Here is an email I received today about listening skills examples and making reading and listening comprehension more fun:

“Dear Shelley, I really appreciate the help you’ve offered me. Can you give me suggestions to make my reading and listening comprehension classes more interesting? Sometimes the students get bored easily because the reading and listening skills examples are not so funny.”

The usual scenario:

You have a reading passage connected with questions designed to promote listening skills.

Typically, the teacher asks a few class members to read out a paragraph. By the time you reach the end of the reading, a few students have had a turn at reading while others listen. Yawn! This dull way of working on listening skills will not excite your students!

I had this fun idea which just popped up. I think this listening activity would be great fun as it challenges the readers to read convincingly and naturally while engaging the listeners rather than having them listening passively.

Take the same scenario and liven it up!

1. First, cut up a piece of paper to have one strip per student in your class.

2. Next, write out five sentences that have nothing to do with the reading passage or are related but don’t fit exactly. Then write out scribbles on all the other pieces. Why scribbles? Because the other students will not know from a distance if those scribbles are sentences, whereas someone could more easily see if a paper is blank. Alternatively, write a sentence like ‘this is a dummy strip.’

3. Now, shuffle the papers and hand them out one per student. Students insert these into their reading books or position them so that no one else can see them.

4. Randomly pick a student to read. The student reads the paragraph and must insert the rogue sentence into the text WITHOUT the others noticing.

The job of the other students is to listen carefully and spot the rogue sentence if there is one. But, of course, they won’t know at any time if there is such a sentence because they won’t know if the student reading has a dummy. So therefore, they will have to listen carefully, all the time!

5. After reading the paragraph, see if there are any votes for a rogue sentence. And also, ASK A QUESTION about the passage.

Listening out for rogue sentences helps on several levels:

1. Firstly, it is quite a skill to read a passage out and naturally slip in a sentence that does not fit or sounds silly. It will be fun for the students to attempt this without giving the game away through hesitation or laughing.

2. The other students have an excellent reason to listen, because they are not just listening passively to some content. Instead, they are actively engaged in trying to spot something that sounds out of context or unlikely content.

However, please don’t use this idea every time, or it will get boring. Instead, get one of my books so you have more ideas like it! Links are below to the download version and the paperback. This is my shop for downloads, and this link is to my Amazon author page for paperbacks and Kindles.

I hope you enjoyed this activity. Please share your listening skills examples in the comments.

Shelley Ann Vernon

PS We teachers would love to hear from you if you have fun listening skills examples to share!