Teaching listening activities

Dear colleagues,

Here are some listening activities I tried successfully within my last classes. They are actually adapted from Deborah Detzel’s workshop “Teaching listening”. The objective was to give students an opportunity to:

• Use vocabulary items related to family members, possessive adjectives and the genitive apostrophe,
• Talk about their families and get to know each other in lifelike interactions.
  

1. “Obeying instructions” activity:
   
   I ask students to stand up if they have a brother or if their father is called Mohamed for example. Those who don’t have should not stand up. Then I keep asking them using if statements till I have covered the maximum of previously taught vocabulary items.
2. “Guess who” activity :

• I ask students to work in pairs and complet a kind of questionnaire by asking the other classmate in his/her pair. On the board I write down questions to make the task easier. Below are examples of questions I used.
  - How many brothers and sisters do you have?
  - What’s your father’s name?
  - Do you have any cousins?
  - What are their names? … Etc.
  
• When they have completed the task, I ask them to write on a draft paper a small paragraph in which they talk about their classmate’s family. They have to write his/her name on the top of the paper then start the paragraph with: He/she has …………
• I collect the paragraphs when they have finished writing.
• At random I read a paragraph this way: Guess who has ………..
• Then students have to make guesses and find out who is subject of the paragraph before I move to another paragraph.
  
  These activities successfully helped me meet the outlined objectives and gave an injection of vitality to the lesson. So thanks Deb!
  
  Naima