[I got a request from a teacher for advice on how to make IELTS Listening lessons more interesitng. Admittedly it's an uphill battle, but I threw together all the ideas I had, and sent off an email. And then I decided to put it on this blog as well. If anyone has any extra ideas, please leave them in the comments section.]
I got a request from a teacher for ideas for more dynamic activities for IELTS listening. I went through my archives to find all the activities I had for IELTS listening lessons, and I thought I'd share them below.
I've only got 7, but I thought that if we all pooled our ideas, we could probably come up with a lot more. So if anyone else has any more ideas or activities for listening lessons, please share your stuff as well.
1. The IELTS Resource Pack by Jon Marks is a good starting point.
The listening section is more limited than some of the other skills, but there are at least 4 good activities in here.
2. Re-arrange the strips in order game--use to review what listening strategies the students should use on the test, and the order they should do them in.
Strips are cut up and shuffled before class.
Students are put into groups, and have to re-arrange the strips in the correct order.
3. Find your partner games to review IELTS listening strategies. (I have two examples in my archives, here and here. More examples can be created depending on what particular strategies you want to review with your class.)
I usually do this game in 2 rounds. The first round is a whole class game, where each student gets one card, and has to find the student with the matching half.
In the second round, students are put into groups of 3, and each group of 3 is given a set of shuffled cards and must match each card to its matching half.
4. Write your own Listening Part 1 Test
I thought it might be useful for students to try to get into the heads of the test writers, so they can better predict what kind of tricks the test writers will use.
This activity is done in groups. Students are encouraged to write a dialogue with lots of distrators and synonyms and paraphrases, just like the real test. Then I make photocopies of the questions for the rest of the class, and distribute it, and the students read out their dialogue as a "live" listening for their classmates
5. Board Race
This is useful for directing students' attention to the information in the textbook. It can be adapted for any pages of the textbook, but one example is here. After the game, I usually do feedback on a PowerPoint or slideshow to ensure that everyone knows the correct answer. Example here.
6. Treasure Hunt
As with the Board Race, this is another way of directing students attention to the test tips and test strategies in their textbook.
The questions are cut up and hid around the classroom, and students are put into groups and have to find the questions, and then find the answers in their textbook. (This requires a little bit of advance preparation, since you have to go into the room about 15 minutes before the students to hide the questions). It can be adapted to any page of the textbook, but an example is here. And again, I do feedback on PowerPoint. Example here.
7. Quiz Game
Another way to focus students' attention on the information in their textbook.
Students are told one lesson before the pages of the textbook that will be on the quiz, and their homework is to memorize the information.
On the next class, students are divided into teams, and play the quiz game.
Here's one example. (This is actually an example from a reading lesson, but the same format can be used for a listening lesson.) When I did this in my class, I put the categories and the numbers up on the board, but the students couldn't see the actual questions.
Teams choose a category and a number, and place their bet before hearing the question. (Each team has 10 points to start out, and throughout the game their maximum bet is limited to the number of points that they currently have).
If a team misses the question, they lose the amount of points that they have bet. I then allow other teams to try to steal those points by answering the question correctly.
For extra, extra fun, the same quiz game idea can be used with a "Hurricane" game format. In Hurricane, a grid is drawn on the whiteboard. (Numbers 1-5 on the vertical axis, letters A-E on the horizontal axis). Each space on the grid corresponds to a question. The teacher has the key to which questions match each grid space, but the students do not know. The students chose a grid space and bet their points without knowing the question. Then the teacher reads the question. For extra extra extra fun, a few of the grids in the Hurricane game have special surprises in them (e.g. "a hurricane" means they lose all their points. "A rocket" means they destroy another team's points. "an arrow" means they change points with another team. "+200" means plus 200 points. etc)
Examples of Hurricane games can be found here and here. These are not IELTS questions, but the same template can be adapted for IELTS questions.
This can be used to review test rules, tips and strategies from the textbook. Or it can be used to review your own material that you have given to the students.
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