a collection of ESL Listening Activities and Resources

What makes listening successful?- What to change: task, text, # of times
- hearing emotion and irony
- - teaching the layers of meaning
- can transcripts help in showing the layers?

Activities
- Watch 3 trailers pick the correct movie

from Helgesen
- dictate a short story, then have sts use a cloze activity to fill in the story as they imagined it with words for the boxes, while other missing words are supplied as they are heard
- Listen and raise your hands when you hear specific info
- What do I want to know? words I expect to hear?
- complete cloze activities first, then listen for correctness
- choose between types of conversation (dr. and patient, or not) and then write key words that show how you knew)("What are they talking about?" "What words give you hints")
- put main ideas on the board with distracters
- on the board: Order of the events, they listen and put them in order (extra for distracter)
- Find pictures of the situation on the web and have sts identify the best match
- have sts draw the situation with as many details as possible
-watch for emotions, how do speakers feel? how do you know?

from Penny Ur
- listening with gaps that students fill in; (silent listening with a video?)
- guessing definitions (person, place, thing, action) that the teacher gives

from Jack Richards
- identifying differences between a spoken and written text
- pair readings of the conversation audio previously heard

Wheatley comments that "people are literally clamoring for attention" (pg 90) while also relating a story of a teacher who spent the time listening to a student who had begun shouting at her. She also relates how it took some time for the student to realize that the teacher was really willing to listen since it had been so long since anyone had listened to him. This seems to me to be another salient point: people often do not expect to be listened to, or maybe just as accurately, they do not expect to be heard. A friend noted a while back that most people are only the 3-4 questions (of the right sort) from breaking down in tears about their own story, even to a stranger. We need to learn listening again, everywhere and often.