Learning English

Three unusual listening sub-skills

Dan and Sian talk about three unusual listening sub-skills

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Three surprising listening sub-skills
Listening can be tricky to teach and for students to improve due to its speed, immediacy and other factors like accent, background noise etc. However, improving listening isn’t always about listening! There are a number of seemingly unrelated sub-skills that can help your students listen better.

Inferring meaning
Communication is not always explicit. Sometimes, what is said has a deeper meaning. Teaching students to better understand this meaning allows them to better hear the message that is being communicated and not just the words. Have students watch and analyse drama clips, particularly where the characters are being less than open. Use them to generate discussion on the difference between what is being said and what is really meant.

Predicting
A lot of conversation falls into patterns, called scripts. Knowing the script makes listening easier because you don’t need to concentrate so hard to hear something you already expect. However, it requires knowledge of a range of contexts and typical conversations. To help, get students used to predicting by playing sentences for them, but stopping the playback halfway through and having them guess based on context. Make sure they explain why!

Pronunciation
Being able to listen well means having a good understanding of the phonological features of connected speech. Ellision, intrusion, contractions, weak forms….etc. When students being to understand these, they are better equipped to listen more accurately. The easiest way to practise is to play or read sentences with these features in them and have students discuss or guess how many words there are, what the full sentence is and which features that they can identify.

English journal on the internet
Every day, get your students to take a picture and post it online with one or two sentences attached. This means they get vocabulary and writing practice, can have their sentences corrected online by the teacher, and are able to comment on each other’s posts. You can even dictate the topic, food, for example.

To do

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Get involved

Well, those were just a few ideas that we here at BBC Learning English had, but we know that you teachers out there have lots of fantastic ideas too, and we’d like you to share them with us and everybody else.

If you have a great tip or technique about listening, or anything else, please email us at learningenglish@bbc.co.uk. Your email could be posted here on this page, or may even be mentioned in our show.

We are also looking for video tips to include in the programme. You could be rewarded with a T-shirt for your efforts.

End of Session 4

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