Out of all the language skills students learn, listening skills are considered the hardest for all students who don’t have the option to experience immersion.
There are many reasons for this:
not enough contact hours therefore not enough repetition,
teachers not speaking in French/L2 enough,
teachers focusing too much on grammar and accuracy and explaining this in the L1/English,
students’ default response to listening activities (freaking out!/ “I’m not good at this”),
language not being recycled enough and every listening exercise being completely different to the previous one,
teachers cramming listening practice before an exam rather than doing it in every class,
listening being done “seriously” (pretty much as an exam) and not just for fun etc.
It is important for teachers to create a routine that includes some listening, if possible as a game, in every lesson.
Two examples:
You could have a very simple warm up done with mini whiteboards in which you say a word and students have to write it or draw it and show you
It could be a dynamic swat game (tapette à mouches) where you either write words on the whiteboard or attach a picture representing the word to the whiteboard. Ask two students to come to the front and compete against each other, hitting the correct words with the tapette à mouche. If students are part of a team and you rotate the opponents often enough, the whole class will be involved and they will be out of their seats for a while.
The advantage of these two activities is that students get immediate feedback and there is no number/ percentage associated with the activity.
Listening activities should not be done for testing but for comprehension and learning/growth.
Rather than playing a recording a couple of times with breaks in between, how about pausing the recording after 20-30 seconds (increase as students become more competent) and ask students to share with each other what they understood (in their own language)?
This will allow a few things to happen:
develop communication skills between students,
discuss complicated words and sounds,
compare note-taking skills,
and possibly the most important thing: lower frustration levels of weaker students! Teachers often underestimate how much negative self-talk is happening in students’ heads while doing a listening task: “I’m not good at this”, “I don’t get it”, “Why bother?”, “I hate this” etc. This noise in the students’ heads slows down their understanding significantly. By bringing a social aspect, you will reduce this issue for most students.
As an alternative, if you have shy students or it’s the start of the year and students don’t trust each other very much yet, you could ask each student to volunteer a word or a couple of words each to a whole class discussion. Start by asking how many words students have written down… ask them to count. Make a big deal of this because for most students recognising spoken words and taking notes is a difficult process. Spot the strongest students and ask them to volunteer words last. Let the weakest students shine as much as possible. As a teacher, you will see quickly which students have better aural skills and you could use this information for future sitting plan or activity done in pairs/ little groups.
Spending too much time or not enough time practising listening could completely derail an activity you have potentially spent a long-time planning and organising.
Should you spend 10 mins on an activity and move on quickly while students are still fresh? Or should you spend 40 mins on one text and make sure that students all understand 75% of the recording by the end of the activity? That’s often our dilemma!
I would argue that it depends on
the students’ age (40 mins for a 12-year-old is a lot! But not so much for a 17-year-old),
the kind of activity you are doing (is it purely listening and note-taking or are you allowing some time for discussion as well?),
the level of fluency of students,
the purpose of the activity (to improve understanding, to answer questions, to introduce a new topic etc).
You, as the teacher, need to have decided what your goals are and, if the activity is taking too long, you should simply stop it. You can come back to it during the following lesson. If you frame this “rescheduling” well, especially if you emphasize the importance of “learning” and “improvement”, students will be grateful you gave them a break for a demanding activity and they will see that revisiting the recording will support their learning.
