How to develop listening skills

How to develop listening skills
Listening is one of the most challenging skills for our students to develop, but they don’t learn only listening, motivation for learning language is to be able to communicate. ”Listen twice as much as you speak” is an old proverb passed down from generation to generation. By developing listening abilities and skills, we help them to become more independent learners and they could improve their overall communication.
So, my article is about developing listening skills, helping teenagers understand spoken English, as they find listening difficult. Of course some teenagers are very keen to learn while others are in class because they are forced to be there and this makes the discipline of listening much more difficult and they simply turn off when listening to English being spoken as it seems very difficult to follow and understand, dealing at speed with unfamiliar sounds, words and structures. This is even more difficult if we do not know the topic to be discussed, or who is speaking to whom.
Thus, making listening more engaging and understandable I usually try to select suitable listening material that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse my students’ interest and curiosity. Listening activities based on simulated real-life situations are more motivating and interesting to do than working through textbook comprehension exercises which quickly becomes boring. So I usually try some of the following listening texts and tasks that are likely to grab my students’ attention.
Usually I try to think of listening in three stages, pre-listening, while-listening, post- listening.
Pre-listening
I think pre-listening is the most important, during which we help the students prepare to listen.Pre-listening tasks aim to deal with all of these issues; to generate interest, build confidence and to facilitate comprehension. The most important thing that I do first is to give an idea about the material they are going to listen to. There could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. For example, when I had a lesson about teenagers’ pocket money, in order to motivate my students I showed them some pictures and a video about teens, money, about part-time jobs, what problems they face, whether it is important to have pocket money and so on. The next step I did was to activate topic knowledge. This step will build their confidence for dealing with listening. It’s important to activate the language that may be used in the listening. Sometimes I use prediction activities. I think as they know the context for something, they are able to predict possible content.
While- listening
They listen twice to the audio file without looking at the words. Then I ask them what the speakers are talking about. Then I uncover the hidden words. They listen to the dialogue again with all the text uncovered. Then they read the dialogue aloud in the same style as the English speaker, concentrating on pronunciation, tone and speed. Finally, they listen to the dialodue again three times without reading the text. This time they will understand the text better, and then I ask them to try to say the dialogue or part of it by heart, and believe me all of them are active and have something to say.
Post-listening
This could be discussion as a response to what they have heard, do they agree or disagree, what they liked or didn’t like, express their opinions and finally make their own dialogues using the same language; the new words and expressions.
Conclusion
In this article I have tried to describe a framework for listening development. I believe that it is important for teachers to prepare thoroughly for a listening activity if the activity is to be successful and this is especially true with teenagers.