The first teacher training book I had published is called “Listening in Action.” It contained 4 main sections about designing different types of listening practice. The most popular was the section on “selective listening” tasks. Here’s the intro to that section. See other posts for guidelines for specific activties.
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Selective listening activities address two separate, yet equally important goals in language development. The first goal concerns listening as an active process of predicting information and then selecting “cues” that surround this information; the second goal concerns becoming familiar with the organization of different types of discourse.
Because listening is an active process, it goes without saying that learners have to participate actively in order to improve their listening ability. Learners can experience how their listening ability is developing when they have opportunities to test the consequences of their attempts to listen. This means that to evaluate how well they have understood, learners need to develop their own goals for listening and to evaluate their efforts at reaching these goals.
Because development of listening ability involves increasing our learners’ access to different kinds of listening situations, it is important for us to expose our learners to a range of authentic types of spoken language. However, since most of our learners will initially find authentic listening rather frustrating, we can introduce them to authentic language through selective listening tasks. Selective listening tasks focus the learners’ attention on key parts of the discourse. By noticing key parts of the discourse, the learners can build up their understanding of the overall meaning by inferring, or “filling in”, what they have missed.
The activities in this section are designed to address both of these purposes. The activities aim to develop students’ listening ability by:
1. promoting attempts to listen to a range of authentic spoken language (that is, to a range of speakers, topics, and situations)
2. focusing expectations on understanding the main ideas of a text and on completing a specific task
3. providing pre-listening work which helps the learner understand the overall function and organization of the listening extract
The key features of the activities in this section are :
• the learners focus on selected information as they listen
• the learners have the opportunity for a second listening to check their understanding
• the teacher makes frequent use of taped materials
• the teacher provides warm-up activities prior to listening
• the teacher helps students set a purpose before listening
• the teacher requires minimal use of written language during the activity
• the teacher gives immediate feedback following the activity
There are twelve basic activity outlines in this section. Once again, with each activity there are suggestions for variations in which the learners can work toward the same instructional goals.
1. Cues game
VARIATION 1.1: TEAMS
2. Sound sequences
VARIATION 2.1: SOUND SKIT
VARIATION 2.2: SOUND BINGO
VARIATION 2.3: SOUND TRACK
3. That’s not right!
Variation 3.1: MEMORY GAME
VARIATION 3.2: THE CONTRADICTION GAME
4. Images
VARIATION 4.1: Listen for this!
VARIATION 4.2: ELICIT THE WORDS
5. Recorded messages
VARIATION 5.1: SERVICE ENCOUNTERS
6. Facts and figures
VARIATION 6.1: DOCUMENTARY
7. Story maps
VARIATION 7.1: PREDICT THE NEXT PART
VARIATION 7.2: ARGUMENT MAP
8. Talk show
VARIATION 8.1: WHOSE LINE?
VARIATION 8.2: OPINION GAP
9. In order
VARIATION 9.1: MONOLOGUES
10. Topic listening
Variation 10.1: WRITE YOUR QUESTIONS
VARIATION 10.2: STANDARD QUESTIONS
11. Conversation clues
VARIATION 11.1: WHICH WAS IT?
VARIATION 11.2: TEST QUESTIONS
12. Episode
VARIATION 12.1: Self-access
