This is something that I’ve been doing for a while and I find that instead of ‘testing’ my students’ listening ability, which most listening exercises you find in course books seem to do, this truly provides listening practice by sensitising the learners’ ears to how English sentences are said. I have had learners, who previously found listening to English TV programmes intimidating, not only display a marked improvement in their listening ability after only carrying out this procedure once every day for a week, but also enjoyed a remarkable boost to their self-confidence.
I’ve done this successfully with learners of a Low-intermediate but I would recommend that learners be at least a good Mid-Intermediate Level for the BBC News Headlines to be satisfactorily exploited.
That said, this procedure could be applied to other kinds of authentic listening texts as well, and does not have to be restricted to the BBC News.
A) Prediction task
Ask leaners to predict what they think the news headlines might contain. Write the predictions on the board.
B) Google ‘BBC News Headlines’ and click the first link listed
C) Listening for content
- Teacher tells learners to listen to the news headlines and check predictions, and also count the number of news stories there are.
- Pair check and feedback
- Listen again and state what country/company/topic the headlines are about.
- Pair check and feedback
- Listen again and take notes in order to summarise the story for your partner.
- Pair check and feedback
These three listening tasks provide the learners with opportunities to process the content from top down, practising extensive subskills gradually combined with listening for detailed understanding.
D) Intensive Listening
- Teacher plays the news headlines sentence by sentence and get the students to identity each word which is then transcribed onto the board. Repeat each sentence as many times as necessary.
E) Noticing chunks
- Teacher gets students, in pairs, to find collocations, fixed/semi-fixed expressions and grammatical collocations from the transcribed text.
- Feedback
F) Progressive Deletion
- Story by story, headline by headline, the teacher rubs off parts of collocations and fixed expressions from the board and students fill in the gaps verbally in pairs.
- Quick feedback – teacher nominates a student to read out the news headline with the gaps filled.
- Teacher rubs off more words from the board and students fill in the gaps.
chiasuanchong 