Pre-listening activities: what to focus on?
At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a
presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with
the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation
at IATEFL but I wasn't on my best behaviour, which I later regretted. The
whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that
in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little
benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't
agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in
English, is useless :)
There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the
speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read
(2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were
divided into four groups and received a different kind of support:
