Our Top 5 Listening Activity Ideas
When we would like to improve our listening skills, we tend to rely mostly on the same classic activities such as true-or-false and gap-filling exercises. However, if you’d like to spice up your toolkit of regular activities, join us and read our tips!
1. Snap
2. Sequencing
Using the cards from the previous task or by providing them with all the sentences from the listening material, the learners’ task is to put these cards into the order they hear them. Always let them listen to the recording at least twice; firstly, to work on the task and secondly, to check their work.
3. Picture dictation
Who says that a recording must be part of a listening activity?
This one is similar to an information gap activity but, in this case, only the teacher has got all the information. The teacher describes a picture and the learners attempt to recreate it. This exercise can be perfectly tailored to the learners’ needs and is suitable, no matter what the topic is.
4. Listen and act it out
Even if it’s a story or just a set of instructions, this activity is good for both improving the learners’ listening as well as assessing their comprehension skills.
As the learners listen to the recording or your instructions, ask them to act out what they hear.
This activity can be great fun.
5. Storytelling Bingo
Write some of the target vocabulary on the board and ask your students to draw a Bingo Card on which they can write some of the words. Start a story with some of the target vocabulary items. The students have to cross out the items they hear in the story. Then the teacher lets a student choose a vocabulary item and continue the story.
