Developing Receptive Skills: A Sequence of Activities for Listening Skill

Activating Task:

 A Typical Listening Lesson

The following statements describe the different steps of a listening lesson. Number
them from 1 to 5 to plan a typical sequence of activities for listening.

(a) Follow-up speaking activity.

(b) Listening for a more general understanding of information in the text.
(c) Pre-listening activity to activate students’ knowledge on the topic of the text.
(d) Very detailed listening for language (vocabulary, language, phonology) in the text.
(e) Listening for a general understanding.

Activities
(i) Students listen to the track for the first time to get an idea of who the
characters are, where they could be, and the topic of their conversation.
(ii) Teacher asks students to brainstorm any vocabulary words related to the
word magic (characters, objects, movies, places, adjectives).
(iii) Students listen to the track but now they focus on particular aspects of the
conversation and answer some matching and true-or-false exercises.
(iv) Students get in small groups to discuss on the spells they listened to and write
their own.
(v) Students listen to the track for the last time to identify and work certain
vocabulary items in the text.
 Developing Receptive Skills: Managing the Lesson

Reflective Task:

 What could go wrong?

Look at the following list of problems that could occur while teaching this listening
lesson. Can you think of any others? List down two other problems and provide
solutions for each of them.

Possible problems:
1. The speed of the dialogue is too fast.
2. The task was too challenging.
3. The speakers of the dialogue used a strong regional accent.
4. The context of the dialogue wasn’t clear.
5. The vocabulary/grammar in the text is quite difficult for learners
6. The topic/subject of the conversation wasn’t interesting for learners.
7.
8.

Focus of the Non- Suggestions for

Description of the Task Satisfactory
Task satisfactory Improvement
Doing a demonstration
Setting the
and brainstorming
context
vocabulary on WB
Listening to text to get a
Listen for GIST general idea of the
context
Listening to focus on
Listen for
more specific details of
detail
the text.
Identify and work with
Building new
the new items in the text
vocabulary
in controlled exercises.
Working in small groups
Collaborative
to discuss and come up
Task
with a written product.