Extensive and intensive listening. Listening of both kinds is especially important since it provides the perfect opportunity to hear voices other than the teacher’s, enables students to acquire good speaking habits as a result of the spoken language they absorb and helps to improve their own pronunciation.
Extensive listening (the teacher encourages students to choose for themselves what they listen to and to do so for pleasure and general language improvement).
Extensive listening will usually take place outside the classroom, material for extensive listening can be found from a number of sources (tapes that accompany different books, songs, video-films).
Intensive listening are taped materials and material on disk. Most coursebooks include tapes and many teachers rely on tapes to provide significant source of language input. The teacher uses taped material at various stages in a sequence of lessons.
Types of listening activities 1. No overt response The learners do not have to do anything in response to the listening; however, facial expression and body language often show if they are following or not.
Stories. Tell a joke or real-life anecdote, retell a well-known story, read a story from a book; or play a recording of a story. If the story is well-chosen, learners are likely to be motivated to attend and understand in order to enjoy it.
Songs. Sing a song yourself, or play a recording of one. Note, however, that if no response is required learners may simply enjoy the music without understanding the words.
Entertainment: films, theatre, video. As with stories, if the content is really entertaining (interesting, stimulating, humorous, dramatic) learners will be motivated to make the effort to understand without the need for any further task.
2. Short responses Obeying instructions. Learners perform actions, or draw shapes or pictures, in response to instructions.
