ESL Article: Teaching Listening Skills

Hello visitors, in this post you will find some strategies related to the most difficult skill to teach: listening. I hope you find it useful for your lessons.

As English teachers, we face several problems when it comes to teaching listening to our students. This is more complicated when we have learners that do not have English as their mother tongue. The mainstream problems we have to cope with are:
- Lack of rules.
- Mental barriers.
- Translation.
- Length of the process.

So, what can we do to overcome these difficulties?

One way we can deal with these problems is by exposing them, little by little, to spoken English. There are many resources we can take advantage of on the internet; podcasts, videos, songs, TV shows, and so on. We have to keep in mind the level we are teaching. This is to say, we should choose carefully the track we are going to play to our students. Neither too easy nor too difficult to understand.

Furthermore, we have to avoid pressuring them to understand exactly what they just heard. In order to avoid this, we can play it many times the same track two or three times until they have gotten the main idea. If possible, use the same 'voice' so they will get used to it faster and in future occasion it will not be difficult to listen to the tone of voice.

Another route we can take is to encourage them to listen to TV or radio shows in English for short periods of time. Gradually, they can increase the amount of time until they can listen to the entire episode. Also, listening to music in English can be a great help for them; they will listen to words in context and learn the usage of slang or idioms in English.

With that being said, here are the techniques I found in Lucy Pollard's book A Guide to Teaching English.

-Listening for gist-
This strategy consists of getting the main idea without focusing on the details. So, if the audio is about global warming, you can ask them what global warming is about.

-Listening for specific information-
This technique involves disregarding the information that is not required. For instance, if the audio is about someone's biography, you can ask for the date of his / her birth, important accomplishments, or his / her daily life.

-Predicting-
This technique is applied by stopping the audio in a specific part of it, then, the students are asked about what is going to be next. For this activity, we must accept every single opinion they give, otherwise we are going to dishearten them and they will not participate anymore.

I hope this can help you, also, if you have other ideas for teaching listening, share them freely.