The way a teacher begins a lesson has a significant impact on its success as it sets the right tone and helps to engage the students and focus their attention on the topic of the day. The first part of a lesson also allows students to get familiar with the expected learning outcomes of the session. If a teacher goes straight to the main task of a lesson without some lead-in or opener, there is every chance that students won’t be ready, making it harder for them to achieve the aims of the lesson.

Apart from routine activities done in the opening minutes of a lesson such as taking attendance, there are many ways teachers can spice up the beginnings of their lessons. Here are ten useful ideas you can use to start your class.

1. Use Homework to Flip the Lesson

Homework is most often assigned to have students review course content, consolidate the content of a lesson just taught, or simply for self-study. However, by using a flipped classroom approach, homework can be used as an effective way to open a lesson. In the flipped approach, students are presented with the topic of the next lesson through homework. In a flipped classroom, homework content can be delivered in many forms. This may include, discussion boards, a research task, or reading and listening texts. In class, a quick review of the content covered through the homework can be done through activities such as discussions or quizzes. In this way, students can come to class knowing what the theme or focus of the lesson is and be better prepared for the activities to come. This approach works best when the content is either matched to the students’ interests or relevant to their immediate learning needs.

2. Setting a Challenge

A less conventional lead-in to a lesson could be to simply ask students to attempt the skill being taught from the outset. For example, ask students to give a presentation at the beginning of a lesson if the objective of the lesson is for students to understand how to give an effective presentation. From completing the challenge, students should be able to reflect on their presentations and consider what they were able to do well and what their shortcomings were. This can be a springboard from which to elicit from students what they believe are the key components of successful presentations. These reflections should hopefully align with the learning objectives of the lesson. Through this process, it should become apparent to students the relevance and significance of the content that will be covered in the lesson.

This type of opening tends to work well for lessons where the focus is on a productive or functional skill such as the example given here or other skills such as writing an email or making a phone call.

3. Reviewing the Previous Lesson

You may find students easily forget what they did in the previous lesson, so it is always worth reviewing what they have studied in the last class. This helps keep the material fresh in the students’ mind and helps them recall the vocabulary and language they have studied. Furthermore, it allows you to connect the previous topic with the new topic. Regular reviewing of previous lessons is also useful in preparing students for assessment as it helps consolidate what students have learned.

To make reviews fun for the students, try creating a quiz game where the students answer questions for points. A Jeopardy-style game works great for reviewing previous lessons because you can choose the topics you want them to practice.

Teaching is a great way to review what students have learned. Therefore, you could also have students teach something they have learned in class to their peers. Additionally, rather than the teacher clarifying a point, ask students if they can answer a question from a classmate. For students, returning to class after a period of absence, you could review important points from the missed lessons by eliciting input from the class.

4. Media

Since modern classrooms contain useful multi-media equipment, it is easy to exploit audio-visual content to help kick off an interesting and successful lesson.

Pictures are useful for creating interest in the topic you are about to teach. You can use photos, drawings, cartoons, paintings, symbols, flashcards, magazine ads, etc. Pictures allow students to be creative as they are open to different interpretations. You can use pictures to introduce or elicit vocabulary, predict the content of a reading or listening text, or guess a main idea, etc. They provide a talking point and help students share their opinions and ideas.

In the same way that using pictures helps raise interest in a topic, playing a song is great for catching students’ interest. If one of the language points of the lesson is the present perfect, look for a song that has words like 'Have you ever...?’ or ‘I’ve been to...’ in it, mainly in the title or chorus. You could also use a song with a past simple theme and ask students to write down all the past tense verbs they can hear.

Videos can be even more appealing than pictures and songs as they have both audio and visual stimuli. They are great not only for generating interest in a topic but also to focus on specific points of the lesson such as vocabulary or functional language. Moreover, video can be useful when trying to expose students to other important aspects of learning a language such as the cultures in which the language is used.

5. Class Discussion

Discussions can be used to begin a class with higher-level students. Pose a question or questions to the students about the topic you are going to teach to generate discussion and debate. Class discussions help to improve the students' critical thinking skills and get the students thinking about what they know about the subject and what they want to know. This in turn helps them retain more information.

It is important to give students time to think about the answer(s) first. Students usually feel more comfortable expressing ideas and answering questions if they have some time to think about them first. Just as important as thinking time is to consider if the discussions are going to take place in pairs, small groups, or the whole class. It can be a good idea to start with pairs or small groups and then move to a whole class setting.

