Helping students overcome the challenges of listening

Introduction

This post follows up on my previous one, which explored why L2 listening can be so difficult. Anecdotally, throughout my career—largely spent teaching higher-aptitude students—I often felt that listening, to some extent, took care of itself. This was because my students were doing a lot of listening right from day one: through oral question-and-answer work, drills, games, information gap tasks, dialogues, role plays, short audio clips, songs, and the occasional video.

It’s worth recalling here that oral work almost inevitably involves listening, even if we think we’re primarily teaching speaking. This common perception—that speaking is more “visible” or measurable—may explain why listening is often under-emphasised in classroom planning. The so-called 'listening lesson' is about so much more than playing a recording while students do some exercises based on it.

Let's explore how teachers can 'teach listening'.

Do lots of listening

A first, obvious principle in helping learners improve their listening skills is that they need to do a lot of it. Listening should feature in nearly every lesson. (I say “nearly” because some lessons may justifiably focus exclusively on reading or writing.) Listening can be one-way, using audio clips, video or teachet talk, or two-way (interpersonal) through the type of activity I described above.

Evidence suggests that there is often a lack of aural input in lessons. If Ofsted inspectors in England have over the years repeatedly lamented the lack of target-language use, it’s because they recognised that progress depends heavily on exposure to meaningful input—what we often call comprehensible input, following Krashen’s terminology (Krashen, 1982). So this is not just about teaching listening, it's about providing the conditions for general proficiency to improve.

But is simply “doing listening” enough? In the case of many of my students, it often was—though I also built in focused work on phonology and phonics, especially in the early stages. I explicitly highlighted features such as liaison, stress, and intonation. We sometimes did aural discrimination tasks such as: “Are these two sounds the same or different?” So even in those cases, I was implicitly acknowledging the importance of more than just listening.

More than 'just listening'

In my previous post, I referenced John Field’s process model of listening, which breaks the skill down into component stages of processing. Long before Field, scholars like Jack Richards (Richards, 1983) proposed that listening could be analysed into sub-skills or micro-skills. The idea is this: if learners must process phonemes, syllables, word boundaries, grammar, and meaning to comprehend spoken language, then we can create activities to practise each of these levels. It's like breaking down the skill of listening and building it back up. The emphasis is not so much on strategies or using background knowledge (so-called top-down knowledge), it's about homing in on decoding skills - bottom-up skills, to use the research jargon.

For example:

• To help learners distinguish phonemes, you might use same or different tasks. i would ask classes to listen to two words, for example 'tout' and 'tu'. Sometimes I would say the same word twice, sometimes I would use the two words. Students had to identify if the words were the same or different. I assure you that this promotes very careful listening and helps sensitise students to phenmic differences.

• To help learners segment words from a speech stream, you could use exercises focused on word boundary recognition. For example, syaing a senetnce and asking students how many gaps there were between words.

This sub-skill approach forms the core of our book Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (Conti and Smith, 2019), where we argue for systematic development of listening decoding skills —not just comprehension. We also point out:

“The kind of listening practice envisaged here does not exclude traditional comprehension tasks. These are useful when working on meaning and discourse-building skills. In addition, lessons can include a mixture of LAM [Listening as Modelling] and comprehension-style exercises. In sum, in an ideal world, a listening lesson would activate every level of processing:

• Phonemic and syllabic processing
• Lexical retrieval
• Parsing (grammatical and syntactic processing)
• Meaning-building
• Discourse-building”

So do not think that practising decoding skills replaces communicative tasks. To me, it makes most sense to build in work on sub-skills organically within communicative activity.

Types of activities by sub-skill

Here is a small sample of activities we describe in the book, grouped under phonology, lexical retrieval, and grammatical parsing.

Phonology

Faulty Echo

Purpose: Raise awareness of common decoding errors in pronunciation.

1. Display a list of words or phrases that contain the target sound(s).

2. Read one item aloud clearly and correctly.

3. Read it again, this time mispronouncing it in a way that reflects a common learner error (e.g., mispronouncing /r/ in French or using incorrect vowel sounds).

