Make Listening and Speaking More Enjoyable

Developing students’ listening skills is fundamental to their progress in acquiring the language. In the same way, giving them opportunity to develop their fluency, to try things out in the language without fear, to make mistakes and learn from them, is very important. However, listening classes are often difficult and even boring for students because the listening piece itself is not interesting for them or, because teachers expect them to hear everything and answer lots of questions. It becomes stressful, instead of enjoyable. In order not to face this difficulty teachers need to recreate the motivation that engages all the students in the topic and really make them want to listen. But how can the teacher do that? Not all the students are interested in every single topic that the teacher brings to the classroom. However, real teachers’ job is to motivate their students to listen, whatever the topic. Giving students’ a choice about which piece of information they would like to listen for from any listening task is a way of creating an effective reason to listen. Other things the teacher can do are: Always to have a lead-in, e.g. engaging the students in the topic .Pictures and other visuals on the target listening material can be helpful to the teacher in this step. To make a link between the topic and the students’ own lives and experiences( personalization). To have a pre-listening task which helps students to focus on the task that the teacher require the students to do when they listen., e. g. prediction from some extracted information ( key words, title); read questions about the listening; students compose their own questions. To set a clear global listening task; Global tasks focus on gist e. g. guess the title; put events in the correct order; check texts against predictions made beforehand. To set a clear specific listening task; Specific tasks focus on specific details (e.g. answering questions about specific items of information; using the text to fill in a form etc.), require more comprehensive understanding (e.g. comprehension questions; discussion of issues; comparison of viewpoints etc. ) , and test individual language items ( grammar or vocabulary; working out meaning of words from context). To do a follow- up task if relevant, e.g. speaking (role-play, debate, or writing task).