Developing Listening Skills

With young learners, it's important to make sure that they have plenty of opportunities to listen to a
variety of English speakers. They need to get used to listening to recordings of spoken English if they
are going to take a Cambridge Young Learners English test.
General Listening Skills Development
To help young learners develop their listening skills it is often a good idea to think of a listening activity
in three parts: pre-listening, during listening and post-listening.
Pre-Listening
A pre-listening activity allows children to become familiar with the relevant material. Studying the
visuals that go with the activity or talking about the topic in relation to themselves helps them to
predict what they are going to hear, even if this is subconscious. It also increases their interest in
completing the task. They also need a chance to check that they understand the task, and that they
know what to listen for and what to do. You can teach them to read and use instructions and examples
at this stage.
During Listening
For this phase, you need to think about how many times your students will hear the recording (twice,
or more?), how they will hear it (as a whole or with pauses) and how much control they will have over
playing the recording (can they ask you to stop? does a student control the machine?). Your decisions
will depend on the difficulty of the recording, the task and how near you are to an exam. For example,
if your students are just beginning to prepare for a Cambridge Young Learners English test, you may
want them to gain confidence by allowing them to listen several times, giving them plenty of time to
write, draw or colour answers and letting them tell you to stop when they need to. However, as your
students approach the test date, they need to get used to hearing the recording twice only and without
pauses (other than those included in the recording), so you should gradually work towards this.
Post-listening
Post-listening usually involves checking answers in some way. You may want your students to show
their answers to the finished task. Sometimes it is a good idea to discuss how they found the answers,
as this is a way of developing their awareness of successful listening strategies. You may also want to
use the content or language of the listening text to lead into other skills work, such as acting out a
dialogue, interviewing each other on a similar theme, writing about themselves or their family, reading
a related text, and so on.
Test Preparation Activities
Here are some ideas you can use to prepare your students for the Listening component of their test.

Do lots of practice with numbers, writing down numbers that they hear in digits.
Work on listening for longer prepositional phrases such as 'between the chair and the table'.

Do activities which involve drawing lines between words and objects and be strict about the
lines going exactly to where each object is located.

Do lots of work in class on instructions. You could dictate instructions or write them on the
board and get the learners to read them aloud and paraphrase them or translate them into
their own language.

Practise the English names of letters of the alphabet, especially writing down spelt-out words.

Use listening activities in class so the candidates get used to listening to recordings as well as
to you.