Priming for Listening

None of us throw our class into a listening unprepared, do we? It would be unfair - after all, in real life, we're normally listening with certain expectations. But often in ELT, our pre-listening activities are limited to a bit of discussion of the topic and maybe some pre-teaching of new vocabulary. In this presentation, I want to suggest a richer diet of pre-listening ideas can offer support to our learners as they deal with this most difficult of skills.

I will present a variety of activities, all based on one 55 second podcast aired on Love and Science, a Bristol Community Radio programme http://bcfmradio.com/loveandscience One or two of these can serve as pre-listening activities to prime our non-expert listeners for what they are about to listen to. The whole text and snippets to accompany the activities on the handout are available here as downloads.