Hi Mariví

You ask about 'while listening' activities for video. I think one thing that you should be careful with in this respect is that before you get students to focus on the listening, you make full use of the visual aspects of the video. So much of the power of video is that it can communicate so much of the cultural and 'non verbal' aspects of communication that are often neglected within language teaching.

When setting viewing tasks, try to focus students on the non linguistic elements of communication. Deciding on relationships between people, understanding context, understanding genre and structure of things like newsbroadcasts can really help students when it comes to understanding information they recieve through the aural channel.

When you do set listening tasks, make sure that these require minimum response during viewing. It's very difficult to write longer responses while viewing.

If you seperate your tasks and start with viewing tasks and then follow these up with listening tasks, you might find it beneficial to cover the video screen or seperate out the audio to stop students getting distracted by the visual.

One of my favourite activities is to get one set of students to watch without sound and another set to listen without the visual, then put them in pairs to compare and share the impressions and piece together what really happened in the clip. This works best with videos of social situations, especially where there is some tensiuon between the characters.

Hope this advice helps a little.

Best

Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer
Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/
News and Tips: http://quickshout.blogspot.com/
Student Activities: http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/

Listening is unfortunately the most critical but often widely neglected aspect of communication. Powerful listeners can achieve miracles. You first step is to make a clear distinction between hearing and listening. Hearing is done by the ears. Listening is done with the mind and the heart.

Listening tasks need to be carefully chosen. Your audio visual materials should not have a variety of accents. There is every chance that your learners will get totally confused. Just to cite an example, there is a huge difference between the UK and US accent. Another danger if your materials are audio visual, is the fact that your students will unconsciously omit the listening part and your entire exercise will be a failure.

It is better to focus only on audio initially and gradually introduce audio visual. You can play recorded talk shows, stories,  sports commentary, news and so on. Have some questions based on the conversation and split the class into groups. Do not take conversations which go beyond ten minutes to start with. Ask the groups to answer the questions and make it a competition.

You can also introduce lot of listening games. Depending on your class strength ask each student to find details about any 5 parameters,which you can decide by talking to the other class members. The 5 parameters could be father's maiden name, favorite dish, favorite color, date of birth and ambition. Make it clear to the students that they cannot note down anything. Fix up a time limit. Ask the students or the groups to come out and share the details they have gathered about other class members. Ensure that you ask each student to write down their answers before you start the game and give it to you. Award one point  for the right answer. Ensure no student or team notes down anything or talk between themselves once the game starts. The beauty of this game is the bonding that it creates within the participants apart from the fun factor.

All the best.