Listening Challenges
As you begin teaching in the classroom, you should consider some of the challenges your students will face as they learn to listen in a foreign language. Here is a list of some factors that will affect your students’ ability to understand and some ways to combat them:
Rate of speech
As you speak to your students, especially at the beginning, slow your rate of speech and speak clearly. If students have trouble understanding a video or recording, slow it down.
Accents: Vary the accents used in the videos and recordings you choose to use in class and assign as homework. The more they are exposed to, the easier time they will have understanding English wherever they go in the world.
Unfamiliar material: Before asking the students to listen to anything, you should prepare them by explaining essential vocab, culture, or background that will be necessary in understanding what they will hear. We often call this pre-listening preparation scaffolding. Set your students up for success!
Language shortcuts: We may teach our students beautiful English, but, unfortunately, we do not often use beautiful English in the real world. “I do not know” can become “I dunno”, or even “ih-uh-oh”. It may sound normal to us, but it will sound as unfamiliar to your students as it appeared to you when I wrote it out. Teach your students the most often used contractions and shortcuts so they can recognize them when they come up in authentic speech.
A few other ideas to help your students:
Use videos or other visual aids! Students will feel successful as they use the visual aids to glide over the gaps in their understanding.
If subtitles or transcripts are available, always use them! Not only will this aid in comprehension, but it will help in language acquisition! Students will match what they hear to what they see!
Encourage your students to listen outside of class! The more practice, the better!
Classroom Resources
Worried about finding authentic listening resources for your students? I promise that it’s not as hard as it seems. First of all, never forget that any time you open your mouth, you are giving your students a prime example of a native speaker! The good old “think-pair-share” means listening to their partner speak! With no outside resources, you already have access to two sources of listening input for your students! Of course, that will get old very fast, for both you and your students. To add to your own YouTube scavenger hunts and any resources provided by your employers, here are a few websites I love:
ESL Video: This website has a treasure trove of video samples. They are organized by language proficiency and even come with some premade comprehension and cloze exercises! The videos vary in genre from mock job interviews to episodes from the TV show Friends. You can even assign the videos as homework and create an account to see if your students watch the videos and to see how well they perform on the quizzes!
ESL-Bits: Though there are no premade quizzes or visuals, this website has endless sources of listening practice! Thousands of audiobooks are available! I would be wary of relying on this resource though, since audiobooks are not authentic examples of speech. The way we write in English differs wildly from the way we speak. Longer sentences, complex transitions, and a lack of language shortcuts are just a few examples of how novels differ from every-day speech. Consider this website a supplemental resource.
TED Talks: Especially if your students are focusing on business or academic language, TED talks are a great resource! Though they do not model conversational skills, they expose students to lots of vocab and grammatical structures, and they model presentation skills.
I am sure that there are many more resources to turn to, but this is a great place to start!
