Pre-listening activities are things learners do before a listening activity in order to prepare for listening. These activities have various purposes, including pre-teaching or activating vocabulary, predicting content, generating interest and checking understanding of task.

Example
The learners are going to listen to a radio programme about sharks. First, they work in groups to pool their knowledge of sharks and then tell the rest of the class.

In the classroom
Pre-listening tasks include discussion questions, true or false statements, vocabulary work, prediction tasks and brainstorming the topic.