How to improve the listening skills?

Listening is one of the most difficult skills to learn because students have to understand what someone is saying. Moreover, they learn a lot of vocabulary and grammar from listening activities, so teachers must have clear how to present it to their pupils and motivate them to learn a new language.

In my opinion as a future teacher, the best for our children is to create an atmosphere where they only listen to the language which they are learning. Although they don´t understand what are listening at first, they will deduce the direct orders and the social words and expressions. If these children are from Kinder Garden School, teachers have to speak them without fears because they will learn very quickly the vocabulary, grammar and phonetics without any previous knowledge. It will be well if we know how to introduce them in a communicative context, where is necessary to learn the language that is spoken there.

Furthermore, the most important thing that they have to interiorize in themselves is the sense and the utility of the new idiom. We don´t get it with the listening activities that, traditionally, people from my generation have done in schools to learn English. It consisted in listening to a CD and choosing the correct answer in a paper. By this way, students have the conception about listening exercises as something difficult, stressful and stupid. We have to change it and use new kind of activities to support the listening learning process. For example, it is very useful start with songs and films to stimulate our children’s audition. They will improve and, little by little, pupils will understand and catch some words and expressions. In addition, maybe they will try to sing and say the same as the songs or the movies say. In relation with that, the “Story Telling” is a fantastic educational resource. In this case, teachers not only have to speak in the new language. We must use gestures, change our voice, make different faces and move our hands. Flashcards, pictures, toys and puppets are indispensable to support the most important words which we want to focus in. With all of these elements we make our students participants of the activity. Moreover, depending on the way that we develop it, we could make use of the story that we have told in class to prepare a theater play, where all our children will have to performance.

However, all of the listening activities that we prepare have to consider two important steps: the activities pre-listening, the activities post-listening. Both kinds of exercises work with listening skills, too. It is because, as docents, we should be sure about the comprehension level of each child. So we have to consider other skills that accompany the listening. Consequently, new technologies like Interactive Digital Whiteboard are very advantageous. It allows us to create our interactive listening activities and motivate our scholars to learn and speak a new language.

Concluding, if we have in mind all of the factors which we could change the way to learn a new language, we will design activities through improve the listening skills in the learning process of the new generations.

Gemma Lerma