These activities can be challenging for some learners, but provide a positive learning experience when they are able to understand more fully what they hear. They can be done regularly and don't take up too much time, so they make ideal warmers or fillers at the start or end of a class.
Procedures
Using dialogues
- Take a recorded dialogue from a coursebook suitable for the level of your learners. Create a gap-fill exercise by deleting some of the target language. Learners listen and write down what they hear, or they can predict the missing words with ideas of their own and then listen to see if their predictions were correct.
- Cut up a recorded dialogue from a coursebook so that learners have to order the lines of the dialogue as they listen to it. They can do this either by simply numbering the jumbled text, or moving the cut-up sentences into the correct order. Learners listen again to check their order is correct and can then practise reading the dialogue in pairs.
Dictation
- Dictate a sentence and learners write down the first word and the last word. Learners listen again and count how many words they hear – this is difficult because of the natural linking between words. They write down the number they think they've heard and compare with a partner before you tell them the real number. Then learners listen a final time and write down key words they hear in order to build the complete sentence.
Similar sentences
- Give the learners three or four sentences that have a very similar meaning or function. Then read out one of the sentences and the learners have to identify the sentence they hear. For example:
Could you open the door, please?
You couldn't open the door, could you?
Would you mind opening the door?
Could you open the door for me?
- To make the activity more challenging, the sentence could be part of a longer text that you read out, or a recorded dialogue.
Using songs
- Give learners verbs from a song on cut up pieces of paper. Learners listen to the song and order the verbs as they hear them. Then give the learners the full song lyrics and they compare their ideas before listening again.
- You could also make a gap-fill exercise with the song lyrics, similar to the one suggested above using dialogues.