Idea From: TESL-L Lida Baker
Los Angeles
Subject: Authentic listening tasks
A special area of interest for me is teaching listening using authentic
materials. By "authentic" I mean recordings of real-world language not
necessarily created for the purpose of teaching English. To this end I
like to teach using recordings of people talking in person, phone
conversations, radio broadcasts, and lectures.
At the moment I'm working on compiling a collection of listening tasks that
mirror the reasons why people listen in the real world. Here are some
examples of such tasks:
1) "Cold" listening - e.g., turning on the radio in the middle of a
program and determining who the speakers are, what the topic is, and
whether you want to continue listening or not. 2) One-sided phone
conversation: Hearing only one of the speakers in a phone conversation and
determing who the person is talking to, why, about what,
etc. 3) Predicting; Listening and predicting what will be said
next. 4) Interacting by asking questions, forming opinions,
laughing. 5) Summarizing and telling another person what was heard, e.g.,
recommending a radio program to a friend. 6) Finding more information
after listening, e.g., hearing an inteview with an interesting person and
going to the Internet to find out more. 7) Taking notes, e.g., writing
down a phone message, writing down a phone number.
Once you have selected an authentic recording for students to hear, it is
easy to create real-world listening tasks like the ones above. In this way
the listening lesson becomes much more interesting and purposeful.
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