Listening Strategies

Listening tasks

Awaken student interest!

Interest in the topic or context is important for students to be motivated to understand what they are listening to. There are many ways to do this - but the teacher must be motivated and interested too!

Activate Schemata

It is important for students to think about what they already know about a topic, to get them thinking about their previous experiences.

Predicting

Have students look at images or give them the context so they can predict some of the content they expect to hear (vocabulary, topics, etc.)

Students identify gist

Students should listen first to get a general idea of what is going on before they listen for specific information.

Purpose for listening

It is important that students know WHY they are listening to an audio text. Give them a specific purpose for each listening task.