There are several active listening strategies that we can teach to our students.
I’ve grouped them into 8 categories:
Planning
Focusing attention
Monitoring
Evaluating
Inferencing
Elaborating
Collaborating
Reviewing
All are important!
Consider concrete ways to teach, discuss, practice, and review these strategies!
Group 1: Planning
Planning means: developing an awareness of the steps needed to accomplish a listening task.
It means considering the outcome before you begin. In other words, clarify the goals of a task before listening.
How to do this?
Anticipating content that may be introduced: what words, what ideas, what attitudes.
Anticipation provides a “template” for slotting in information as you hear it.
Anticipating means coming up with an ‘action plan’. What am I going to do when I get this information.
An action plan provides a “task structure” for anticipating what is going to happen next.
These are ways of mentally rehearsing the steps to take to deal with a listening task.
Teaching Tip:
One concrete planning device is using “advance organizers.”
Create an outline or a graph or set of visuals to guide the listening process.