Assigning roles is an effective strategy for group discussions. Possible roles may include:

Manager: ensures that the group stays on task, on topic, and that everyone contributes.

Recorder: records critical points from the discussion along with findings or answers.

Presenter: reports the group’s ideas to the rest of the class.

6. Error Correction Activities

Using error correction activities to start the class is an interesting way to review and draw attention to language points such as punctuation, spelling and grammar rules. An effective activity is to write sentences on the board which are related to the topic you are teaching and contain mistakes for students to spot. Begin by asking students to come to the board and correct the mistakes. One benefit of this activity is that it adds movement to the lesson by getting students out of their seats, which can help enliven students at times of the day when attention spans can wane.

Error correction activities at the start of a lesson are also useful when students are making the same mistakes repeatedly as they offer the opportunity to review a particular language point or structure and hopefully avoid repeating the mistake during the lesson.

7. Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a very easy way to begin a class and is very simple to do. Brainstorming entails eliciting everything students know about a topic. You do this by writing the students' background knowledge and ideas on the board. Write up any vocabulary or information that is useful to the lesson. Try to connect ideas or content together to give the students a platform to work from.

A great way of doing this is working with mind maps. Start out with a simple central idea based on the topic of the lesson like ‘The Future’, ‘travel’ or ‘Clothes’. As you elicit other words and ideas from students, add branches to the map and make connections between them. To make the mind map easier to understand, try colour coding the information. This will help students easily identify and categorise key ideas and see how they connect to one another. Mind maps are great for starting a new topic as they activate prior knowledge from which students can make connections to whatever input material is being used.

8. Using Vocabulary Activities

Vocabulary activities are a good way of reviewing specific words learned in past lessons or can serve as a preparation for a new topic. One obvious situation for employing a vocabulary game or activity is as a pre-reading or pre-listening activity. For example, this could be done by taking key or unfamiliar words from the text that is going to be read in class and distributing them to the class in small groups. Each group is given a different set of words. In their groups, students are then required to find the meaning, pronunciation, and an example sentence for each word. Students then form new groups to exchange their respective completed word sets. This type of activity is a more fun and interesting way of previewing vocabulary than the so often used definition matching type activities.

Other useful vocabulary games can be found on the Teach This ESL Vocabulary Games page and ESL Word Games page.

9. Previewing the Lesson

Previewing the lesson gets the students thinking about what they are going to study. It lets the students know what to expect in the lesson, so they can mentally prepare themselves as well as reduce any anxiety they may be feeling. Explain the objectives of the lesson and how they are going to be achieved. It is also very important to explain the significance of the objective and how it will benefit the students. In other words, tell students how the lesson can help them in situations outside of class. For example, the objective of the lesson might be to have students produce outlines as part of the writing process. Some students may not see the point of this and see it as a waste of time. But by simply explaining how outlining can save time and result in better essays and ultimately better grades, it can result in a positive shift in student motivation.

10. Playing a Game

Playing a game is an excellent way to begin a lesson. It makes the students energized and brings enjoyment to the whole class. It also gets the students involved in producing English by doing something fun.

Kinaesthetic games, those centred around movement, are a great way to spice things up especially if they have spent most of the day in more passive types of learning. This type of activity can be as simple as a game of stand-up/sit down in which students are asked basic yes/no questions. When answering ‘yes’, they stand up rather than simply calling out the answer. When answering ‘no’, they sit down. The main take-away here is that it doesn’t require a great amount of creativity to integrate movement into your lesson openings. If prepared carefully, an activity like this is not only effective for getting students energised, but it can also help in reviewing content from previous classes or activate students’ prior knowledge for the topic you’re going to teach.

But don’t forget that while games are fun and can help set a positive tone for the class, they are not just about having fun. Games should help to introduce or practice the topic or subject matter of the lesson. Most games can be easily adapted to introduce any language point or topic. Check out our Fun ESL Classroom Games section for enjoyable games to play with your students.

For English language learners, reading in English presents a significant challenge for several reasons. Perhaps most obviously it is simply because they lack the vocabulary range required for successful comprehension and the reading process is constantly interrupted by having to look up the meanings of unfamiliar words. Even when learners can recognize most of the words in a text, they still struggle to grasp the essential message. This often results in learners associating reading with feelings of frustration and failure and as a result, their motivation to read of their own accord diminishes. This article aims to introduce teachers to some approaches that will help make reading in English less frustrating and more interesting for students and some key concepts that underpin the reading process along with some activities that help improve students’ reading skills.