4. Students identify the mistake and explain what went wrong.

Spot the Error

Purpose: Reinforce phonemic awareness after initial practice.

1. Show a list of target items.

2. Read one aloud, deliberately including a pronunciation error.

3. Students spot and explain the error, referencing relevant phonological rules.

Track the Sound

Purpose: Help students recognise target sounds in longer passages.

1. Read (or play) a short, comprehensible text saturated with the target sound.

2. Students listen and note down any words containing the sound.

3. Use a song or nursery rhyme for added cultural interest.

Variation: Turn it into a game of musical chairs—every time students hear the target sound or syllable, they sit down.

Lexical Retrieval

Odd One Out

Purpose: Develop word recognition in context.

Read aloud four short sentences. Students choose the one that doesn’t belong. Example:

1. Yesterday I went to the beach.

2. Yesterday I sunbathed.

3. Yesterday I went snowboarding.

4. Yesterday I went swimming.

Find the Near Synonym

1. Write a numbered list of five words or short phrases on the board.

2. Say six items aloud in random order—five are near synonyms of those on the board; one is a distractor.

3. Students match each synonym to the correct item on the list.

Associations

1. Display a numbered list of items (e.g., short sentences).

2. Say related phrases that are meaningfully associated with each (e.g., “It’s very tall” → “I see a building”).

3. Students identify the match and write the correct number.

Gapped Sentences

1. Write several gapped sentences on the board.

2. Say the missing words in random order.

3. Students listen and fill in the gaps with the correct items.

Grammatical Parsing

Guess What Comes Next 

Purpose: Develop prediction skills based on grammar.

Use sentence stems that require grammatical completion. For example, if practising after/before/while + gerund in English, pause after the preposition and ask students to predict what follows. Display answers on mini-whiteboards:

• Yesterday evening, after ___ (having lunch), we went to the beach.

• Before ___ (going for a swim), I sunbathed.

Aural Gap-Fill

1. Provide a text rich in known sentence structures and phrases.

2. After working on it (e.g. through reading or sorting tasks), play a version with gaps.

3. Students recall and write down the missing elements.
   This reinforces both parsing and vocabulary recall.

Listen and Change

Purpose: Develop flexibility with known sentence structures.

1. Write a sentence on the board, e.g., Ayer fui al campo con mis padres.

2. Say a new version with a change in tense or person, e.g., Ayer fueron al campo con sus padres.

3. Students transcribe the revised version immediately or with a short delay (Delayed Dictation).

Conclusion

I began by noting that, in my experience, doing lots of listening—alongside some explicit phonological work—was often enough. But that likely underestimates the value of everything else the students were doing: grammar, reading, and vocabulary work, all of which support listening. This reinforces one of our key messages in the book: integrating the four skills benefits listening. It's important to be clear also that sub-skill training can be especially helpful for students who struggle most with processing spoken language. In helping all students to become better listeners we build their self-efficacy and positive attitudes towards language learning. making activities fun helps a lot in this.

So, hopefully, this has given you a flavour of what “teaching listening” or "listening instruction" can mean. It’s about more than just playing audio and asking comprehension questions. To reiterate, we suggest breaking the skill down into sub-skills, then targeting each one through carefully designed tasks, many of which include a game-like element for extra engagement. 

If you did not know already, this listening-as-modelling (LAM) approach is integral to the EPI (Extensive Processing Instruction) approach, developed by Gianfranco and in use in many schools in he UK and elsewhere.

The second edition of our book will be published in the coming months. We aim to add further activities, update research references, revisit the Conti MARS EARS cycle and the chapter on strategies. No doubt we'll find more to say!

References

Conti, G. and Smith, S.P. (2019). Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen. Independently published.

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Languages Classroom. Cambridge; C.U.P.

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Available at: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf

Richards, J. C. (1983). Listening comprehension: Approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly, 17(2), 219–240. 

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