How to Teach a listening Lesson 

Introduction 

Of all English language skills, listening is considered the most important skill. This is why it is very important to every teacher to know how to teach a listening lesson. Listening is the first skill that all new children engage in when born. Listening is defined as the process of hearing sounds, making meaning from them and responding to the message. So, How to teach listening lesson to ESL students? 

Teaching a listening lesson to ESL students is one of the most complicated and confusing part of teaching English language. ESL teachers face a lot of difficulties and problems in classroom when they teach a listening lesson, especially for beginner students. However, there is a common saying that says “ true speaking is true listening “. Therefore, it is very important for the students to master listening if they want to speak well. No matter how well you speak, if you don’t understand what your conversation partner said, your answer will be a little awkward at best, or totally random at worst.

How to Start a Listening Lesson?

Before you start teaching a listening lesson, get the students engaged in what you are going to teach them. Introduce the main theme of the listening topic to your students by asking them to do a short quiz or watch a video related to the topic. if your listening is about shopping, you could ask students whether or not they ever buy things without trying them on and whether or not they’ve had good or bad experiences with that.

The 3 Stages of Teaching a Listening Lesson 

You may find a lot of ideas and ways on how to teach a listening lesson but the listening lesson can be divided into three main stages; pre, while and post listening. 

1. Pre Listening 

This stage is set to prepare the students for what are the going to hear in the second stage. In this stage, the teacher may do a brainstorming about the topic by asking the students to guess what are they going to study and/or teaching some vocabularies related to the main topic. The mai goal of this stage is to provide the students with an idea of what they are going to listen to. There are many techniques and activities that teachers can use to teach the pre listening stage including: 

- looking at a list of items and guessing 

- making lists of possibilities ! ideas suggestions 

- reading a text before listening

- reading through questions (to be answered while listening) 

- labelling a picture

- compieting part of a chart

- predicting 1 speculating

- previewing the language which will be heard in the listening text

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2. While Listening 

This is the second stage of how to teach a listening lesson. In this stage, the students are going to listen to the target record and do some activities at the same time. The main goal of while listening activities is to help learners develop the skill of eliciting messages from spoken language. 

The students should listen to at least two times for the same record. First listening is extensive where the students should be told to get a global understanding of the listening material by doing multiple choice questions. Second listening is intensive process where the students have to answer questions about more detailed information. It is important that the students should be required to do different tasks every time they listen. 

There are many different activities that we can use for this stage of a listening lesson including: 

- storyline picture sets

- putting pictures in order

- completing pictures

- picture drawing

- carrylng out actlons

- making models 

-completing grids

- form chart completion

- using Lists

- true or false statement 

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3. Post Listening 

This stage of how to teach a listening lesson is known as the different skills stage as the teacher should move on from a listening practice to focus on other language skills like reading, speaking and writing. The main goal of this final stage is to check if the students can apply the target language of the lesson in their daily life. This can be done by different activities including: 

-chart completion 

- Extending lists

-Sequencing1 `grading'

- Matching with a reading text

- Extending notes into yvritten responses

- Summarising

- Using information from the listening text for problem-solving and decision-

making activities - Jigsaw listening

- Identifying relationships between speakers

- Establishing the mood / attitude ! behaviour of the speaker

- Role-play situations 

These are the main stages of preparing a listening lesson.