Activity of the Week - Audio Prediction

Hi Everyone,

 This week's activity is designed to get students engaged in listening activities.

When using an audio track or reading text in a class, it is important to engage the students first by setting a context. There are three main reasons for this.

1. More Authentic  -  We rarely listen to information in the real world without knowing the context.

2.Less challenging - Knowing the context of the audio will help the learners to understand what they are listening to.

3. More Engaging  -  Giving learners a reason to listen to the audio will help to generate interest. With no context the learners are just listening for the sake of listening. The task will feel like an examination and it's no wonder they might not find it interesting.

So what can we do?

Good text books will always include a pre-listening task to engage the learners before the listening task.

Here is one.

Audio prediction

Before playing the audio track, choose 5-10 key content words from the audio and write them on the board. Ask your learners to then work in small groups to predict what they will hear by creating their own version of the listening script using the key words on the board.

Give the students 5-10 minutes to do this.

The learners then tell their predictions to the other group or to the whole class.  When the students have done this and they are familiar with their own version of events, they listen to the audio track and note down similarities and differences between the real track and their own version.

For extra motivation, points can be given for correct predictions.

This gives the learners a reason to listen as they are eager to learn what the real story was and how accurate their predictions were. 

Have fun!