How to Structure a Listening Assignment
So you’ve found a current, engaging target language text. Here’s what to do with it!
Have you heard of Auditory Illusions? Like Optical Illusions, Auditory Illusions show us that we can’t always trust our ears.
For example:
Auditory illusions like these demonstrate that our brains use more than just the pure audio coming in our ears; we also use visual cues, anticipated responses, and context to construct meaning from what we hear. As teachers, we need to develop tasks to accompany listening texts to help our students construct meaning.
Listening tasks do a couple of things:
It helps students stay on-task
It focuses students on the auditory cues they need to pay attention to
It reinforces to students that they don't have to understand everything in a text to be successful (read why this is important here)
It gives the teacher objective evidence of students’ comprehension.
Listening activities can broadly be broken into two categories: comprehension tasks and language mechanics tasks. Of course, comprehension is the most important, but research shows there is value in both types of tasks.
Comprehension tasks:
Yes / no questions
Opinion before / after
Main ideas
Match speakers with their statements
Sequencing (Chop up the text and have kids physically sequence it!)
Language Mechanics tasks:
Choose the verb tense
Identify vocabulary
Listen for specific words
Listen for the of number of times something happens
Cloze or fill-in-the-blank
“Kid’s need lots of listening practice - at least weekly. During this practice, help students build their ability by intentionally teaching listening strategies.”
I've had success starting students with overall comprehension, followed by some targeted close listening for mechanics. With this progression, the language mechanics end up supporting students’ overall comprehension.
You can also use the same listening text for different proficiency levels by changing up your questions. This is a great way to simplify your lesson planning if you have multiple preps.
Novice tasks:
Determine the main idea (what is this video about?)
Circle items that are mentioned
Simple matching (visual cue to target language)
Either / or tasks (does he prefer reading or playing sports?)
Simple sequencing
Answers that include use of cognates
Cloze activities for selected sentences with mostly known words
Intermediate tasks: all of the above, plus:
More complicated matching (match the speakers with statements)
Listening for specific details (Who? When? Why?)
Correcting errors in sentences, based on the audio
Ask questions that ask students to analyze or make judgements based on what they heard
Regardless of students’ proficiency level, I recommend this general instructional sequence:
Figure out what the text is about. Identify the words and details that help us understand this.
Watch again and understand some major details in the video. Complete one or more comprehension tasks.
Complete a close listening of a portion of the text. Isolate key structures and understand almost everything about that clip.
Listen to the entire text once more, and (possibly) have students rate their own comprehension.
I have quite a few ready-to-go listening exercises for level 1 French and Spanish on my TPT store, along with “Artful Listening Comprehension” for Chinese. Click the links to check them out!
And finally, many AI platforms can generate questions for you on a listening text. AI is great - as long as you thoughtfully incorporate it into your instructional design. AI won’t do a good job of balancing comprehension vs. mechanics or of writing questions targeted for your students’ proficiency level. That’s your job!
Tips for Assessing Listening
Like the other skills, listening proficiency should be assessed. Here are some ideas to make that happen:
Give kids lots of practice - at least weekly. During this practice, help students build their ability by intentionally teaching listening strategies. (Here’s how).
When possible, give immediate feedback. Some online platforms provide this (e.g., This is School, Lingco, Speakology, LyricsTraining). If you don’t have an online platform, try embedding your video and questions in a google form. You can see students’ answers come in in real time, which lets you know what kids are struggling with.
Always tie listening to a task. The task is what you can assess.
Comprehension is most important.
Listening assessments can be quick and simple - you just need to document the kids are moving forward.
What’s your favorite listening instruction tip? Share in the comments!
