“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
How do you get students to listen? This question is especially important for young learners, who tend to have shorter attention spans and be easily distracted. Sometimes getting students to pay attention and listen feels like a never-ending struggle!
This week’s article, Say What? 5 Ways to Get Students to Listen, by Rebecca Alber on Edutopia‘s website, offers some fantastic suggestions on getting students to actively listen.
All five strategies are good ones and worth trying with your learners. Strategies 2 and 4 involve paraphrasing. In my experience, when students will be “tested” in some way, such as having to repeat or summarize what was said, they tend to listen a lot more carefully.
I especially like strategy 3, and have often used it with my students. Strategy 3 involves student hand signals, which can be adapted in many ways. The example Rebecca Alber gives is to have students hold up one finger if they agree, two if they disagree, and three if they’re undecided. This is a great way to get students involved in a listening activity!
As Rebecca points out, strategy 3 is also easier on shy students who may be reluctant to share their opinion verbally. When non-native students of English are mixed into classes with native speakers, they often hold back because they’re embarrassed about their speaking ability. Hand signals allow them to listen and then actively participate/respond without that pressure!
Do any of you use listening transcripts in class? In January, I wrote about four different ways of using listening transcripts in class on our sister-site, ESL-Library. Methods 3 and 4 offer ways of getting students more involved with the listening activity by using transcripts in interesting ways.
All our readings in our Library section on Sprout English have a high-quality audio component. Just click on the “includes digital tasks” button under the story’s title to access the audio. Play it in class for your students, try out the methods in Rebecca’s article or my blog post, and let us know what you think!
