Although the times of online classes caused a lot of inconvenience for teachers as they had to familiarize themselves with the technology within a short time, it is also undeniable that that period also has its upsides. With the influx of online resources, teachers are suddenly blessed with a variety of materials and programs that can make teaching more interesting. Here are some of the English listening activities for online lessons (as well as classroom learning with some minor modifications):

Jigsaw listening

To conduct this activity, the teacher must first find two different videos on the same topic e.g. the use of e-wallets. During the lesson, the students are split into two groups. For ease of discussion, let’s refer to them as Group A and Group B. Group A listens to one of the videos and Group B listens to the other. Students should be encouraged to jot down notes, especially if they are beginners. The complexity of the activity can be adjusted based on the length of the video, the depth of issues discussed or whether the two videos take on opposing stances. In the next phase of the lesson, a student from Group A pairs up with a student from Group B and they compare the points and arguments raised in the two videos. For online classes, this can be done with breakout rooms where each pair can talk, discuss and maybe create mind maps to illustrate the connections highlighted in the videos.

Dictogloss

Dictogloss shouldn’t be unfamiliar to English teachers. The online version is not too dissimilar to the one run in the classroom, except for its virtual presentation. To start, the teacher reads out a short text containing factual information. A topic that the students are familiar with is highly encouraged as this can be a quite challenging activity. While the teacher is reading, students listen and take short notes on key points. The teacher may decide to repeat the text several times based on the students’ level of competence. Next, students use their notes to reconstruct the text while the teacher may help with grammar and coherence. At the end of the lesson, students compare their work with the original text. 

Songs

Using songs as materials for listening activities is pretty self-explanatory – students watch a video of a song and learn the lyrics to the song as a means to expand their vocabulary or pick up some basic phrases or sentence structures. As enrichment, the teacher can guide the students in singing the song, possibly with the aid of pictures and mimes or perhaps an information gap activity based on the song where students have to fill in the blanks in the lyrics. For more advanced students, they can even replace the words in lyrics with their own to make their own rendition of the song.

Film clips

Now, this is an interesting one as a listening activity, because students begin the activity by watching a short clip, preferably a conversation between two characters but with the sound muted. The objective of the lesson is to make the students predict what is being said by the characters and they can type their answers in the chat box. Naturally, with the absence of sound, context and body language play a more prominent role and this activity can train the pupils to be more alert to the non-verbal cues in communication. The students can then check their answers by watching the short clip again with the sound on.

Which question?

The objective of this activity is for the students to recognize weak forms and connected speech. To carry out this activity, the teacher reads out a set of questions. The students have to count the number of words they hear for every question. The teacher repeats the questions and the students answer them.

Which photo?

This activity resembles the Total Physical Response (TPR) method as it involves physical movement rather than verbal. The teacher first displays a few pictures on her screen. Next, the teacher reads out sentences that describe the photos one at a time, and after each statement, the students say which picture the teacher is describing.

All the credit for this article goes to Balali (2020), who has done a Prezi presentation on these listening activities. If you are interested in more ways to conduct online classes (or even classroom learning), you can visit https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english-online/.

Reference

Balali, P. (2020, November 16). Listening Activities for Online Lessons. Prezi Video. https://prezi.com/v/view/SQkJBFb6QzlYqAfUxanH/?ref=eltbuzz&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email