How to Develop Listening Skills With Authentic Materials
Helping students develop listening skills is one of the most challenging missions that modern educators are tasked with. The difficulty arises from the fact that as an assignment, it requires active participation by, and the full attention of, both the instructor and the student. Additionally, the mastery of the skill itself is absolutely critical for the development of successful communication skills, which generates further pressure and stress. The incorporation of authentic materials into a lesson can enliven the classroom atmosphere and help foster a positive attitude toward learning. If you'd like to learn how to use authentic materials to teach listening skills in your classroom, there are several steps you will need to follow.
Instructions
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Choose your materials. Appropriate authentic materials for the promotion of listening skills might include popular television programs, radio shows, public announcements (such as those you might hear while at an airport or shopping in a store), famous speeches and recorded phone calls made to customer service centers, though these might need to be edited to delete any inappropriate language.
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2
Set up a listening task. Decide well in advance what you would like your students to listen for, and then determine if further explanation or background material will be necessary for successful completion. An appropriate task might include listening to the description of an errand and then selecting the correct picture to correspond with the description or holding a mock job interview.
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Perform any necessary prelistening exercises, in which you identify the purpose of the exercise and explain what the students should be listening for and why. Use this time to define any new vocabulary words or any slang terms they are likely to hear.
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Set up the exercise by explaining the context of the listening material. Using this information, have the students predict what they are about to hear. For example, if the authentic material is an announcement from a bus station, they might predict "passengers, bus number, going where, leaving when, from door number."
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Play the selected material and monitor classroom comprehension by observing the level of participation and the ease with which the material seems to be absorbed or not. Make any necessary adjustments to account for the ability and skill level demonstrated by the class.
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Wrap up with a postlistening activity that will allow students to put the information they have just acquired to immediate use. For example, you could make a recording of yourself saying each student's name followed by a task. Students could be asked to write down the task and then perform the requested action once the recording is finished.
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Tips & Warnings
Try to choose materials that reflect the general interests of your class, but that are still appropriate for their ages and ability levels. Stick with formats that the students find familiar. Anything too "foreign" is generally labeled as "too difficult" and rejected.
