How do you introduce a listening and speaking lesson?

How and Why to Teach Listening to ESL Students

Listening is an extremely important skill if students want to speak fluently in English. No matter how well you speak, if you don’t understand what your conversation partner said, your answer will be a little awkward at best, or totally random at worst.

In order to help our students, we need to include some practice with it in our English classes. Here’s some basic advice on how to teach listening to ESL students, including a lesson plan template and some ESL listening activities.

According to Funk and Funk (1989), it’s important to have a goal or purpose for every listening activity. First, begin by stating a purpose. This will give students guidance to know where to focus, enabling them to achieve success.

2. Build Background.

Next, help students connect what they already know with what they will hear in the audio story by asking questions about their personal experiences with the topic. Explain what students need to understand before listening, preview vocabulary words. Invite them to think about relevant prior knowledge, anticipate the subject of the story, or otherwise engage actively in preparing for the story.

3. Prepare the Environment.

If playing the story out loud to the whole class, limit distraction by making the environment at home or in school as quiet as possible. For instance, use headphones for listening if appropriate.

4. Introduce Listening Strategies

Next, introduce tools and strategies for successful listening (see below).

Step Two: Teaching During Listening

5. Scaffold Note-Taking.

Students can use a listening organizer to help them focus on important ideas and details while listening to the story, which can help to deepen their understanding. For example, listening organizers might include T-charts, Venn diagrams, or a blank page to keep track of a character’s actions in the story. Such organizers can guide students in taking notes to help them focus their listening and teach them strategies to support comprehension in other contexts.

6. Explain Problem-Solving Strategies.

If students do not understand a word or idea, they can use clues from the story to make a guess. If they are listening independently, they can stop the audio and think or listen again as needed. They can be “problem-solving listeners”. These strategies should be taught before students begin listening with reminders provided as needed.

Step Three: Post-Listening

7. Reflect on the Audio Story.

Finally, engage students in synthesizing what they learned from listening to the story with a focus on key understanding goals. For example, ask students to respond to listening comprehension questions in writing and then share their responses. This could either be with a partner, small group, or in front of the whole class. Discuss key themes in the story and encourage students to make connections to other texts or experiences. Students can respond to questions about the story through writing, speaking in conversation, recording themselves speaking, or a combination.

Read about more ways in which you can engage your students through listening:

• 5 Ways to Integrate Listenwise into Your Teaching
• 5 Ways to Get Started with Listenwise
• Educators Share Ideas for Teaching with Listenwise
• Teaching Strategies from Listenwise

These guidelines are adapted from those developed by Michael F. Opitz, a professor emeritus of reading education from the University of Northern Colorado who has investigated numerous literacy topics, including listening, for over two decades. His substantive research on teaching listening resulted in his book, Listen Hear! 25 Effective Listening Comprehension Strategies (Heinemann, 2004). He is the author of and coauthor of numerous books, articles, and reading programs. Read his guest blog post about 5 reasons why you should teach listening.

How to Teach Listening and Speaking

But how do you teach vital listening for learning skills? You can’t exactly pry open those little ears! And for that matter, how do you teach your students when to speak up and how to communicate their needs properly?

Here are some great tips to help you help your students!

Role Model Good Speaking and Listening Skills

As teachers, we are our students’ role models, and it’s up to us to lead by example! When your students are speaking, make eye contact, and let them know you’re listening rather than letting your mind wander to the piles of paperwork on your desk. Don’t interrupt your students (unless necessary!), and encourage your students to speak up in class rather than you talking “at” them.

Set Speaking and Listening Goals

Get your students off on the right track by collaborating with them to set some Speaking and Listening Goals. With goals specifically tailored to lower, middle, and upper grades, your students will have clear direction on the skills they need to develop on their journey to becoming better listeners and speakers.
Once students have reached their goals, they can proudly display ‘I Can’ Statements – Speaking and Listening in their take-home folders.

Hand signals are a great way for students to communicate without having to speak up and interrupt a lesson when they need help or need to use the bathroom. How can this help students learn listening and speaking skills? Simple! Knowing when to stay silent is as vital as knowing when to use your voice!

Having hand sign posters prominently displayed will help your students remember which sign means what.

Scaffold Note Taking

Part of learning listening skills is being able to transfer what is heard into comprehension of a specific topic. Scaffold your students note-taking with graphic organizers, venn diagrams, and similar methods for chunking material to enhance their encoding and processing of information.

Teach Whole Body Listening

If a mime were to imitate the act of listening, you would no doubt see their hand held up to an ear – this is universally recognized, and why shouldn’t it be? Listening occurs in your ears, doesn’t it?
Despite this common belief, most teachers will tell you that listening does not JUST happen in your ears; it’s a whole-body experience! Get the fundamentals of listening down pat and teach your students how a good listener behaves with ourWhole Body Listening Posters.

