A Journey Through Online
Language Learning
Activities > Listening
Things to consider
Listening is the first language skill. It can easily be practised online, either as a specific-skills course, as in the case of the Listening and Speaking Skills in Polish Course, or as a component of a comprehensive language course, as in Lagelands and Hogelands.
Listening activities tend to be built around conversations, from simple exchanges to complex dialogues such as interviews and discussions, or spoken texts. These materials can be authentic, e.g. providing a link to on-line content or including downloaded material, or specially created by using audio recording and editing- software. Your choice will be dictated by the ease of finding a suitable text and by copyright issues.
A listening activity can teach students listening for gist as in Listening and Speaking Skills in Polish, or for more detailed information, as in Listening and Speaking Skills in Polish and Lagelands.
Example of a self-correcting listening exercise in Polish Listening and Speaking.
Students can listen to the texts as many times as they need to achieve the goal of the activity, making online learning very flexible and accessible. You may provide the scroll-over or pop-up transcript of the text option to ensure better comprehension (example1 from the Polish course). A glossary will further help students in their task.
Some of the other listening activities are designed to familiarise students with the pronunciation of the words that appear later on in the text(s), which can be regarded as a pre-listening activity. Students can also be asked to identify or isolate words from the text or attempt auditive discrimination as a pre-pronunciation exercise as in Lagelands. Practising the alphabet is another listening activity, as in the case of Read Ukrainian (example).
The listening activities can be self-correcting or tutor-supported. They usually focus on answering questions about the content of the audio texts, in order to test the students’ comprehension. Self-correcting exercises can include True or False, multiple-choice answers (example2 from Lagelands), or gap-filling exercises. On completion of the exercise the student can click on the ‘Score’ or ‘Check your answers’ button to see how well s/he has done. Tutor-supported activities are useful at a higher level, when the exercises, either oral or written, can include summarising, specific questions about the text asked by the tutor, written reviews, or presentations given to fellow students/tutor via Skype as in Hogelands.
- Mode of delivery. Will the activities be part of a blended learning context or wholly online?
- The type of course you want to offer. Will the activities be part of a comprehensive language course, or will they be offered as a specific skills course focusing on developing only listening skills?
- Will the exercises be self-correcting, or tutor-supported? Will feedback be provided online or in a classroom? If self-correcting, make sure the questions and answers are unambiguous and the feedback is satisfactory.
- Define the activities’ outcomes. A listening activity may have more than one goal or outcome, but be careful not to overburden the attention of beginning or intermediate listeners.
- Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task. Contextualized listening activities approximate real-life tasks; they give the student an idea of the type of information to expect and what to do with it in advance of the actual listening.
- If you are using authentic materials, make sure you have obtained permission from the relevant source. If you state that you are using them for educational purposes only, preferably in a password-protected environment, broadcasters are usually compliant. Obtaining permission for video content is generally harder.
- Check the level of difficulty of the listening text. Pay attention to the speed of the recording and vocabulary.
- How much support can you/are willing to offer as a tutor? This will influence the balance between the number of self-correcting versus tutor-supported activities.
- How will the activities be assessed?
- Do you have adequate technical know-how to develop the activities (e.g. with the help of Audacity, the freeware for recording and editing of sounds, or SANAKO Media Assistant Lite digital recorder)? (link to resources, Sibylle worksheets)? If not, will you have the right level of technical support?
Examples:
- Developing Listening and Speaking Skills in Polish
- Read Ukrainian
- Hogelands
- Lagelands
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