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Post-Listening Activities Adapted by Peggy Marcy, Professor Cal State
Univ San Bernardino from J.J. Wilson's textbook, "How to Teach
Listening" This is the third video in a three-part series
about listening activities. The first video looked at some issues connected to pre-listening.
The second video explored while-listening activities. And, this video will examine post-listening
activities. The reality is that most textbooks do not
spend much time on post-listening activities so neither do teachers. For most teachers,
post-listening means checking the answers. That is one reasonable post activity, but
certainly not the only one. Knowing that a student got the correct answer does not help
you understand how they got that answer. The younger generation has often been accused
of not being good at reflection. They tend to want to move forward at full speed instead
of slow down and consider lessons to be learned. But that type of reflection is exactly what
post-listening should be. Help learners reflect on how to get the correct answer and not just
on what the correct answer is. Almost all pre-listening activities, except
pre-teaching vocabulary, are top-down. They look at the larger framework of the listening.
Post-listening can also do that, but it can also spend time on the bottom-up. For example,
when you ask students where they had difficulty, they and you should try to diagnose the problem.
Was it a vocabulary or slang issue? Was it an issue of pronunciation? Or was it a problem
with assumed context knowledge that the listeners lacked? Diagnosing usually requires analytical
thinking where the listening is taken apart. Another way of deconstructing the text and
doing bottom-up processing is by choosing a particular grammar item such as past perfect
and picking out all the instances of that in the passage. The teacher can replay the
sentence or slightly larger context where this grammar item occurred and then spend
time asking the students about it. Methods of transition, vocabulary, and discourse markers
can all be focused on in post-listening activities. However, be sure to just choose one of them
per post-listening activity. Wilson advises teachers to not overwhelm students by trying
to point out every linguistic feature. Transcripts, by the way, can also be useful when looking
at specific aspects of the language used. One way of finding out how much the learners
understood is by asking them to summarize what they heard. Wilson points out that this
is student-centered and focuses on their success before pointing out areas they missed. It
also replicates a real life listening skill. Students will say what they understood and
they usually feel free to include details that they found interesting.
There are lots of possible post-listening activities but I'm going to finish with discussion.
When the listening intersects with the listeners' lives, discussions are fun for the learners.
In contrast, answering comprehension questions about the listening is not discussion even
if it requires longer responses. Discussions could reflect back to a pre-listening activity
of prediction where learners talk about which predictions were accurate and which weren't.
Any type of pre-listening expectation could be resolved in post-listening discussions.
So, in summary, post-listening activities should be any combination of reflection, troubleshooting,
analyzing specific language, summarizing what was understood, or discussion.