Listening and speaking prediction tasks for beginners.

[Hubert]

Dear Lucy,

I need access to listening and speaking prediction tasks for beginner learners of English who are native speakers of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Polish. Would you still recommend the two texts you have referred to in the correspondence I have included with this email or not?

Many thanks,

Yours,
Hubert Judge.

'Dear Hubert,

Penny Ur's Teaching Listening Comprehension and Underwood's Teaching Listening are excellent resources. These books are fairly old now (1980's) but they remain classics in the field. They are not aimed specifically at the learners you mention. However,I think you'll be able to use the activities.

Good luck,

Lucy'

[Lucy]

Dear Hubert,

I think you need to be clear on the difference between listening prediction tasks and speaking tasks. Prediction tasks are used for the receptive skills – listening and reading. They don’t always involve a lot of speaking and you shouldn’t try to make them into speaking tasks, especially at beginner level. Good prediction tasks can be used with any nationality; I don’t think it’s necessary to design them specifically for one group of students. The exception to this is when you are focussing on a language point that your students have difficulty with; in this case, listening might not be the aim of that stage of the lesson.

To encourage prediction, you can set the scene (for example by showing a picture or by describing the subject) and ask students to predict what they are going to hear. When they listen, they compare their predictions with the actual content. Another prediction task involves telling the students the topic of the listening text and asking them to say everything they know about a topic; they then listen to check whether what they know is correct.

Yours,

Lucy