Teaching EFL Listening
in the Classroom
** Study the lessons on teaching EFL pronunciation and teaching EFL reading before studying this lesson. There are important concepts that you should understand first.**
1. Play the video below to start this lesson.
. . . .Please wait a few seconds for the first video to load.
2. Basic Concepts
Listening skills are tied to speaking and pronunciation skills. Most likely if students can correctly pronounce something and speak it in a natural and common way, they will understand it when they hear it spoken.
When/if you have the opportunity to teach pronunciation and listening together, you will see many similarities in the content that you are covering. Ideally, the two areas should be taught together.
Once again, you will be teaching students about reductions, linking, stress and rhythm in natural speech. But you will also, as in teaching reading, be teaching students to listen for main ideas and details. Like pre-reading, you also set the stage with pre-listening activities to set the context for listening.
Teaching EFL listening skills is rewarding as students can often make good gains rather quickly if taught with proper instruction.
Be sure when you are teaching EFL classes that you do not speak too slowly or overly enunciate for your students. Doing so only makes it much more difficult for them to understand normal speech when it is spoken at normal speed. There are times when you will need to slow down a bit and to pronounce words or phrases carefully, but don't make it a habit.
Here is a great video from Stacy teaching linking to listening students:
You can find all of Stacy's videos on YouTube on her channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/EnglishwithStacy
3. Expanded Concepts
Excellent pronunciation and listening videos for EFL students provided by Stacy Hagen can be found HERE at YouTube. These videos are primarily for EFL students, not so much for teachers, but they can give you an excellent idea of how to teach the very things we have addressed on this page. These are really worth watching. Stacy is one of the most skilled, practical and straight-forward EFL teachers you will ever find. Must untrained teachers do a very poor job of helping students with their listening and pronunciation skills and no one will help you get a grasp on teaching them better than Stacy Hagen.
You will find that you can make either a pronunciation lesson OR a listening lesson from any one of her videos. Excellent!
Here is a good summary example of Stacy Hagen's work - a fast overview:
You'll notice that Stacy always uses good teaching methodology for her classes.
One of the best listening books you can find anywhere is Stacy's Sound Advice. We recommend all EFL ESL teachers get this series. The books used to come with cassette tapes, but now you can download the audio at YouTube free, starting with Chapter One here:
There are many websites where you can convert the YouTube video into a simple MP3 file. It is easy to do. Buy the second edition of the book so it will match the audio.
