Spoken Reception (Listening)

Children often cannot say a sound they have never heard. Explain tasks in Hebrew or Arabic.  For beginning EFL learners who find spoken English difficult to understand, start with listening. Pupils can point, move or hold up a card before they are asked to repeat the words they hear.

Recommended Activities

• Say two words. Pupils hold up a blue card if the words are the same and a green card if they are different. Begin with very different words, such as cat and fish, before introducing similar sounds such as ship and chip or ship and sheep.
• Show pictures of a ship and a sheep. Say one word; pupils point to the matching picture.
• Stick pictures on different walls of the classroom. Say a word e.g. ship.  The pupils need to walk towards the wall which has a picture of a ship stuck to it.
• Give pupils a small chart filled with pictures of words they already know. When you say one of the words, they circle it on their chart.  Continue saying words until their entire chart is filled with circles.
• Before you speak or play an audio recording, give pupils a basic question that they can answer by listening to the text.  Check that they’ve understood this question and that they know what to listen for.  Speak clearly or keep the audio short. The Speak Up audio recordings and the 6th grade U-Star materials give you ready-made listening and speaking models.
• Teach rhythm and syllables by clapping and jumping out words and short chants, so pupils feel the beat of English.
• Pupils who struggle with listening need frequent opportunities to hear clearly spoken English, with a clear purpose for each listening task. Songs let pupils hear, sing and move to the words, which builds vocabulary and listening fluency. Karaoke cloze (lyrics with about 10 percent of the words missing) gives pupils a focused listening job. Music provides an engaging way to expose pupils of all ages to English sounds and language (see Learn in Tune).   
• Choose and adapt material from Let's Talk. The site targets grades 6 to 9, so pick the chants, songs, tongue twisters, stress and intonation exercises and icebreakers that suit 6th graders. The Overcoming Fear of Speaking page helps pupils who freeze when they need to speak English.