"How can I help my students improve their listening skills? We practise listening often, but they seem to make little progress."
Any advice or ideas for Khanh? How can you improve someone's listening skills? How can a student see that improvement? Any tips, suggestions or comments? Contact us.
This question is from Khanh Thach, Vietnam
Comments
rebecca1
Marcus Murilo, Brazil
I believe that you can help your students become better listeners by helping them improve their pronunciation. Students sometimes expect to hear things as they're written, ignoring things such as assimilation etc. So you might find it useful to focus on these aspects in your classes. Moreover, you might also wish to devise tasks which help them notice differences related to stress distribution between English and their L1. For example, my first language is Portuguese, which is syllable-timed, so I had to learn that English is stress-timed in order to be able to understand spoken English. Also, there's one thing that is frequently overlooked in EFL course books, which is the 'schwa'. Personally, I believe this is the most important sound for students to learn, since it's particularly frequent in English; besides, teachers often forget that students NEED to be taught about vowel reduction.
Nadawajdi, UAE
I think that to improve students' listening skills we need to play a game in class. The teacher can read a text as fast as possible and give a few questions to the students. If they fail to answer he/she can read it more slowly, and so on, till they know all the answers. Of course, those who can answer first would be the winners. Practising this frequently will help students listen carefully and they will soon answer questions from the first try.
John, United Kingdom
Use tapes - on a walkman cassette, MD, CD or MP3. And listen, listen, listen. Listen while you travel, while you do the laundry, as you come in, as you go out. Listen first - again and again - without using a visual text. [Even without understanding!] Try and work out the sound patterns. Then - and only then - look at the text. And listen again. Use three, four, five or more different courses.
You can understand how to play a guitar in forty-five minutes. You can understand how to tune one in five minutes. But to hear how to tune a guitar takes weeks, months. To learn how to play takes much longer than forty-five minutes. These are skills that require application and repetition.