Here’s one idea to make your listening activities more personalised and interactive – and to move away from the usual “Listen to the conversation and identify the main topic.”
Personalisation is important in any lesson. Learners are more engaged and motivated when they have a reason for doing an activity beyond simply “to find the answers” – especially if they can interact with a listening text in a way that reflects how they might engage with a similar situation in real life.
This may seem obvious, but it’s all too easy to fall into the habit of giving students activities that are neither personalised nor particularly interactive – simply because it takes less time, thought, and preparation.
Context for the Activity
This activity takes a standard listening exercise – where students listen to a recorded conversation on a train – and transforms it into something more meaningful. Instead of passively listening and answering comprehension questions, students imagine themselves in the situation, make predictions about the people and their relationships, and then test their predictions by listening.
The aim is to replicate the way we naturally listen and observe in real life, giving students a genuine reason to engage with the recording and a more memorable, enjoyable learning experience.
Preparation and Set-up
The best way to set this up is to make your own recording. Find a couple of friends and assign yourselves roles as train passengers. You all know each other, but how you know each other is up to you. The subject and context of the conversation is also up to you – your imagination is the only limit, as long as the language suits the level of your students.
You can even assign one person the role of “interrupter” – someone who doesn’t play a main part in the conversation but interrupts occasionally – for some follow-up language work later.
Once you’ve recorded your conversation, you’re ready to use it in class.
The Non-Interactive Version
The typical approach would be to tell your students they’re going to listen to a conversation between some people on a train, and ask them to identify the topic. You might follow this with a detailed listening task, such as answering comprehension questions.
These tasks practise important listening sub-skills – but can we practise the same skills with the same text in a more engaging way?
The Interactive, Personalised Version
Instead of answering some impersonal comprehension questions, let’s think about how we would naturally listen in this situation. If you were sitting on a real train with these three people, and you were a curious type without a book to distract you, what might you do? You’d probably observe them, try to guess their relationship and how they feel about each other based on their body language and tone, and then test your guesses by eavesdropping on their conversation.
So why not have your students do exactly that?
Start by building the situation. Tell them they’re sitting in a train carriage with three other people. Show them the seating arrangement on the board – you can even draw a simple diagram. Ask them to predict, just based on the seating, what the relationship between the three people might be (just as we often subconsciously do ourselves).
Then build it further. Tell them that two of the people are men and one is a woman – or that one is an elderly gentleman and the other two are angry-looking teenagers – or whatever scenario you created for your recording. Have them modify their predictions about the relationship, and start to speculate about why they’re together and what they might be talking about.
Now, and only now, play the recording. Students test their predictions as they listen – just like in real life.
(You can even add an extra step: record the conversation with an attention-grabbing start – perhaps a shout, or someone crying – and play just the first few seconds at first, then pause and ask them to adjust their predictions before listening to the full recording.)
At this stage, they’re still listening for the topic of the conversation – but this time they have a personal reason to listen beyond just “to answer the questions.” Once they’ve tested their predictions about the relationship and topic, you can move on to picking out details or the outcome of the conversation.
This works particularly well because students have already made judgments about how they expect the conversation to progress based on what they know about the people – so their natural curiosity keeps them engaged, as they want to know if their guesses were correct.
You can follow up by using the text for some language work – for example, picking out how one of the passengers interrupts politely, if you recorded the conversation that way.
Why This Works
What you’ve done here, simply by thinking about why and how we really listen, is deliver exactly the same listening and language skills practice as the non-interactive version – but with a real reason to listen, and motivation to stay engaged in the task and in your lesson.
And the best part is: you can apply this same thinking to almost any listening or reading text, to a greater or lesser extent.
