Listening

Developing effective listening skills in learners

On this page you can download all the listening materials which were disseminated at the PDC in MFL workshops in Summer 2012. The videos clips of listening activities shown at the workshops can be seen here. You will find other helpful resources sent in to us by teachers who have been using the listening Principles here.

**We would love to hear what resources you have used from this page and how you’ve used them. Please let us know by clicking here! Thank you for your feedback.**

The research based Principle relating to developing listening skills in learners is:

Principle 5 Learners need to be taught how to access a greater range of more challenging spoken and written texts, through explicit instruction in comprehension strategies and in the relationship between the written and spoken forms.

Lotticks and Izzids is a listening activity designed to make students aware of the useful things they do already, maybe in their first language, or in their foreign language, that they can use to help them understand a spoken text.  You can download the transcript of the activity along with a protocol, student worksheet and listening strategy guidance sheet here:

Download the Lotticks and Izzids activity

Download or listen to the Lotticks and Izzids audio transcript

One of the discussion points during the Listening, Reading and Writing workshop focussed on the use of feedback during listening activities. The document below provides two ways of presenting the same listening activity to a class. The outcome of the discussion pointed to the development of students’ listening skills (use of strategies, effective feedback from the teacher and student self-evaluation) as being helpful to learners.

Download ideas for feedback and strategy use in listening

Prediction is a useful tool for approaching a listening activity, but only if it is done effectively. Learners need to be given the opportunity to assess and evaluate their predictions, in order to draw their attention to the link between the way they approach solving language learning challenges and the task outcome. These prediction grids give a framework for doing this in class:

Download sample prediction grids

The PowerPoint presentation below can be used to help students identify and correctly pronounce difficult sounds in French with the aim of improving their encoding skills in writing and general confidence in approaching their language learning.

Download the Difficult French Sounds PowerPoint