Exploiting listening and reading texts

Exploiting listening and reading texts

When you are going to use an extended listening or reading text rather than a few individual words, there is a basic procedure which it can be helpful to refer to and follow if appropriate. This is a model procedure which can obviously be adapted if necessary but it does provide a generally sensible starting point.

Establish context

In real life, whenever we listen or read anything, we know what the context is, we are aware of the situation, the location, the kind of conversation, for example. These factors affect our ability to understand and make sense of what we hear and read. In class, it’s necessary to introduce the students to the context before they listen or read. The context can be elicited
or prompted from earlier work, the course book, pictures, discussions and so on. Without ‘setting the scene’ like this, the tasks can become unnecessarily difficult.

Pre-teach vocabulary

It is useful to teach certain key items of vocabulary before students begin a listening or reading activity. For example, if they are going to listen to a conversation about people smoking, it may be necessary to pre-teach ‘to smoke’, ‘a cigarette’, ‘to give up’ and so on.
When pre-teaching language it is important to establish the meaning clearly. the new word from
students via prompts such as mime, pictures, definitions or whatever seems most appropriate. If no students are able to provide the new word then, of course, you will need to supply it. Having supplied it, write it on the blackboard for students to make a note of.
However, be careful not to swamp the students with new vocabulary. There may be many words the students don’t know, but focus only on those that they will need to complete the task you are going to give them. Seven or eight new vocabulary items is probably more than enough for a pre-teach stage.

Set gist questions

We need to give students a reason to listen or read. There is little point in asking the students just to read a text, for example. When native speakers read, they know what they are reading and why. There are different kinds of reading. For example, the way you find a number in a telephone book is very different from the way you read a newspaper. So the students need to be given some purpose for their reading or listening.

This can simply be done through the setting of gist questions. Gist questions are general questions that refer to the overall meaning of the text. They are usually not too difficult. The students listen or read only for that information.

If you don’t set gist questions, students may try and read all of the text in detail, focussing on trying to understand every word. It is worth letting the students know that they do not need to understand everything because:
• That is not how we listen/read in real life.
• It is extremely difficult to do and can, consequently, be quite demotivating.