Teaching Tip: Listening Skills
When helping students to develop effective literacy skills, it is
important to make sure that listening and talking don’t get short
shrift. We may assume that our students already know how to listen,
but research reveals that people consistently overestimate their
listening prowess. Seeing that approximately 50% of time spent in
communicating with others is dedicated to listening, we certainly
want our students to listen to us. This Teaching Tip will explore fun
and formative ways to help your students focus on their own
listening, and find ways to improve their skills.
Image courtesy of the PDO
Back to Basics – What IS Listening?
Although it may seem easy and natural, listening is actually a complex learned process, comprised of
several distinct steps: selecting important sounds, understanding the meaning of the sounds, and
remembering the information while excluding other noise. Sharing some of this background information
on the listening process with students can help them pay more attention to the different steps and
hopefully improve their listening skills. One simple class activity that teachers can do to focus attention
on listening is to challenge students to close their eyes and be completely silent for 2 to 3 minutes. At
the end of the specified time, students are asked to write down all the sounds they heard. A discussion
about which sounds we usually attend to, and which we have learned to ignore (e.g. the hum of the
lights, the breathing of others in the room…) can be enlightening.
Listening to Understand
As mentioned above, one of the important steps in the listening process is to actually understand what
we’re hearing. As teachers, we cannot assume that just because our students look like they’re listening
to us that they are effectively processing the information we are presenting. This might be because
they’re busy thinking about other things, or because their skills are not developed in this area. One fun
activity to do with students is a DENSA- type listening quiz (teachers can adapt the questions to match
their specific course content). By bringing home to your students the fact that they don’t always listen
carefully, in a humorous yet telling way, you can help motivate them to put more effort into their
listening.
Listening to Peers
Ultimately, we don’t only want our students to listen to us; we also want them to listen to each other.
Highlighting the listening aspect of group discussions is important. One strategy to challenge students to
listen effectively in groups is to institute the Talking Stick rule. Provide each student discussion group
with an object – something simple like a highlighter or pen – and explain that only the person holding
that object may speak. The others in the group must listen until the object is passed to them. This
simple, time-honoured technique forces group members to focus on each speaker’s message, and stops
students from interrupting and jumping in to a discussion without listening first. A quick, whole-class
debriefing after the fact about how the Talking Stick rule affected everyone’s listening is a good followup.
26 January 2015
Pedagogical Development Office (PDO)
Vanier College
821 Sainte-Croix
Montréal, Québec H4L 3X9
1
Listening to Learn
In the end, if teachers want to maximize student success and learning, supporting listening skills should
be part of the package. Moreover, the same expectations for effective listening should also apply to
teachers - we have to practice what we preach. The Greek philosopher Epictetus reminds us that we
have only one mouth, but we have two ears, suggesting that we can all talk less, and listen more.
For more information regarding LCAD, reading, writing, listening, and talking, please contact us at the
PDO!
26 January 2015
Pedagogical Development Office (PDO)
Vanier College
821 Sainte-Croix
Montréal, Québec H4L 3X9
2