Listening Activities
Now we are going to look at some examples of listening activities that you may be able to adapt to your own classes. Then we will ask you to design your own listening activity that you can use in your classroom.
Activity Briefing – Pre-listening - Picture Captions
Click here for the Picture Captions worksheet.
Instructions: Now we will complete some listening tasks while watching and listening to the video. Our first task will be writing captions for still images found in your workbook. Play the video again, and as you listen to the news item, you will write captions for the images you see on the page.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
Activity Briefing – Listening - 3-2-1 Strategy
Click here for the 3-2-1 Strategy worksheet.
Instructions: Our next activity is called 3-2-1- Strategy. Watch the video again. This time, in the spaces provided, write three things you found out from this news passage, two things you find interesting from the passage, and one question you still have about the topic.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
Activity Briefing – Listening - Transcript Error Correction
Click here for the Transcript Error Correction worksheet.
Instructions: Our next listening activity involves working with a partial transcript of the new passage. It is found in your activites workbook. You will listen to the new passage as you read the transcript. There are some errors in the transcript. As you listen, locate the errors and correct them.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
Activity Briefing – Listening - Graphic Organizer
Click here for the Graphic Organizer worksheet.
Instructions: Our next listening activity is a "mind map" graphic organizer. It is found in your activities workbook. You will listen to the news passage. As you listen, complete the each section of the graphic organizer.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
Activity Briefing – Listening - “Two Gists”
Click here for the "Two Gists" worksheet.
Instructions: Our next listening activity has a little fun with gisting. It is found in your workbook. You will find two summaries or gists of the news passage. Only one of them is correct and the other is incorrect. Your task is to identify the one that is correct and the one that is incorrect. Highlight the inaccurate information.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
Activity Briefing – Listening - Note Takings
Click here for the Note Taking worksheet.
Instructions: Remember the note-taking activity from earlier? Here is a way to use note-taking to organize thoughts and create clear summaries. In this activity found in your activities workbook, you will see find an area for jotting down notes from the passage you hear. After listening, construct those notes into a clear summary of the news you heard.
Confidence Check
- Is this an activity you can use with your students?
- What are some advantages of this listening activity?
- What are some disadvantages of using this listening activity?
One word about note-taking and summary. For some linguists writing a good summary is part of the job. Here the teacher offers opportunities for students to practice accurate rendering of target language information while maintaining the integrity of the text.
Activity Briefing – Designing Listening Tasks
Your task at this time will be to design a listening activity for the passage on traffic in China. You may view the video again if you need to. Otherwise, begin designing your listening activity. You can pause your media player while you complete this activity and you can resume play when you have finished designing your listening activity and are ready to continue.
Confidence Check
Take another look at the listening activity you designed and consider the following:
- Does it provide the learners with strategies for listening?
- Does it determine how input will be presented?
- Does it match the student’s proficiency?
- Did you provide the learners a purpose for listening to the passage?
- Do they understand why they need the information?
- Do you provide the learners with a series of steps or scaffold to guide them to the completion of the task?
- How did you organize the information?
- Did you incorporate both bottom-up and top-down processing?