Page 77 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Developing Listening

Table 4.1 Continued from the previous page
Type Examples of activities
Listen The teacher or one of the students tells the others to draw a picture. It is important
and draw to note here that the picture needs to be kept simple as drawing may take time. A
good example which is related to the topic ‘body parts’ is an activity in which the
teacher gives the learners the instructions to draw a monster: ‘The monster has got
two yellow heads. It has got only one mouth. It has got six green eyes. It has got a
square body, four red legs and two purple arms. It has got one small pink belly but-
ton.’ The learners can then compare their monsters.
Listen Learners are given pictures of different items, animals, situations, etc. They listen
and to the teacher describe one of them and guess which one is described. For exam-
identify/ ple, the learners look at pictures of different school bags, each containing different
guess/ school supplies and try to identify the right one. This activity can also be done with
match other topics where different items are involved, such as houses, cupboards, farms,
shops, etc. This activity may be made more interesting with realia as learners may
bring their own toys, clothes or other items to class.
Listen The teacher gives the learners scrambled pictures of a story and while they listen to
and it, they try to put them in the right order. We need to make sure that the learners are
arrange able to follow the story and that appropriate scaffolding is used. The pictures can be
either scenes from the story or pictures of objects related to different parts in the
story.
Listen The learners listen to two or more descriptions of places (houses, schools, restau-
and rants, towns, beaches, etc.) and need to decide which one they would choose or
decide where they would like to go.
Listen The learners listen to a song, story or any other text which they are already familiar
and spot with but which the teacher has modified by including some mistakes (for example
mistakes ‘Today we will listen to the story of Little Yellow Riding Hood ...’). As they listen, the
learners try to spot the mistake.

picture. However, there are several other, more demanding activities which
can also be used in the YLs’ classroom and which require learners to ‘listen
and identify,’ ‘listen and draw or colour,’ ‘listen and guess,’ ‘listen and act out’
and so on (Brewster et al., 2002; Cameron, 2001; Pinter, 2006). Table 4.1 gives
examples of activities for developing active listening.
Active listening activities are often a combination of more than one task.
For example, learners may be asked to listen and draw first and then to ar-
range or match what they have drawn. In the activity in Figure 4.2, learners
are asked to match and write after listening to the text. They listen to the
description of five different meals which have been ordered by the children
in the picture and identify the children according to the ordered meal (e.g.
‘Tom ordered ...’). They then write their names in the given spaces.
Several activities carried out in the language classroom are based on inten-

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