Engaging Activities for Any Listening Text Workshop

(TESOL Ideas--Workshops, Activities that Can Be Used with Any Listening Text)

Google Drive Folder HERE

Slideshow: slides, pub

* Activities for any Listening Text Document: docs, pub

* Session plan: docs, pub

* Bullet Point Explanations: docs, pub

* Discussion Prompts for Fast Finishers: docs, pub

* Gallery Walk: docs, pub

* Skills Evaluation: docs, pub

* Stages of a Listening Lesson: Put the Cards in Order: drive, docs, pub

Activities to Post Around the Room:

* Word Grab: docs, pub

* Paraphrase Sentence Grab: docs, pub

* Put the Cards in Order: Sample 1: docs, pub, Sample 2: docs, pub, Sample 3: docs, pub

* Word Bingo: docs, pub

* Using Running Dictation to Reconstruct Listening Transcripts: Sample 1: docs, pub, Sample 2: docs, pub

* Make Questions for the Other Group: docs, pub

* Faulty Printer: docs, pub

* Wrong Words: docs, pub

* Put the Transcript in Order: docs, pub

* Put the Transcript in order: Table Format: docs, pub

* Student Editors: docs, pub

[Notes: This workshop is a sequel to a previous workshop that I did last year: Engaging Activities for Any Reading Text.  The idea was to do the same thing for listening texts, but unfortunately listening texts were a bit harder to gamify.  (Students may be able to move around the room and read the text at the same time, but too much movement makes it difficult to engage in careful listening.)  But I did the best I could with this, and tried to accumulate as many different listening activities as I could.  And then at the end, participants were invited to share their own activities.

As with the Engaging Activities for Any Reading Text workshop, the activities were posted around the room, and participants walked around with a partner a worksheet to prompt discussion.  (It wasn't necessary to actually write the answers in the worksheet--participants could just use it as a discussion prompt).

Participant feedback on the Engaging Activities for Any Reading Text workshop had been that there was too much information on the presentation, so I cut down on the slides this time around.  Instead of putting my evaluation of the activities on the slideshow, I put it on a document, which was cut up and posted around the room, so participants could compare their own evaluation with mine as part of the gallery walk.  After the session, this document was shared electronically with the participants after the session.

Fast finishers had also been a problem on the previous workshop, so I prepared a couple activities for this.  One is an ordering activity for the stages of a listening lesson.  Although my co-presenter thought the information in the ordering activity was important enough that he wanted to use it as the first stage in the workshop, and we altered the plan to that. We instead used discussion questions for fast finishers.]

Word Grab 

• Put students into pairs.  Give each pair one set of cards 

• Students listen to the audio, and when they hear the word, they grab the card 

• At the end, the student with the most cards wins 

• Optional Follow Up 1: After the Word Grab is over, give students a copy of the transcript.  Have them locate the words in the transcript 

• Optional Follow Up 2: After the Word Grab is over, give students a copy of the transcript with the words blanked out.  Have them write the missing the words in the blanks 

 

Paraphrase Sentence Grab 

• Find 10 sentences from the listening.  Write paraphrases of those sentences on cards 

• Put students into pairs.  Give each pair one set of cards 

• Students listen to the audio, and when they hear the word, they grab the card 

• At the end, the student with the most cards wins 

• Optional Follow Up: After the Word Grab is over, give students a copy of the transcript.  Have them locate the paraphrases in the transcript 

 

Put the Cards in Order 

• Put students in pairs.  Give each student a set of cards 

• The students listen to the audio, and put the cards in the order that they are mentioned 

• The cards can either be words or phrases directly from the audio, or they can be paraphrases 

• Variation 1: Students match cards together and then put them in order.  Then listen and check. 

• Variation 2: Students listen and put the quantifiers in the order they are mentioned.  Then, they listen again to match the quantifiers to their nouns. 

• Variation 3: Arrange the cards on a table.  Then listen and check.  

 

Word Bingo 

• Give each student a bingo grid.  Students arrange the words on the bingo grid as they like. 

• Play the audio. When students hear the words, they cross it off on their bingo grid 

• When a student gets 5 in a row, they shout out “Bingo”.  Briefly stop the listening to verify the 5 words.  Continue playing the listening until 3 students have had a Bingo 

• Variation 1: Use lexical chunks or collocations instead of individual words 

• Variation 2: Don’t give students a word bank.  Students come up with the words themselves. 

