How to Teach Listening 2: Different Sub-Skills and WHy They Matter
Show Notes
In this episode, we're going into even more depth on how to teach effective listening lessons. First, we talk about different ways we listen in real life and how we can apply this to our listening lessons in the classroom. Then we go over the different listening "sub-skills," why the distinction between them matters, and examples of how you can help students practice each one. Finally, we offer some suggestions for taking listening tasks to the next level, and answer some common questions (should you give students the transcript?) along the way.
In this Episode
Listening as a skill- just any listening doesn’t necessarily count as true listening comprehension practice!
Why it’s important to practice listening in the classroom
Creating a bridge between the classroom and real life listening
Why we listen to different types of audio in different ways, and how this applies to listening lessons
Three different listening “sub-skills” and how these compare to the reading sub-skills we discussed in this episode
How to choose which types of listening comprehension or sub-skills to have students practice- why the audio text itself determines this
Listening for gist
How to set up a listening for gist task when you can’t make students “skim” listen
How to set a task that helps students practice listening for the main idea
Examples of listening for gist tasks
Listening for specific information
How to identify what “specific information” is in a text
What listening for specific information requires of students - how it’s different from listening for gist
Examples of specific information tasks
Listening for detail
How this is different from listening for specific information and how to tell the two sub-skills apart
Why it’s helpful to let students listen for gist before asking them to listen for detail
Why practicing this sub-skill usually requires playing the audio multiple times
Why it’s ok if students don’t get all the answers right the first time around
A good strategy for going over the answers to listening for detail tasks
Examples of listening for detail tasks
More advice for teaching listening
Why it’s not important for students to understand every single word in a text - it’s about the process, not the final result!
What else you can do with an audio text, after you’ve already gone through tasks to practice listening for gist, specific information and detail
How to help students understand connected speech
A situation in which you can use the transcript
A specific example of a complete listening lesson - including an exercise in which students practice listening to connected speech
Why students need to be comfortable with the content of the audio before you give them an exercise on connected speech
What to do if students continue to have trouble with the detailed listening task
How to help students use logic and knowledge of context to help them understand what they might have missed in their comprehension
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