The listening activities in this section invite the learners to respond to something they hear in a variety of ways: by physical action (‘Change chairs’, ‘Obeying instructions’), by suggesting immediate responses or questions (‘Predictive listening’, ‘True or false’) or by brief writing or drawing (‘Ground-plans’, ‘Altering and marking’). Significantly, none of them are based on listening ‘blind’ to the long stretches of audio recordings which often furnish the basis for listening practice in coursebooks and online materials; they rather involve listening and responding to input from the teacher as it is produced or, in one case, sorting out bits of speeches from video clips (‘Jumbled statements’). Essentially, all the activities in this section invite learners to listen, understand and respond to spoken texts through engaging with tasks based on interesting and enjoyable challenges.

Altering and marking

From Teaching Listening Comprehension by Penny Ur

Procedure

1 Tell the students to colour bits of the picture according to instructions: for example:

There are flowers on the table. They’re red, and they’re standing in a black vase. Got that? The vase is black all over, and the flowers are red … .

2 Then tell them to take a pencil and add things. For example:

Can you see a little baby in the picture? Ok, I want you to draw a hat on the baby's head. OK? A hat on the baby.