Developing listening subskills and enhancing classroom engagement

You might have experienced that situation when right after listening to the text, your learners would say that they did not understand anything and asked you to listen again. 

Or when you were about to give your learners a listening task to complete, you could see that they were not enthusiastic about it at all. 

Such situations can be really frustrating for both a teacher and learners. 

They appear largely due to the fact that listening is a complicated skill to master. 

In this article, we will discuss why listening can be challenging or boring for your learners and what you can do to make it a more enjoyable part of your lessons.

Let's have a look at some possible reasons why learners may be discouraged to do listening tasks. 

One part can be connected with the nature of listening as a process and another one may be related to learning activities, used to develop listening skills. 

Let's start with the peculiarities of listening as a process.

Listening itself is quite challenging to master. 

First of all, there is no visual contact with the speaker. 

As a result, learners do not see the speaker's body language, emotions and the physical background.

In most cases, we hear the text only once, that's why there is no chance to get back to some parts of the text again. 

Apart from that, if learners are not familiar with the context of the listening text, they can get distracted. 

Instead of completing the task, they may think about the characters' relationships. 

Learners do the same tasks all the time and know the routine. 

No surprise, they are not excited to do just another boring task. 

Another difficulty is the use of the activities which do not in fact develop listening skills. 

The examples of such tasks could be listening to the text and retelling it or listening to the text sentence by sentence and translating them. 

Such tasks are really difficult as usually, there is no pre-test discussion or pre-teaching the vocabulary that blocks understanding the text. 

As a result, learners often fail to perform well and may feel frustrated. 

Having analysed the common challenges, let's have a look at some possible solutions which can make your listening lessons more engaging. 

First of all, let's get back to basics — the listening task cycle.

A pre-listening activity is essential to familiarise the learners with the context of the listening text and activate their background knowledge about it. 

It will help them understand the text better and will generate interest in the topic.

Another interesting and unusual activity is watching a scene from a film without sound so that the learned can predict what happened.

As we have mentioned earlier, your learners may be distracted from completing the task if there are some unknown key words in the text. 

Therefore, it makes sense to pre-teach such words so that the learners can understand the main ideas and details and cope with the task.

Firstly , learners try to understand the main ideas — the gist — and after that, they listen to understand the details. 

The first listening of the text straight for details may be unsuccessful as learners will have a dual challenge of understanding both the gist and details. 

Complete the listening task cycle with interesting and creative follow-up activities, e.g., discussions where learners can express their views on the problem, rewriting the story ending, conducting an interview based on the text facts.

Aim to use various comprehension check tasks, not just answering the questions. 

Instead, you can use True/False statements, multiple choice, unjumbling the sentences, completing the sentence endings or the gaps in the summary of the text with the information from the listening text. 

With young learners, you can try the "Listen and draw a story" activity when your learners try to draw what they hear. 

Older learners can draw a mindmap or a diagram to visualise the information they listen to. 

It is real-life content which your learners can relate to and find more interesting.

On top of that, see if you can choose the topics of the listening text that match your learners interests and age. 

It will make the lesson more engaging.

As listening texts may contain some unknown words, your learners may focus on understanding every single word. 

As a consequence, it may prevent them from understanding the important details and completing the task. 

What can help you here is the development of some compensatory strategies. 

For instance, learners can try to catch the explanation or meaning of an unknown word in the text. 

Or it is the context that can help. 

Sometimes, learners should ignore an unknown word if it does not prevent them from understanding the important details.

We hope that a combination of the suggested activities and techniques will enable your learners to improve their listening skills and make your lessons more interesting and engaging.