead-in, which essentially sets the scene of the lesson to engage students in the topic of the listening passage they will hear. The pre-listening stage may also include what is known as the pre-teaching of lexis. Let’s take a better look at those stages below.

Lead-in

This stage is designed to introduce the context and topic of the lesson, engaging students and activating their top-down processing. This is often referred to as schema activation and is intended to help learners think about what they already know about that context, which facilitates the learning process.

That might be tricky depending on the material you have to work with. You may be able to choose the listening passages yourself and pick topics that are relevant to your students, but you will most likely be working with material that was selected by your school and many times you will have to try to find an angle that will make it relevant for your learners.

How to set the scene

But how do we introduce and establish the context of the lesson? That will depend on the topic, of course, but the simplest ways are to show a picture and ask some eliciting questions or to tell a quick story and ask students if something similar happened to them. You can stop at that, or you can then set a quick activity where students discuss a couple of questions in pairs or trios.

What exactly are eliciting questions?

Among other things, eliciting questions are used to extract the information we need from students in order to establish the context and make it relevant for them. These questions also generate more student participation in class and help increase student confidence. For example, if the context of your lesson is a phone call and you have a group of A2 learners, you may show a picture of someone on the phone and ask: ‘What’s this? What’s happening?’ and then give students a few questions to discuss in pairs, such as ‘Do you prefer phone calls or text messages? How often do you make phone calls? Who do you normally call?’

If you asked your learners to talk in pairs or groups, ask them to report what they discussed. You should respond to their ideas and provide some feedback, perhaps ask some further questions. Any activity you set in class must have a clear purpose, and students must receive some form of feedback afterwards.

Tip 1: When eliciting information to set the scene, be careful not to try to elicit things that your students obviously won’t know; otherwise, you will bring their confidence down instead of building it up, not to mention that hearing crickets is a sure way to break rapport. Besides, you also don’t want to waste time. For instance, imagine you are teaching teens in Latin America using a textbook selected by the school. The lesson in question involves history and contains a portrait of an English historical figure, such as Henry VIII. There might be an Anglophile and/or history nerd among your students (I used to be that student!) but that’s quite rare, so don’t ask ‘Who is this? Where was he from?’ because it is unlikely that your students will know the answers. Instead, perhaps show a castle or palace, ask learners what type of building it is and if they would like to visit it. Ask them if they are interested in history, etc., and then you say something like: ‘This palace is where this king lived’, and then you introduce Henry VIII.

Tip 2: Will it always work? No, especially with more complex topics and abstract concepts. Don’t feel disheartened, try to ask something more explicit or, honestly, just tell them the topic of the lesson if they are not getting to where you want. Sometimes our students won’t follow the train of thought we expect them to. For instance, once I was teaching an intermediate group and the topic was something about donating to charities. I chose to start with something about generosity (I don’t remember the details exactly) and I was trying to steer the initial conversation to the idea of making donations to charities when a student mentioned that generosity is not just about making donations and that that was a superficial understanding of generosity and blah, blah, blah…That would have been great in a follow-up activity, but not at this initial stage. Don’t let students veer off course and wax lyrical at this point, unless you are teaching private students and have a lot of time, but even then you will be following a syllabus and will have lesson aims and some time constraints. In that instance, I simply explained that we were going to talk about making donations and asked what kind of things can be donated, if there was an institution that the learners used to help or something of that nature (which is probably what I should have started with), and that was that! We won’t always get things right and that’s ok. Unexpected things happen when we are dealing with people.

Pre-teaching of vocabulary (if necessary)

The next step is to pre-teach some of the vocabulary your learners might need for the listening tasks. Why pre-teach? There is some controversy here, some believe we shouldn’t pre-teach at all, but if we know that some words might be obstacles to our learners’ understanding of the whole and/or those words are necessary to carry out the tasks, let’s help our students (especially if they are beginners) by pre-teaching those lexical items. That will give learners a better chance to recognise those words in the audio track; otherwise, they might not do so well and may feel discouraged, which might negatively impact their development. Lessons shouldn’t be too easy, learners need some challenge, but tasks can’t be too difficult either. Teachers need to strike a balance. The goal of a listening lesson is not to test students but to help them practise and develop the listening sub-skills. Additionally, it is also part of our job to help students have a sense of achievement. If you’d like to know more about vocabulary pre-teaching and the rationale behind it, check my article Vocabulary Pre-Teaching: Should you do it?

Ideally, you wouldn’t pre-teach more than three or four words, or it will go on forever. If you are designing the activities yourself, you are in control, so try to create them in a way that students don’t need many unknown words to complete the tasks; you can always work with the new vocabulary later.

You may skip this stage in higher levels or even in lower levels, depending on the passage and on your students. You will know your students’ needs. It sounds daunting at first, but with time you will.

How to pre-teach vocabulary before listening

We try to elicit the meaning of the words first, that is, we ask questions to check if our learners happen to already know that word. For instance, if we want to check if our learners know the word ‘schedule’, we can show a picture of one and simply ask what it is. They might know the word but be unsure of how to pronounce it or write it.

Clarifying pronunciation and form of a word are the next stages, and in this order. Ideally, learners will hear a word and learn how to pronounce it before they see that word written down. That’s because a word’s spelling might be confusing for learners, and that might cause them to mispronounce the new word if they see the spelling first, and they might then stick to that wrong pronunciation.