 

Running Dictation to Reconstruct the Listening Transcript 

• Take the first 5 or 6 sentences from the listening transcript.  Replace each word in each sentence with a blank space. 

• Put students in pairs.  Give each student a worksheet 

• Play the audio track for the first 6 sentences a couple times.  Students listen and try to write down the sentences exactly.  

• Students will still have gaps in their answers.  Tell students that the full sentences are outside the room. Students can reconstruct the rest of the transcript with a standard running dictation activity.  (One student can run outside and look at the text, they cannot write anything, but they can repeat the sentences to their partner, who can write them down.) 

• After students have reconstructed the text with running dictation, play the audio one last time for them to do one final check. 

• Time allowing, play again with the next 6 sentences in the transcript (to give students the opportunity to switch roles.) 

• Variation: Instead of blanking out the whole sentence, only blank out some of the sentence (e.g. every other word). 

• Make it a Competition: The winner is either the first pair to finish, or the pair with the most correct sentences 

 

 

Make Questions for the Other Groups 

• Students listen to the audio, and take notes on the main points. 

• Put the students in groups.  From their notes, the students work together to make comprehension questions for another group. 

• They trade their comprehension questions with another group.  They try to answer the questions that the other group has made 

• After finishing, put both groups together. The students correct each other’s answers, and, where necessary, explain where in the audio the key points were located. 

• Variation: Have students make questions for the other groups using the transcript.  Give only a portion of the transcript to each group (so that no one group has the whole transcript). 

 

Post Listening Transcript Work: Faulty Printer 

• Delete the last word from every line.   

• Students read the text, and try to predict what the missing word is. 

• After students have already made their best guess, play the audio track one time. Students can listen and check their answers and write in any additional words that they have missed. 

• Make it a competition. Put students in teams.  One point for each correct word. 

 

Post Listening Transcript Work: Wrong Words 

• Change one word in every sentence into an incorrect word 

• Students read the text, and try to predict what the wrong word is.  They underline the wrong word, and write the correct word above it. 

• After students have already made their best guess, play the audio track one time. Students can listen and check their answers, and make any changes they need to. 

• Make it a competition.  Put students in teams.  One point for each correct word. 

 

Post Listening Transcript Work: Put the Transcript in Order 

• Cut the transcript into strips of paper and shuffle.  Where possible, try to cut the transcript at places where reference words or cohesive devices offer strong hits as to how the sentences connect. 

• In groups, students try to reconstruct the transcript by putting the sentences in the correct order. 

• Play the audio.  Students listen to check their answers, and make any changes as needed 

• Variation: Instead of strips of paper, have students arrange the transcript on a grid (like pieces of a puzzle). 

 

Post Listening Transcript Work: Student Editors 

• Go through the text and change every pronoun to the original referent (e.g. change “she” to “Amy”)  

• Students read the adjusted text, and try to predict where the pronouns should be.  They underline the nouns, and write the appropriate pronouns above. 

• After students have already made their best guesses, play the audio track. Students can listen and check their answers, and make any changes.   

• Possibly draw students attention to the fact that a reference word can sometimes be used to replace a whole phrase or clauses.  If necessary, play the audio track multiple times until students can find all the places where reference words are replacing clauses. 

• Make it a competition.  Put students in teams.  One point for each correct reference word the teams can put in the text. 

 

 

Activity Name	Word Grab
Source	Standard activity, How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson p.95
Targeted Skills	Microlistening, Aural recognition of individual words, Being able to recognize word boundaries and pick individual words out of the stream of speech.   Alternatively, this activity can be used as a noticing activity for target language prior to doing work on vocabulary or useful language from the text.
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is high.  Students enjoy the competitive element of it, and it gets them moving a bit.  However, with longer listenings, engagement can drop if there is too long between word grabs.  So, for longer listenings it may be better to concentrate this activity just on the first half of the listening (i.e. rather than have 10 word grabs over 7 minutes, try 10 word grabs over 3 minutes).
Evaluation of Skill Building	There is some divided opinion about this activity in the staffroom.  Some teachers feel this is a useful activity, but criticism of this activity are: 1) Listening activities are best done individually rather than in pairs, because pair work will distract from the listening  2) Any listening activity that involves any amount of movement will distract from the listening  3) Listening for individual words is not a useful listening task.  It does not encourage students to process the listening for meaning.

