How to adapt
audio activities?
Abi Leal & Mar Mascote
What are
they?
Listening activities are games and
exercises that teachers can use in the
classroom to help students develop
their active listening skills. These
activities range in difficulty level and
allow students to engage in various
types of listening so they can
gradually hone their ability to focus
on discerning key information,
understanding its context and applying
it practically in their own work.
Why are they
important?
IMPROVING IMPROVING
ACCURACY FLUENCY
Students need to be able to Students need to be able to
sound out words accurately. read sentences fluently. Fluent
Reading along with audio readers know how to chunk out
recordings of articles can help sentences into phrases and
them develop this skill, especially clauses, when to pause, which
with multi-syllabic words, words words to emphasize, and where
that they have not encountered to change voice pitch. Reading
before in print, or words that along with audio recordings can
they know but only orally. help them develop this skill.
How to adapt them?
LISTENING MATERIALS LISTENING TASKS STRATEGIES AND SKILLS
INSTRUCTION
Activating relevant prior Combining listening for global
knowledge, informing learners that meaning with authentic materials Students with limited lexical
they dont to need understand could be helpful in developing knowledge would perhaps
every word, and simplifying the their ability to listen for gist. benefit from practicing making
task to aid comprehension. Tasks providing learners with inferences, guessing from
Shorter authentic listening opportunities to listen for both
materials on simple topics should gist and details, such as listening context, or affective
be used to prevent leaners from to the same text multiple times, strategies instruction in
becoming frustrated when unable but focussing on different persevering with a difficult
to comprehend what was said. information each time, and those task.
that that require listeners to Subskills instruction suggested
form the kind of responses by Field (1998) will also be
required in real life listening are beneficial in helping learners to
more effective than traditional recognise individual words in
comprehension questions. the stream of language that
they hear.
How to adapt them?
EXTENSIVE LISTENING INTEGRATION WITH
OTHER SKILLS
Extensive listening requires quite
a large time commitment. Listening activities can utilise
It seems that some kind of materials as ‘a point of
compromise is needed if extensive departure’, where students
listening is to be included in my move on from the listening
classroom context. A more task to provide their own
realistic target for learners content, for example, listening
would be to initially listen to to a speech and formulating
short, simple texts in class for questions for the speaker, or
enjoyment, before moving on to listening to part of a story
encouraging learners to listen to and writing an appropriate
one or two texts a week and ending.
report back to the group. This
could be something they are
particularly interested in, for
example a song or a film trailer.
don’t ask anything:)
References
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(S/f). Birmingham d oc u m en ts/ college-
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[Link] w w se n d-c art wr igh
h ing /m1town
1 artslaw/cels/essa
ys/la n gua ge t ea c
oom-resources/audio/
[Link]/classr
[Link]
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