So, we work with meaning first (eliciting, showing pictures, etc. and checking learners’ understanding), then with pronunciation, and finally with form by writing the word on the board or showing it on a slide.

Tip 3: Should you translate words? Some research suggests that new words are better retained in memory when learners have to put in some effort to work out a word’s meaning, which is referred to as depth of processing. However, in my opinion, it is ok to use translation sometimes if all your students are speakers of the same language, and the word in question might be something difficult to explain or represent in any way. That’s especially the case with more abstract concepts that might take up a lot of class time to clarify, a situation which could end up becoming an unintended guessing game. I once worked in a school that was very adamant that we shouldn’t translate anything ever in class, and I remember a colleague being pretty upset once because after several minutes trying to make students understand the word ‘harvest’, a student who finally got it said the translation out loud… Besides, let’s be realistic, your students are going to translate things all the time anyway nowadays, considering how easy it is to do so with a smartphone.

Pre-teach vocabulary in the context of the lesson

Ideally, you will teach vocabulary in the context of the lesson while you set the scene. The pre-teaching of lexis stage should proceed naturally from the lead-in. For example, let’s get back to the idea of pre-teaching the word ‘schedule’. The context is a business phone call; therefore, use an image of someone on the phone in an office environment and ask some work-related questions (lead-in). Then, show the picture of a professional-looking planner and ask the students what they normally write in a planner to try to elicit the word ‘schedule’. Alternatively, show a picture of a work-related schedule, but avoid showing something unrelated to the context, such as a TV schedule. To check that students understand the meaning, you may ask about their morning schedule at work, for example.

Tip 4: That words must be taught in context may sound obvious to most, but I feel this must be said. I once observed a teacher during training who pre-taught vocabulary completely divorced from the context they had just established. It was a rather strange thing to behold. This person would set the context in the lead-in and then leave it completely aside and show random pictures, usually with famous people or characters (Michael Jordan, Donald Duck, etc.) doing something related to the vocabulary to try and elicit it from learners and would then go back to the context of the lesson for the activities as if nothing had happened. This teacher was never marked down for that, and I remember the teacher trainer saying it wasn’t wrong, but that felt very strange to me because it caused a break in continuity. The lesson didn’t flow very naturally. If that felt strange to me, it was probably a bit strange for the students as well, who were made to think of a specific scenario and then about completely disconnected and random things and then back again to the original idea… Always try to put yourself in your learners’ shoes and try not to lose the connecting thread that goes through everything in a lesson.

While-listening tasks

Listening for gist

Once the context is set and a few new words have been understood, we can start with the actual listening tasks. The first listening task will usually ask students to listen for the gist, that is, the general idea of the passage. Why? If we go straight into asking our students to pay attention to specific pieces of information, they might get caught up with other details or with a word they don’t understand, and they might lose track, get distracted, or even panic. However, if they can listen to the whole passage once with less pressure at first, just to get a sense of what the passage is about, they will be more comfortable and confident.

Therefore, this is a simpler task intended to give learners confidence and prepare them for the next task. There are several different ways you can do it. The simplest and easiest to prepare are just a few questions or a prediction activity. You can ask a few questions, such as: How many speakers are there? Is the conversation professional or are the speakers friends? What is the topic of the conversation? (with three options, a, b, and c)

A predicting activity could be, for example, showing a picture representing the listening passage and asking students what they think will happen (they can discuss it in pairs), then playing the audio for students to check whether their predictions were correct.

Listening for specific information

You will play the audio track a second time for learners to answer specific questions, such as, ‘What is the name of the caller?’, ‘What time is the meeting?’, etc. Keep in mind that these must be comprehension questions, not grammar questions! The point here is to develop listening skills.

For more advanced learners, you can include even more intensive listening tasks, such as listening for inference and note-taking.

Tip 5: Beginner learners in the early stages of developing their listening skills may find it difficult to write while listening. Therefore, for learners at these early stages, it is best to create listening activities that don’t involve writing, such as multiple-choice tasks, true or false, ordering pictures, etc.

Post-listening activities

Follow-up

This can involve integration with other skills, such as speaking, writing, or reading. You can further develop the topic of the lesson through those other skills. That’s the chance for students to react more personally to the content of the lesson, which will make what they learned more meaningful and help cement their learning. Ideally, this will be a communicative activity bringing everything full circle. For beginners, especially, it can be as simple as a few questions to answer in pairs or trios.

Final feedback

Provide a final feedback on both content and form: elicit and react to what learners discussed in the follow-up, and then provide a few corrections of grammar or vocabulary mistakes that you noticed your students making during the activity. This should be a delayed correction as a whole-group activity. Do not point out who made the mistakes!

How long should a lesson take?

You might be thinking: ‘I teach 1h30 or 2h classes, even doing all these steps won’t be enough to fill a whole class!’ Typically, a listening lesson like this will be only one part of the class. For instance, you might proceed with a more structured speaking lesson afterwards based on the passage students just listened to, or you might use something in that passage to focus on a grammar point and proceed with a grammar lesson, maybe work with vocabulary as mentioned earlier, etc.

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References:

Harmer, J. (1998). How to teach English. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman.

Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning Teaching: the Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. 3rd ed. Oxford: Macmillan Education.