How to Create an ESL Listening Lesson Plan

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A lot of English learners complain they can't get enough guided listening practice. ESL course books don't always provide good listening lesson plans and material, though; so teachers are often left to design their own. When you know how to create an ESL listening lesson plan, you have almost limitless possibilities for using audio in your class. Provide plenty of useful, interesting listening lessons and your students will thank you. Read on to learn more.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Listening material
Listening activity ideas

Step1

Choose the topic you want to teach. Since you'll probably be following a course plan, choose listening material that provides practice with one of the topics you're currently working with. If you're working on the present perfect, you might listen to people discussing what they have or haven't done in life. For teaching food and cooking vocabulary, you could choose an interview with a chef.

Step2

Find listening material. Don't feel limited to the material that comes with the course book you're following. There's a wide variety of free prepared ESL listening lessons online, complete with transcripts and activities. If you work for a language school, check the resource library or ask other teachers if they have anything that would fit your teaching goals for the lesson. With a little more time, you could even get some friends together and create your own listening material.

Step3

Plan your introduction. To warm up for your ESL listening lesson, you'll want to get your class thinking about what they're going to hear. This activates passive vocabulary and provides a context, making the listening easier to understand. Start off by telling students generally what the listening is about and talk about the topic. To bring up potentially difficult vocabulary from the listening, ask questions like "What do you call a person who?" or "What's another word for?"

Step4

Develop a global listening task. For the first listening, you'll need to make sure your English students got the gist of the material. Have the students predict something about what they're going to listen to so they can check their prediction as they listen. Ask students to write ten words that come to mind when they think of the topic and see how many of those words are in the listening. Other options are asking students to choose an appropriate title for the listening from a list or answer a few simple true or false questions.

Step5

Create detailed listening tasks. For the second and following listening tasks, students can listen for specific words or grammar points. Your ESL listening lesson plan will move smoothly from global to detailed listening if you give your English students increasingly focused tasks. You might start with writing missing words or phrases in a transcript, move on to synonym matching and then to let students create their own sentences using words or grammar from the listening.

Step6

Provide follow-up practice. Rather than just going from listening to an unrelated activity, create some continuity. If the listening used future tenses a lot, you might follow it up by having students write about their plans for the next holiday. After listening to an interview with a chef, you could practice related vocabulary with a role play about choosing a restaurant for lunch.

Tips & Warnings

Check your sound equipment before class. Make sure it works correctly. Also make sure it's located where everyone can hear and it isn't set at a volume that will blow out everyone's ears when you turn it on.
If you hand out worksheets before the first listening, your students may pay more attention to the papers than to the listening. Anything you hand out at this point should be simple and directly related to the global listening task.