Pre-listening activities
Listening skills are hard to develop. Students can do a variety of work before listening to help them understand the listening. ?Why do pre-listening tasks? ?Aims and types of pre-listening tasks
?Selection criteria
Why do pre-listening tasks? In real life it is unusual for people to listen to something without having some idea of what they are going to hear. When listening to a radio phone-in show, they will probably know which topic is being discussed. When listening to an interview with a famous person, they probably know
something about that person already. A waiter knows the menu from which the diner is choosing their food.
In our first language we rarely have trouble understanding listening. But, in a second language, it is one of the harder skills to develop - dealing at speed with unfamiliar sounds, words and structures. This is even more difficult if we do not know the topic under discussion, or who is speaking to whom.
So, simply asking the students to listen to something and answer some questions is a little unfair, and makes developing listening skills much harder.
Many students are fearful of listening, and can be disheartened when they listen to
something but feel they understand very little. It is also harder to concentrate on listening if you have little interest in a topic or situation. Pre-listening tasks aim to deal with all of these issues: to generate interest, build confidence and to facilitate comprehension. Aims and types of pre-listening tasks
?Setting the context
This is perhaps the most important thing to do - even most exams give an idea about who is speaking, where and why. In normal life we normally have some idea of the context of something we are listening to.
? Generating interest
Motivating our students is a key task for us. If they are to do
a listening about sports, looking at some dramatic pictures of sports players or events will raise their interest or remind them of why they (hopefully) like sports. Personalisation activities are very important here. A pair-work discussion about the sports they play or watch, and why, will bring them into the topic, and make them more willing to listen. ? Activating current knowledge - what do you know about…?
'You are going to listen to an ecological campaigner talk about the destruction of the rainforest'. This sets the context, but if you go straight in to the listening, the students have had no time to transfer or activate their knowledge (which
may have been learnt in their first language) in the second language. What do they know about rainforests? - Where are they? What are they? What problems do they face? Why are they important? What might an ecological campaigner do? What organisations campaign for ecological issues? ? Acquiring knowledge
Students may have limited general knowledge about a topic. Providing knowledge input will build their confidence for dealing with a listening. This could be done by giving a related text to read, or, a little more fun, a quiz.
? Activating vocabulary / language
Just as activating topic knowledge is important, so is activating the language that may
Pre-listening activities