Games that require students to listen, wait, and then react, or listen and make a decision are particularly good at targeting not only listening but processing skills too.

These games can easily be incorporated into your morning routine!

Hurrah-Boo!

Ask your students to listen intently to statements you’re about to make.

If it’s a nice statement, they say hurrah! If it’s not so nice, they say boo.

• “Everyone gets an ice cream!” – “HURRAH!”
• “Lunchtime is canceled.” – “BOO!”

I Say – Go!

1. The catch is, they have to wait until you say “Go!” before they can carry out the instruction.
2. To increase the difficulty, leave a longer gap between the instruction and saying go!

The Telephone Game

This timeless classic needs little explanation.

1. Students sit in a circle and pass around a message by whispering in their neighbor’s ear.
2. When the final student is reached, they stand up and repeat the message they heard.
3. Compare it to the start and see how well the message got relayed from person to person!

Grocery Store

This is a great game to challenge your students’ listening and memory skills.

1. One child starts off the shopping list by saying “I went to the grocery store and bought…” something.
2. The next child continues by saying the previous item and adding their own item!
3. Continue around the class working through the alphabet and adding items to the list.

For older students, why not make the items topic-specific, such as items you’ll find only in the rainforest or animals that are herbivores?

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

Read a list of true or false statements. Students have to listen carefully and decide on the validity of the statement.

If it’s true, they give a thumbs up! If it’s false, a thumbs down.

“My hair is blue.” – thumbs down.

“Ms. Stuart is the best teacher in the world!” – thumbs up (I can only hope!).

This game can be altered to suit older students – read out true and false statements about a curriculum topic you have been working on.

Mix Visuals With Listening

Play the Is It True? Listening Activity with your students!

Students listen to the description read by the teacher while viewing an image. They decide whether the information is accurate or not. This resource provides great exposure to descriptive vocabulary, and you can adjust the vocabulary to suit your students’ abilities

Drawing on Demand

Listening and art can go hand in hand, too, and studies have shown that drawing can be a superior form of note-taking for kids —helping with memory retention.

Read the description out to your students several times. They need to listen very carefully as they are required to draw what they hear.

teaching resource

A fun listening activity that involves drawing.

Use the picture on the second page to see how close your students came to drawing the picture described.

Sometimes students have lots of lovely thoughts in their head, but when it comes to verbalizing it, things get tricky. Have students practice their speaking skills by using our Writing a Speech Poster.

Encourage students to think outside the box! How about a speech on their favorite animal, or a great movie they’ve seen?

If your students struggle to express their point of view, this effective lesson on investigating point of view will get them on the right track.

After watching, you will have the opportunity to ask students to share their points of view about some everyday issues that they can relate to. Encouraging the students to explain and justify their reasoning to the class is a great way to explore opinion and verbal expression of points of view.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the processing of speech, it’s the nerves that come along with it.

The cards are designed for use in small groups! Print and laminate several sets of the cards so that each group can work on the same rhyme simultaneously.

Love it or hate it, when it comes to the skills of speaking and listening, dictation is an easily assessable teaching strategy that can double as a tool for assessing literacy.

This Color Me Carefully game is excellent for bringing the skills of speaking and listening together.

Your students can play this game in pairs, with the players separated by a barrier. There is aspeaker and a listener. Prior to beginning the game, the speaker colors their sheet.

The goal is for the listener to produce work that is close to being identical to that of the speaker. A good lesson in communication and teamwork!

Conclusion

So, by way of conclusion, I'd make the following recommendations:

1. Devote plenty of time to listening work. Yes, it is difficult. And it's doubly important because it gives practice in listening skills and provides raw material for language input.
2. Make plenty of use of 'live' listening, with natural speed, delivery and pronunciation but tailored to the learners' interests in terms of content, and graded to some extent in terms of linguistic complexity. Give learners practice in using 'active listener' signals, and being effective conversational participants.
3. Gradually introduce some recorded material. It should be naturalistic, but whether it's actually 'authentic' is probably less important than whether it's interesting and accessible to the learners. Use video where possible and appropriate.
4. Give learners plenty of preparation and support for listening, especially in the early stages, but also gradually begin to give them some practice in 'jumping in at the deep end' and listening without any preparation.
5. Give them practice in listening for different purposes: sometimes for understanding, sometimes for language input, sometimes for pronunciation study – i.e. purposes relevant both to their interests as learners of English and to their needs as prospective users of English.

You can read more on this topic in my article 'Listening In', in English Teaching Professional 16 (2000) and in the chapter on listening in Bowen & Marks: Inside Teaching (Macmillan 1994)