Listening in the Classroom
29 The first stage is to do a pre-teach vocabulary. This stage enables the
students to accommodate them in completing the tasks after listening to the recording. The second stage is to establish interest in the topic. To increase the
students’ interest in the topic, the teacher can use some pictures related to the story or recording they will hear and ask the students to predict what the recording
will be about. The third stage is to give “a listening for gist task” or “listening specific information”. The teacher plays the recording for the first time to get the
students used to the voices and speed of the recording. Then, by asking some easy questions such as “What are they talking about? How many people are talking?”
the teacher leads the students to gain the gist from the recording. The fourth stage is to give “a listening for detail”. In this stage, the teacher can ask more questions
to get the more detail of information from the recording. A question such as “How do you know that they are friends or not?” can be delivered.
Furthermore, the last stage is to give “a follow-up activity” based on the topic. In this activity the teacher can either ask the students to talk about their
favorite bed time stories or discuss the specific language point used in the recording. By staging the lesson such as above, the teacher helps the students to
prepare themselves for what is to come as well as building the students’ interest in enjoying the listening class.
However, there are other things the teachers can do to help the students enjoy their listening lesson as well as improve their listening skill. The kind of
help would be some tips, which are proposed by Riddell 2001, pp. 112-113. When using the tape recording, the teachers should place the machine as close as
30 it should be to the students as well as play the recording for a few second first to
check whether it is audible or not. Before the students listening to the recording, give the students the task and chance to read the instruction and the questions
first. It is also good for the students to be convinced to not worry if they find it difficult at first because the teachers will play the recording for the second time or
probably three times. Finally, having a discussion on the task after listening to the recording will help the students a lot.