You listen to many different things in your home language (or other languages) every day. Think back to your day so far – what have you listened to already? Maybe you have noted some of the following:
You probably have many other things on your list.
In each of these situations you were not a passive listener. You actively listened to what the person said in order to find out information. When you have a reason to listen, you listen actively.
When students are doing a listening activity in the classroom, there should be a reason for them to be listening. In Case Study 1 the teacher tries one approach to his class.
Mr Khan is a secondary English teacher. He recently went to an English language teacher training workshop on how to help students improve their listening skills in English. Read his account of how he tried to apply what he experienced there.
The trainer showed us an activity that we can do with our students. The activity was called ‘listen and draw’. The trainer told us to follow her instructions and draw what she said. She told us to draw:
Each of us had a paper and pen and we had to draw what the trainer said. At first I thought it was strange to do some drawing, as I’m not a very good artist. But the trainer told us just to play along and be quick. It was fun and it also made a nice change from listening to the lectures. At the end, we compared our drawings to those of the person sitting next to us. We all laughed to see how the drawings differed.
While this was a fun activity, I realised that it could help my students to practise listening. It could also help them to practise language structures like prepositions (such as ‘in’, ‘under’ or ‘on’). I decided to try the activity with my class as soon as I could.
I saw a good opportunity when my students were reading the story ‘The Bond of Love’ by Kenneth Anderson from the Class IX textbook Beehive. The story has a few illustrations in it. I decided to use the picture on page 117 for a ‘listen and draw’ activity (see Resource 1).
To start the activity, I told my students:
After I was sure that they had understood I started by saying:
Some of my students looked surprised or worried at first. Some complained that they were not very good at drawing. I explained that this was not a test of their drawing skills, but that it was a chance to practise listening to English. I told them: ‘Don’t worry about how good your drawing is. This is not art class, it’s English class! Just draw quickly.’ As they drew, I walked around the room to encourage them, saying things like ‘Nice bear!’ or ‘Good, the woman is on the right side of the page.’
After giving the instructions, I told my students to compare their pictures with each other [Figure 1]. They laughed as they looked at each other’s drawings because they were very different. One student noticed that she had drawn her bear on the right side of the page instead of the left. Then I then told them to look at the illustration on page 117 of the Beehive textbook.
This was a great activity for helping my students to practise listening. It also helped the students to prepare for reading the story. By talking about the illustration, they now had some ideas about the text before reading it.
My students liked this ‘listen and draw’ activity, so I decided that I would repeat it from time to time in the future, using simple illustrations from the textbook. I also thought that once my students were used to it, they could perhaps do the activity in groups or pairs – one student could look at a picture and describe it to their classmates, who would listen and draw it. This way, they would practise listening and speaking.
The ‘listen and draw’ activity in the case study is a simple activity that you can do with any age group, and with many different pictures. This activity:
Follow the steps below and try using the activity in your classroom:
If your students enjoy this activity, you could get them to do it in pairs or groups. One student can choose a picture from the textbook and describe it to their classmates. The classmates draw the picture from the description (and should not look at the textbooks). You could also tell your students to choose a picture and ask you to draw it on the board.
![]() Pause for thought After trying this activity with your students, think about the following questions:
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