 

Activity Name	Paraphrase Sentence Grab
Source	Adaptation of word grab
Targeted Skills	Comprehension of meaning of listening text (as opposed to just picking out individual words).  Useful for getting students to ready for tests that involve recognizing paraphrase
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Students find this activity challenging, so it’s a bit slow to get started, but most classes eventually rise to the challenge and engage with it.  As with the Word Grab activity, be careful with how these grabs are paced out during longer listenings.  e.g. if there are 10 cards to grab, it may be better to place them all in the first half of the listening (and then only play the first half) rather than to try to do the whole listening, and have 1 or 2 minute stretches where there’s no word to grab.
Evaluation of Skill Building	A lot of students are used to listening only for key words, and are not used to trying to process whole sentences for meanings, so this activity is often challenging for them, and at least in the start of the game, requires a lot of feedback and explanation.  But it’s a good challenge for them.  Also, because this activity focus on comprehension of individual sentences (and not the meaning of the text overall), it may be better to do this activity as a post listening activity after they have first had the opportunity to process the text for gist and detailed comprehension.

 

Activity Name	Put Cards in Order: Match and put in order, put in order and then listen again and match, put cards on table
Source	Standard activity
Targeted Skills	This is a suggested alternative to Word Grab.  The theory is that working with a partner to put the cards in order creates less noise (and thus interferes less with the listening activity) than the act of grabbing.  The cards can either be words directly from the listening (targeting recognition of individual words) or paraphrases of sentences from the listening (targeting comprehension of meaning)
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is okay.  It’s not the funnest game in the world, but the kinesthetic element to moving cards around is at least slightly more engaging than working directly from the textbook.
Evaluation of Skill Building	Although this activity is less disruptive than the Word Grab activity, it still has some elements of movement that can interfere with the listening. On the other hand, this activity is easier to give feedback on than the Word Grab activities, because after the activity is completed, the cards are laid out on the table, and it is possible to look at the answers and give delayed feedback on accuracy.  It’s also possible to see where problems have occurred, and replay relevant sections of the listening

 

Activity Name	Word Bingo
Source	How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson, p.83
Targeted Skills	As with Word Grab, this activity is useful for recognizing words in the stream of speech.  If you include multiword phrases as part of the Bingo, it can also be useful for drawing students’ attention to useful lexical chunks.
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is okay.  It’s not the funnest game in the world, but students enjoy the novelty of it if it is used sparingly.
Tips	It’s suggested that you follow along with the transcript and keep track of when the words come up in the listening.  This lets you give feedback to the winners on whether they’ve identified the correct words.  Students must tell you the 5 words in their Bingo to get points.  If students do not happen to get a Bingo, however, it’s difficult to give feedback to them on whether they have been identifying the correct words. To extend the game, you can play for 2nd and 3rd place winners.
Evaluation of Skill Building	As with Word Grab, there is some question about how useful it is for students to listen for individual words, and not for meaning (see the evaluation of skill building).

 

Activity Name	Running Dictation to Reconstruct the Listening Transcript—Completely Reconstruct Sentences, Partially Reconstruct Sentences
Source	Adapted from How to Teach Listening by J.J. Wilson (This is a combination of two activities that J.J. Wilson suggests separately--running dictation and reconstructing the listening transcript.)
Targeted Skills	Microlistening.  Also, as J.J. Wilson points out, the running dictation is itself a listening exercise (students have to listen to their partner to reconstruct the transcript.)  Also, as with any running dictation exercise, the theory is that by being forced to hold chunks of the text in their short-term memory, the students are more likely to absorb the language from the input
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is high.  This is a game that gets students out of their seats and running. They quite often groan at the start of it, but once they get going, it really wakes them up and gets them active.  But they also try to cheat all the time (using their phones to take pictures, writing the words themselves instead of dictating to partner), so a lot of careful monitoring is required.
Evaluation of Skill Building	The activity seems to do what it’s designed to do fairly well.  Students have to listen to their partner very closely to get all the words in the sentence

Activity Name	Make Questions for the Other Groups
Source	Standard Activity,
Targeted Skills	Creating their own questions promotes deeper understanding of text, Ability to design questions may help students anticipate the type of questions that will be on the test
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement varies on this activity.  Some students enjoy creating their own questions, but many students find it too much work and will disengage.  Nonetheless, when used sparingly, it can still sometimes be a refreshing break from textbook exercises.  When facilitating group work, careful monitoring is required to ensure that all students in the group are working together, and it’s not just one student creating the question, and 3 students on Facebook.
Evaluation of Skill Building	After completing the activity, ideally the students would give feedback to each other about the success, and help to explain any answers that are wrong.  But students often lack the motivation to engage in this, so the activity can be a struggle.