Comprehensible Input

A key concept in language acquisition put forward by Stephen Krashen, a key figure in second language acquisition theory, is comprehensible input. Comprehensible input simply means texts that can be understood by a reader even if they do not understand every word or sentence on the page. Comprehensible input is ideally just a level above the learners’ current level but still able to be mostly understood. By exposing learners to texts that consist of comprehensible input, students are able to acquire language naturally, rather than learn it consciously. The reason for this more natural acquisition is that it promotes the use of strategies such as using context to guess the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary or making inferences. This can help ease the frustration learners experience when reading in a foreign language.

The teacher needs to keep in mind when providing opportunities for students to engage with reading texts that are considered comprehensible input that they have a good understanding of their learners’ actual level and can determine the level of the input text. Also, in a mixed levels class, the teacher should provide texts that cater to each of the various levels.

A Narrow Reading Approach

Krashen also promotes a narrow reading approach to help boost language development. This narrow approach involves reading several books by one author or several books on a single topic of interest. It is believed that narrow reading facilitates the acquisition of both structure and vocabulary by exposing students to new language in a comprehensible context. In other words, learners acquire new structures and words when they understand messages that they encode.

Some ways teachers can encourage students to adopt narrow reading are to not set high standards for themselves and only read materials that they find fun and engaging. These materials can include many forms such as comics, magazines, or romance novels. Through reading for pleasure rather than for self-improvement, students gain constant exposure to language that can prepare them for tackling more demanding texts. Students should not be too concerned about graduating to more serious or demanding texts within a certain time. It is better to move from one closely related topic or theme to another in a gradual manner. This allows students to exploit certain overlaps in language and context. Students should be choosing texts that require no self-discipline to read. Thus, if they find a text that is too difficult or uninteresting, they should choose a new text. Students must find what they read compelling.

Graded Readers

Graded readers can be used as an effective source of comprehensible input and provide an opportunity to engage in narrow reading. Graded readers are adapted versions of various authentic texts such as novels, films, biographies, or travel books. They are produced with particular reading levels in mind, with the complexity of the vocabulary and grammatical structures limited so that they are appropriate for the target level. Graded readers support the extensive reading approach to teaching English. As they are quite extensive in terms of genres and topics, students can access reading material that is not only level appropriate but also inherently interesting. Most textbook publishers produce a line of graded readers, so implementing an extensive reading program in your courses can be a practical way to help develop your students’ reading ability.

The most effective texts for learners to engage with and develop their reading ability are those that are highly interesting to the reader. The key idea here is that these texts provide optimal input for the learner. Input is considered optimal when the content is compelling or so interesting that the reader forgets that they are reading in a foreign language. This is similar to what many of us experience when we are so totally engrossed in a book that we are hardly conscious of the fact that we are reading from the page.

Bottom-up and Top-down Reading Approaches

To boost their reading ability, learners should be encouraged to use both bottom-up and top-down strategies to help them comprehend a text. For example, they can use their knowledge of prefixes and suffixes to help to guess the meaning of a new word which is bottom-up processing. Alternatively, by using their previous knowledge of a topic or theme, students can make predictions about the content of the text – top-down processing.

Bottom-up processing occurs when the reader attempts to understand a text by examining individual meanings of words or grammatical features of the most basic units of the text and moves gradually from these to try to gain an understanding of the complete text. In this understanding of the reading process, comprehension begins with individual words - their pronunciation, definitions, spelling, etc. From this, a reader’s focus gradually broadens to wider features of the text from collocations, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and finally to understanding the complete text. Thus, the central main idea of a text can be thought of as the total of the information in each paragraph. The comprehension of each paragraph is affected by the prior understanding of each sentence which is a result of decoding each word, and so on.

As the name suggests, top-down processing is the complete opposite approach. Rather than focusing on individual words, phrases, or sentences to aid comprehension, learners attempt to speculate the content of the text and confirm or reject their predictions as they read. With top-down processing, comprehension begins with the broader aspects of a text - the title, sub-headings, the basic idea of each paragraph, etc. Later in the process, the reader focuses on smaller language features. Because of this, top-down processing is mainly associated with the activation of the reader’s prior knowledge and understanding of the topic or theme of the text. To understand a message, the reader starts by gleaning the meaning of a paragraph or larger chunks of text and later narrows their attention to the sentences and words that make up the message. As a consequence, top-down processing enables readers to comprehend more complex texts because it activates mental representations that guide the reading process. In this way, using prior knowledge and making predictions become vital components in the comprehension process. In other words, a learner’s previous experience leads the comprehension process.

