Contextualization When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and teachers need to design tasks that will help students to contextualize the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text.
Preparation To do the task teachers set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that teachers cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.
Before starting planning a listening activity teachers first of all should consider three things.
Firstly, they ought to choose a type of a listening activity that they find interesting and suitable for their students.
Secondly, teachers should select an activity that will practisethose listening skills that are relevant for the students.
The last thing, but in my opinion one of the most important, that has to be borne in mind is to compile a coherent lesson. This can be done by scaffolding. Theterm scaffolding means helping students during the listening process when teachers provide their students with support. Nikolic states students of any level can deal with almost any short listening passage, providing that the task is simple enough for them to experience success. When students do not need this support any more it can be easily removed.
Once all three main considerations are taken into account teachers should focus on the lesson planning.
Underwood declares that pre-listening task can consist of a variety of activities, which can help the teacher to focus the students’ minds on the topic by narrowing down the things that the learners anticipate to hear and stimulating relevant previous knowledge and already known language, including:
- The teacher providing background information;
- the students read something relevant to the listening text;
- the students look at some pictures;
- discussing the topic or situation to the listening text;
-a question and answer session to the listening text;
-written exercise to the listening text;
- following the set of instructions relevant for the while-listening activity;
- students think about how the while-listening activity will be organised.
Yagang presents a number of tasks for pre-listening stage that can enable the students to gain knowledge that is needed for the listening task. This gained knowledge gives the students confidence that is necessary for successful listening. The tasks include: