Priming for Listening

Before we get our students to listen, we prime them for what they are about to hear. However, the types of tasks we use tend to use are similar to (if not exactly the same as) those we use to prepare students before they read a text. Such activities aren’t necessarily inappropriate, but surely we could introduce a little variety and get our students to do tasks which take account of the differences between the two skills? In this practical session, we’ll briefly examine the classroom listening context, and I’ll present a number of pre-listening tasks which can be easily adapted for use with different audio, both authentic and non-authentic texts.