Week 9: Designing Materials for Listening Reflection

Listening skills are vital for learners. Of the four skills, listening is by far the most frequently used in the classroom. I believe that there are many problems in listening task. For example, learners cannot cope with not having images. Most learners nowadays will have problems when they do not have any cues to help in English listening task. In a real life, learners have to not only deal with a variety of British, but also American and Australian accents. They have problems with different accents in listening tasks. They do not recognise the words that they know especially homophones. For instance, words such as ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ are. For Chinese, they might have problem in differentiating /l/ and /r/ in ‘led’ and ‘red’.

Although there are many problems in listening task, I believe that every listening activity must include the steps below to carry out a listening activity successfully:

• Pre-listening
  Teacher should prepare learners by introducing the topic and finding out what they already know about it. It is good to have a brainstorming session and some discussion questions related to the topic. Then, teacher provides background information and new vocabulary that they will need for the listening activity.
  
  
• While-listening
  Teacher should let learners know what they need to listen for, it can be general or selective details of the content. If learners are not marking answers or otherwise responding while listening, teacher should tell learners ahead of time what will be required afterward.
  
  
• Post-listening
  Finish with an activity to extend the topic and help students remember new vocabulary. This could be a discussion group, craft project, writing task, game and so on.
  

Teaching is never an easy job.