Practical activities for listening decoding skills – a collection of links

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post (the recording of a webinar on Practical activities for teaching listening decoding skills, which was part of last year’s Electronic Village Online session on teaching listening), here are some links to activities that I collected for the session participants. These were meant as highly practical resources that could help the session participants to try out listening decoding in class. There are three sections:

• activities that could be adapted to a wide range of listening texts
• video extracts from lessons
• materials and excerpts from published books that you could try out.

SECTION A: activities that could be adapted to a wide range of listening texts

1. Fast speech frustrations by Olya Sergeeva (ET professional issue 112, September 2017)

Olya Sergeeva describes the lesson procedure that she uses in her Authentic listening courses with learners at B1 level and higher. The procedure could be used with any subtitled video stored locally on your computer, a TED talk or a subtitled YouTube video.

If you’re interested in this approach, you can also see a recording of a full lesson and sample materials in sections B and C.

2. Helping students become more effective listeners by Annie McDonald (the audio files to try out the activities are here).

Annie McDonald describes six activities that require little preparation and can be used with coursebook or authentic texts (files Decoding activities.pdf and the audio files). Activities iii.2 and iii.3 can be used with audio concordancing software (e.g. TubeQuizard or Aegisub). 

3. PlayPhrase.me and Listening Discrimination by Anthony Schmidt

Anthony Schmidt describes a grammar listening discrimination activity that he created using playphrase.me, an audio concordancing service that uses snippets from TV shows. The blog post includes a PowerPoint with listening files downloaded from playphrase.me and a worksheet that can be tried out in class. Anthony’s PowerPoint activity is for B2 levels, but the activity can be adapted to all levels.

4. Catch the sound by Michael Grinberg

Michael Grinberg describes a listening activity that could be used with any audio or video, provided that you have a transcript. There’s no preparation required, but you’ll need software that allows to isolate and play short extracts from the video (such as Aegisub).

If you’re interested in Michael’s approach and want find out more about the research behind this activity, please feel free to get in touch with him here.

5. Teaching grammar through listening by Gianfranco Conti (especially activities 2.1, 2.3 and 2.4)

6. Micro-listening tasks you may not be using often enough in your lessons by Gianfranco Conti

Gianfranco Conti describes some micro-listening activities that he likes to use with beginner students. 

7. Look through sample units in coursebooks produced by Sheila Thorn to get more ideas for listening decoding tasks (unfortunately, the audio files for these activities are not available).
Link 1: sample units for elementary, intermediate and advanced books in the Real Lives Real Listening series.
Link 2: sample units from another book produced in collaboration with Richard Cauldwell (scroll down to Writing project with Richard Cauldwell of Speech in Action).

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SECTION B: videos of teachers demonstrating listening decoding work in class

1. A video lesson (30 minutes) in which Rachael Roberts demonstrates working on intrusive w, j and r.
The lesson comes from Nagivate Pre-Intermediate (B1) coursebook (Oxford University Press).
If you like the lesson and want to try it out with your learners, you’ll find the link to the materials in SECTION C.

2. A video (13 minutes) in which Mark Rooney demonstrates how listening decoding diagnostics and training could be introduced into any listening lesson through a few simple tweaks.

3. A lesson snippet (6 minutes) in which Julia Galichanina helps learners (B1+) analyze the speaker’s pronunciation in an authentic listening extract.
In this lesson extract,
(1) the teachers uses Aegisub to play one sentence from the video. The learners listen to the sentence several times and try to fill the gaps in the transcript
(2) the teacher elicits all learners’ ideas and boards them
(3) the teacher tells the learners the answers, and then replays the extract for the learners to analyze how the words in the gap were actually pronounced by the speaker;
(4) after this, the procedure is repeated with the next sentence.

4. A lesson (90 minutes) by Olya Sergeeva

This lesson was an introduction into listening decoding for this group of learners, who had never done this kind of work before. This particular group is Upper-Intermediate (B1+), but Olya has also done the same procedure (with different videos) with B1 groups.

If you want to try this out, the materials are in SECTION C and Olya’s article about this approach is in  SECTION A. 

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SECTION C: materials (e.g. coursebook samples) that you can try out with your learners

1. A lesson (levels: strong B1 and higher) by Olya Sergeeva designed to raise the learners’ awareness of features of connected speech and the role they have in listening. The material is based on a subtitled YouTube interview and includes TubeQuizard quizzes.

2. A sample lesson from Navigate Pre-Intermediate (B1) by Rachael Roberts (free but registration required).

3. During his live session in Week 4, Richard Cauldwell spoke about and demonstrated a classroom activity ‘Jungle Listening: Survival Tip No. 10‘. Here you can download the Student’s book, Teacher’s book, and Audio for all ten units in these materials. Level: B1.

If you use Survival Tip no. 10 – or any of the other nine tips – in class, do get in touch with Richard to let him know how it went. You don’t have to be polite! If you do not like the materials, say why (it will be helpful for Richard). Also, if you like them, say why (which will also be helpfuul to Richard!)

4. A sample lesson on decoding weak forms of function words (levels: B1-B2) from Authentic Listening Resource Pack by Marck Hancock and Annie McDonald.

5. Pronunciation as a listening skill by Mark Hancock is a collection of awareness raising activities that could be used at a range of levels. Also, explore the site with fun materials created by him and Annie McDonald. Don’t miss Hay Chewed and the classic, The Word Blender.

6. TubeQuizard offers a selection of YouTube-based listening decoding activities. You can use the selection of ready-made quizzes or create quizzes based on any subtitled YouTube videos. Find a 12-minute tutorial here.

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I hope you find this useful – if you think I’m missing a good resource, could you share the link?