Because top-down processing takes advantage of what students are already able to bring to a reading situation, it is often seen as a more effective and efficient approach. However, there seems to be some consensus that effective reading is an interaction between both bottom-up and top-down processing. Both top-down and bottom-up processes are required for students to recognize, problem-solve, and comprehend. Without bottom-up processing, learners cannot receive and process messages. However, accurate processing is not possible without the framework of prior knowledge that top-down processing helps activate.

Bottom-Up Reading Activities

A reading activity that promotes bottom-up processing and that can be used at all levels is referencing within the text. This type of activity might ask students to underline pronouns such as ‘it’ or ‘they’ or demonstratives such as ‘this’ or ‘these’ within a text and then figure out the word to which they refer. A similar activity might involve preparing a text by deleting the conjunctions and having the students complete a gap-fill by selecting suitable conjunctions. In this activity, it is recommended to ask students to justify their choice as this requires them to establish the relationship between key ideas in the text.

Activities that are more suited for lower-level learners focus on word recognition and the spelling and phonetic features of words such as the various pronunciation of the suffix -ough.

Students at a more intermediate level could engage in activities such as identifying missing words in sentences. Students at this level can also practice activities that require them to focus on paraphrasing and varied word usage in the text.

A useful type of activity for more advanced students, particularly those using English in academic settings, involves breaking down and decoding complex sentences. This may involve identifying the verb and the object and their relationship or determining the relationship between clauses through examining the use of conjunctions. Students can also be asked to identify words and phrases that show the writer’s stance towards the ideas they are communicating. This could involve making notes of reporting verbs used in the text and interpreting them such as examining the difference in meaning between the verbs ‘claim’ and ‘demonstrate’.

Top-Down Reading Activities

Prediction is perhaps the most common of the top-down reading activities. Through making predictions, readers are being asked to anticipate the content of the text which may include key concepts or answers to certain questions. This anticipation helps readers give some order to the content and recognize its significance. Prediction can be thought of as students asking questions and having them answered through their comprehension of the text. Prediction is a key element of reading as it allows readers to employ prior knowledge of places, people, and situations, and previous reading experience to predict what they will read and therefore comprehend and enjoy it.

Another common top-down reading activity is previewing. This asks students to look at titles, headings, and pictures, and read the first few paragraphs and the last paragraph. This helps students get an initial understanding of the text by activating their prior language and content knowledge before they undertake an in-depth reading.

Semantic mapping is another useful top-down reading activity that is an effective way to pre-teach vocabulary and for the teacher to ascertain the students’ prior knowledge of the topic. Semantic mapping requires students to brainstorm on the reading topic with the ideas generated being displayed as a mind map. As students make more connections to the topic, the map should evolve into a useful summary of the concepts and vocabulary that they can expect to encounter in the text. This process can also help students extend their language and content knowledge. To ensure the success of this type of activity, teachers need to be familiar enough with their students so that they are confident that the texts being selected are both familiar and interesting.

A less common but interesting top-down reading activity is reconciled reading. This reverses the standard reading sequence of students reading the text and subsequently answering comprehension questions. With reconciled reading, the teacher adapts the end of text comprehension questions and presents them to students as pre-reading questions. By doing this, students are given the opportunity to activate prior content and language knowledge.

This article has hopefully introduced you to some useful and practical ideas that you can apply in your courses to help students become more engaged and effective readers. Reading is perhaps one of the most accessible and effective vehicles for successful language acquisition outside of the classroom. Therefore, anything teachers can do to promote an interest in reading in English among students is strongly encouraged.

Of the four main language skills, listening is perhaps the most crucial. This is because it is the skill most frequently used. Therefore, it is important to provide sufficient opportunities for students to learn and practice effective listening skills. This is especially the case for beginners, but still important for learners at all levels. This article begins by introducing a few general principles to think about when approaching the teaching of listening, it then delves into the processes required for successful comprehension and associated activity types, discusses the importance of a scaffolded approach to instruction, and ends by looking at strategies that learners can employ to develop their listening abilities and tackle various listening tasks.

