David Bohlke
The challenges of listening in another language are great. Our students have to deal with unfamiliar sounds, new vocabulary, and complex sentences. They may not be familiar with the setting, know anything about the speakers, and have little knowledge of the topic being discussed. And they’re expected to listen and understand a text in real time, with no control of the discourse, in a classroom setting. It’s no wonder listening remains a challenge for many learners.
Listening lessons are often divided into three steps: pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening. I want to focus here on pre-listening as this is one that often gets overlooked. A good pre-listening task provides support, generates interest, and builds student confidence. When students then do the actual while-listening tasks, they are more likely to succeed. As a teacher, what are some ways you can prepare students for success in listening? Here are five strategies you can use to assure your students are equipped with what they need to be successful listeners.
1. Set the scene
This is what your textbooks often does for you. A good direction line may be just a line or two, but it can give key information – the speakers, their relationship, their location, and the topic. The direction line contains the basics. As a teacher, be sure to draw attention to this, but feel free to elaborate and to add further information to help orient students to what they’ll hear. The teacher’s books often contain ideas that can help you set the scene for your students.
2. Activate existing knowledge
Each student brings something different to the class – his or her own knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and, biases. It’s up to the teacher to activate this prior knowledge, or schema. What do the students already know about the topic? Ask questions. Give a short quiz. Find out! Keep in mind, however, that background knowledge is not limited to content schemata. It also includes rhetorical schemata – the learners’ understanding of the structure and organization of the discourse.
3. Build knowledge
When you activate existing knowledge, you may find that the learners don’t know much about a subject. Learners can build knowledge through the listening itself, but you may choose to build upon that knowledge before they listen. This then acts as a bridge to new concepts. There are many ways to do this. For example, you can have students read a short text, look at a photo or graph, or expose them to experiences they have never had before.
4. Pre-teach vocabulary and structures
Included in building knowledge is exposing learners to the basic vocabulary and structures needed for comprehension, as well as cultural information. An overly demanding vocabulary load can be demotivating and cause listeners to shut down. You may choose to elicit or remind learners of vocabulary or structures they already know, or explicitly teach the key words and phrases needed for comprehension. There are of course valid reasons for not pre-teaching, such as when focusing on listening for the meaning of vocabulary in context, or when teaching listeners to tolerate unknown words. It’s therefore up to the teacher to decide what (and whether) to pre-teach.
5. Make predictions
Predicting is one of the most effective pre-listening tasks because it creates a real, focused purpose for listening. It is very motivating for learners to see if their predictions were correct. There are a lot of things that can be predicted and checked. With the teacher’s help, a learner can predict what words will be in the script, what topics the speakers might discuss, the order of events, or the answers to general content questions. These are usually done at the beginning, before listening, and then checked during the initial, gist listening. However, you may choose to predict as you listen, stopping from time to time check predictions. This works especially well with stories.
Keep in mind that a teacher generally should do more than one pre-listening task. For example, you might activate schema by asking students what they already know about a topic, and then set the scene, before finally making predictions about the content. Don’t always choose the same tasks. Mix and match to suit the needs of the learners and to assure variety.
We know our students have a better chance of succeeding if they are mentally attuned to what they will hear. But with limited class time, how much time should you spend on pre-listening? This will depend on the class, the genre, and the complexity of the task and content. A listening about shopping for clothes may require limited pre-listening work, whereas a lecture on the mating habits of pandas will probably require more.
As essential as pre-listening tasks are, remember the time you spend on them takes away from the actual listening time. Too much time may mean too much of the content is anticipated. This may mean you end up de-motivating the learners because they don’t need to focus on the listening itself. Do what you need to do to prepare your students, and then move onto the main objective of your listening lesson – the listening tasks themselves.
David Bohlke is one of the authors of the Listening Power series. He is an author as well as the series editor of Pearson’s innovative grammar series Next Generation Grammar (2013).