 

Transcript Work 

Transcript work should always be done as a post-listening activity—i.e. only after the students have had the opportunity to practice comprehending the text aurally with traditional listening activities.  If the transcript is introduced too early in the lesson, it will become a reading lesson instead of a listening lesson. 

However, when done as a post-listening activity, the transcript can be a valuable opportunity to increase comprehension of a listening text.  If a student is struggling to recognize the aural form of a word, the opportunity to look at the transcript may help with that recognition.  If students are struggling to recognize word boundaries or connect speech, seeing the transcript may help them to realize how the stream of speech is divided into different word units. 

But as valuable as the transcript is, experience has shown that most students have trouble focusing on the transcript when they are simply given the transcript and told: “Listen again and follow along with the transcript.”  Eyes will start to glaze over, and many students will not give careful attention to the transcript.  Therefore, transcript work needs a task or activity to force students' attention on the transcript while they are listening to the audio.  The following activities provide tasks that can be used with transcript work. 

Activity Name	Transcript: Faulty Printer
Source	Adapted from Week 8 in class activities for practicing Reading Subskills
Targeted Skills	This activity is originally a reading activity that has been appropriated here as transcript work.  As a reading activity, it’s designed to promote the skills of “sentence analysis + predicting”, skills which are arguably just as important when comprehending a listening passage.  Also, as with all transcript work, it’s designed to focus attention onto the transcript.
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is high.  Students enjoy trying to guess the final word of each line, and they like the competitive element of it.
Evaluation of Skill Building	The activity seems to do what it is designed to do, which is to get students following the transcript very carefully while listening to the audio.

 

Activity Name	Transcript: Wrong Words
Source	Adapted from 21 Must-Use Reading Activities For Your Language Lessons
Targeted Skills	In addition to all the usual benefits of transcript work, this activity promotes the idea of predicting words from context
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is high.  Students enjoy trying to hunt out the wrong words, and enjoy the competitive element of it.
Evaluation of Skill Building	The activity seems to do what it is designed to do, which is to get students following the transcript very carefully while listening to the audio.

Activity Name	Put the Transcript in Order—paper strip format, table format
Source	Standard Activity
Targeted Skills	In addition to the usual benefits of transcript activity, this activity encourages students to think about the organization and the coherence and cohesion markers in a listening text.
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is okay.  Students find it a little bit tiresome to put the transcript in order initially, and since this is not a competitive activity, motivation is sometimes lacking.  But they do listen carefully to check their answers.
Evaluation of Skill Building	The activity is yet another activity which is good for focusing the attention on the transcript while listening to the audio.  The pre-listening part of this activity, however (getting students to predict the order of the transcript prior to listening based on coherence and cohesion markers) is something that the students struggle with, and seem to need a lot of coaching on.

Activity Name	Transcript: Student Editors
Source	Adapted from Week 8 in class activities for practicing Reading Subskills
Targeted Skills	This activity is originally a reading activity that has been appropriated here as transcript work.  As a reading activity, it’s designed to promote the skills of “identifying the purpose of reference words”, skills which are arguably just as important when comprehending a listening passage.  And in fact, the ability to recognize “referencing” in the listening text is one of the subskills students get feedback on after the week 8 practice exam, so if you have a class that did poorly on the referencing subskill in the week 8 practice, this is a good activity to do.  Also, as with all transcript work, it’s designed to focus attention onto the transcript.
Evaluation of Student Engagement	Engagement is relatively high. Students liked the competitive element of it, and enjoyed to some extent the puzzle of working out where the reference words were.
Evaluation of Skill Building	Some guidance is needed at the beginning of this activity to help students recognize where the reference words are, and to help them recognize that referents can refer not only to single words, but also to whole phrases or sentences.  I usually play the audio several times to help them catch the difference between the referents in the audio and the lack of referents in their transcript.   Another idea is to only use this activity for the first half of the listening, and then for the second half of the listening, play the audio track aurally, and have students identify what the reference words mean.   (e.g. “What does ‘it’ mean at 3:21?”)  See example here.

 

Our Evaluation