General Considerations

When thinking about developing your students’ listening skills, the first place to start is to consider the way you speak to them in the classroom. Try to maintain as much of your natural way of speaking as possible, but especially for lower-level students, consider slowing the pace, simplifying your vocabulary, using shorter and simpler sentences, and using slightly more and longer pauses.

For weaker students, many listening games and activities can be used that do not require a verbal response in English. Learners can simply respond physically to instructions such as in a game of ‘Simon says…’ or complete an activity that requires them to choose a picture or an object or complete a chart.

It is important in listening activities to give students a compelling reason to listen. Creating a more authentic purpose for listening encourages active listening. This can be achieved by having students discuss the general topic of the text before listening and generating a list of questions they hope to have answered by the text. Integrating listening with other skills can also be a useful way of encouraging more active and purposeful listening. If students are aware that content within the listening text is going to be used in a subsequent writing task, students have a very immediate and real motivation to employ active listening.

Many of the listening tasks we set students in the classroom ask them to focus on the very minute details of the text. However, this type of listening does not always reflect the real-life type of listening they will need to perform outside of the classroom. The type of listening required for taking accurate notes in a lecture is very different from that required in an everyday conversation. Therefore, it is useful to give students the opportunity to practice different listening styles for different situations and tasks.

Bottom-up and Top-down Processing

As in reading, bottom-up and top-down processing play crucial roles in listening comprehension. There can be a tendency for teachers to favour activities that are more top-down focused such as comprehension questions, predicting, or listing. However, bottom-up focused activities that allow students to focus on language features such as pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary also require special attention. The value of bottom-up processing is that it helps students to comprehend a text more easily by recognising lexical and pronunciation features. For this reason, bottom-up listening activities are particularly suited to lower-level learners as it helps build their language range. With consistent exposure to bottom-up activities, students should, over time, process messages received as aural input with increased speed and accuracy.

Activity types that help improve bottom-up processing include identifying individual sounds and stressed words and syllables, distinguishing between thought groups, paying attention to grammar forms and functions, and recognising linking words and phrases.

Top-down processing relies on activating the prior knowledge and experience that students bring to the task as a way of utilising the informational input derived from bottom-up processing. To extract meaning from a text, students match what they know about the topic in terms of the context, speakers, subjects, and the wider world to the comprehensible input they receive.

Listening activity types that help improve top-down processing include listening for macro features such as the gist, central topic, and main ideas, listening for specific details, ordering key ideas, and making predictions and inferences.

Teach Listening with a Scaffolded Approach

Listening can present a particular challenge for language learners because of the linguistic and cognitive processing it requires and because unlike a reading text, students do not have the convenience of skimming and scanning through the content. Consequently, many learners, particularly weaker ones, find listening intimidating and approach listening tasks with a lack of confidence.

Therefore, to help students tackle listening tasks with more confidence, a scaffolded approach is recommended. Scaffolding is the use of a variety of instructional techniques designed to move students toward a better understanding and greater independence in the learning process. For listening, this might include exposing students initially to more simple listening texts before gradually increasing the complexity of texts as the course progresses. It may also involve the teacher describing or illustrating a concept or process in several ways to ensure understanding. Students could also be exposed, in the first few classes, to the types of listening tasks they will encounter in the course. A scaffolding technique teachers often use in lessons is to preview key or difficult vocabulary before tackling a listening task. Scaffolding should also involve teachers making the purpose of a listening activity clear, providing simple and easy-to-follow directions, and ensuring that learners are aware of the learning goals they are expected to achieve. Students should also be helped to understand how the current lesson builds on the knowledge and skills covered in previous lessons.

Every listening lesson should begin with a pre-listening stage in which students are properly prepared to engage in the task. In most cases, pre-teaching vocabulary is crucial to this stage. In addition, students should be familiarised with who is speaking and what the context of the listening is. Knowing that the text is an academic lecture will set up different expectations in the learners’ minds versus knowing that it is a telephone conversation between a customer and a travel agent.

Before the first listening, set a clear task for students to perform. For example, if listening to an academic lecture, have the students take note of any language that introduces a main idea or examples that illustrate a point. This helps students make valid predictions about the language and information they will hear and gives them a clear purpose for listening.

