A great way to improve overall English listening ability is through activities that require active listening.

What I mean by this is getting yourself or your students into situations where they have to actively work with and use the language that they are listening to in order to complete the communication process.

This needs at least 2 participants

should involve multiple interactions

Interactions should be 'free' not staged.  When I say staged, I mean not scripted dialogs, although some contextual staging can be useful.  The participants should be free to respond and interact as they think is right and as they are able to at their current level of ability.

Listening & Speaking

There are as many options here as you can think of ranging from completely controlled (structured dialogs) to completely free group tasks.  In all cases activities of this kind should try to require a student to do both listen and respond by speaking.

Structured Listening

Structured listening/speaking activites can be quite good.  In such cases the interaction is controlled or limited in some way.  Perhaps by requiring answers to specific questions, having very specific expectations of the activitiy (e.g. interview your homestay about their job), or working in a specific context (do a skit about ordering pizza over the phone).

This kind of listening helps keep a student's focus and gives them boundaries within which they can work.  This will ideally help reduce some stress.

Unstructured Listening

These situations tend to develop out of task based activities where people must work together to accomplish a specific task.

These activities can be a simple as group discussions, organized 'mini-debates', or more complicated and involved like developing original skits and plays, or doing partner presentations. 

The value of these activities is that a student needs to be able to adjust and respond to an always changing situation.  They are not predictable and force students to call on their abilities spontaneously.

Listening & Writing

Regardless of how, responding to what  you hear is important. This can, and should be done in writing as well by speaking.

As a teacher, encourage your students to keep simple journals that they regularly write in as a way of developing their overall langauge ability.  5 - 10 minutes 3-5 times/week will make a huge difference in a students overall writing fluency as well as their overall comprehension of the langauge they are experiencing through reading and listening.

This does not to be anything special.  They just need to write in response to something that they read or listened to.  It can be a summary, an opinion, a feeling, personal comment, agreement, disagreement, whatever turns their crank.

The point is to take an opportunity to recycle and reuse the language they they have been hearing and a way that is relevant to them.

What they write about is in a way irrelevant.  It can be about a TV show or movie they just watched.  It could be about a conversation they had at a coffee shop with a friend.  It could be about how bad small town DJs are in the local bar scene.  The point it to integrate their daily listening experiences into their writing in order to reinforce the language.

Ok…enough of that.

Listen lots….listen actively…and English Listening Skills will improve.

Cheers,

Eric

The ESL Coach