The tragedy of listening for adults at lower levels [AL]

Oh, I just love listening activities. I can just forget about all the dull, quite frankly rather dumbed down listening exercises you generally find in course books and just pick a favourite gag off YouTube or play that song my students have been nagging to listen to in class for weeks; or even make up my own, if they're not quite ready yet to go full authentic material, and perhaps throw in a little guitar playing to ginger it all up. I mean it's just great.

Great, right.

I mean... Unless they're beginners of course.

Creating a listening activity for lower levels is no piece of cake, and in time I suppose I have come to agree that sometimes slow motion stiff-sounding speech is most of what you can give to your students. It's kind of boring, but I suppose teaching English to low-level adults is likely to come down to pretty basic boring stuff. To some extent we all need to come to terms with it, but there's no reason why we can't try and spice it up and dare a little more. Grade the task, someone said, not the language.

Here is how I have managed to throw my beginners in the deep end of authentic materials, and how I have managed to come out of it alive.

Here's what I do:

Imagine your students have just successfully gone through a vocabulary activity and know their words twice. You have been drilling and they can pronounce them pretty well. Make sure everybody is confident about the new vocabulary and start the activity. Tell them you are going to repeat the very same words to them, and do so. Then ask them to repeat. E.g.

T:  "Table"

Ss: "Table"

At this stage I alway like to kind of dumb it down for them, just for fun. E.g.

T: "Pic-ture"

Ss: "Pic-ture"

Hopefully they will look unimpressed and underchallanged. Just keep going for a couple more just to tease them.

Finally, tell them you are now going to repeat the same words, but this time in the middle of a sentence. Again, they will have to repeat just the one word they have learnt. Stress the fact that they don't need to be concerned with the meaning of the sentence, just the words they have learnt. Pronounce the sentences at natural speed. E.g.

T: "Today I bumped into a table and almost tripped and fell".
Ss: "Table"

Try and be decent with them. There's no need to speed up at this stage. Hopefully after one or two times they will get it. Now pick up speed. E.g.

T: "Look at the pictures please"

T: "There's my office over there"

You can even keep talking for a while before actually pronouncing a word. E.g.

T: "Today I got back from work and I was so exhausted I just took a shower and after that just literally dropped on the sofa to finally get some rest".

Or, if you want to be mean, try and pronounce sentences where no focus language is present and see if they fall for it.

If you like, I suggest only once the activity is over, you can make them think about how such a situation is quite common in real life, say for example when you go abroad and just manage to pick out the name of a street or a hotel. Sometimes just a few key words is all you need to hear (or listen for).

This activity will give your students a bite of natural language and reward them with a very practical new skill. Some of them will even be able to make out some words from the sentences that you didn't plan them to hear and will feel like they have exceeded your expectations and impressed you and the rest of the class.