Simply playing an audio track one time from beginning to end does not serve students well. A better approach is to provide multiple opportunities to listen and to bring focus to particular sections or features of the text. It may be useful to, as a first listening, to play the audio all the way through from the beginning and focus on general and gist level questions. During a second listening, questions can focus on more specific details. Depending on the aim of the lesson, a follow-up could be to focus on specific sections to draw attention to language features such as keywords or the use of signposting language.

Many listening activities simply ask students to test their comprehension of specific detail in the text such as a date or a name. However, this ignores much of what else students can gather from a listening. It might be of more value to engage students in tasks that require them to pay attention to the context, or the emotions and motivations of the speaker. “What did the professor say was the most serious effect of global warming?” involves a lower level of processing than a question such as “Why did the teacher stress or emphasise the word ‘serious’? Context-related questions allow students to delve into deeper layers of meaning than standard comprehension questions allow.

Listening Strategies

English language learners who exhibit a high level of listening proficiency can be distinguished by the strategies they employ. Strategies can simply be thought of as the ways a listener approaches and manages a listening task.

Listening strategies can be classified into two simple categories. The first of these is cognitive strategies which involve understanding messages and processing associated input so that it can be stored and retrieved in memory. The second is meta-cognitive strategies which involve conscious or subconscious thinking about selecting and applying cognitive strategies. This may include evaluating the requirements of the task, monitoring how effectively one is completing the task, self-evaluating performance post-task, and self-testing to assess the effectiveness of one’s strategy use.

Teachers can provide opportunities in the classroom for students to practice and develop meta-cognitive strategies for listening. The first of these is planning. This is important as it helps students become more independent learners. Planning encourages students to set learning objectives and figure out ways to meet them. These objectives can focus on two broad areas – general listening development and specific listening tasks. General listening development objectives could be as simple as expanding topic vocabulary range or increasing exposure to different genres of listening texts. Specific learning task objectives might include previewing the topic through discussion, brainstorming, or paying attention to signposting language during a listening.

For the second meta-cognitive strategy, monitoring, teachers can provide opportunities for students to gauge their learning progress. In terms of general listening development, students can be encouraged to reflect on their progress against certain criteria such as descriptors for proficiency scales (CEFR or IELTS) or syllabus learning outcomes. Students can also be helped to set personal learning objectives against which to measure progress. Monitoring can also be employed by students during the completion of a listening task by checking their understanding while listening or trying to determine the source of a specific comprehension difficulty, which may be something like unfamiliarity with the topic vocabulary.

A final meta-cognitive strategy is evaluating the success of meeting a learning objective or completing a learning activity. For general listening development, measuring progress against specific criteria can also be used as an evaluation tool. However, where evaluation brings particular value is in having students try to assess the effectiveness of strategies employed in their learning and practice and reflecting on the appropriateness and utility of personal learning objectives. As for specific learning tasks, evaluating can be particularly useful for students to assess the success of the particular strategies used in completing a task.

In contexts where meta-cognitive strategies have been used, students tend to demonstrate real improvements in their listening ability. Through the use of meta-cognitive strategies, learners develop a clearer understanding of the requirements and demands of typical listening tasks, develop an increased sense of competence in being able to successfully complete tasks, and develop a set of strategies that allow them to cope with more challenging listening texts.

Sequencing a Lesson to Practice Meta-cognitive Strategies

An activity that incorporates many of the meta-cognitive strategies described above could have the following sequence.

Pre-listening: in groups or pairs, students brainstorm words, phrases, or key points that they might expect to be mentioned in the text.

First listening: While listening, students mark all the items generated during the brainstorming they were able to predict. They should also note any new information they hear that they think might be important for comprehending the text.

Follow-up discussion: in pairs or small groups, students discuss and compare what they have understood from an initial listening and any strategies they used to best comprehend the listening. They then note down any parts of the text which caused disagreement or confusion so that they can focus on these for the next listening.

Second listening: students listen and pay close attention to the parts where there was disagreement and confusion and revise their notes by making corrections and adding new detail that was missed the first time.

Post listening discussion: as a whole class and led by the teacher, students share the content of their notes verbally to confirm comprehension and discuss the various strategies used among the group.

As the article has shown, there are many factors to consider and approaches that can be utilised to make listening lessons more engaging and effective. Listening tasks can be very stressful and intimidating for students. However, by having a better understanding of how the comprehension process works, knowing how to make tasks more manageable, and giving students the tools to become more independent and conscientious learners, teachers can help them to alleviate these anxieties and become more self-assured and competent listeners.