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5/29/2018 0 Comments

Listening and Speaking resources

by Kara Valle and Cait Ferguson

Speaking and listening are often overshadowed by their siblings, reading and writing. Today, we give speaking and listening their time in the spotlight by highlighting engaging activities and resources you can use in your classroom!

First, click through the multi-modal activities for some classic exercises that work for many types of student and classroom format.

multimodal activites

gallery walk

A classic exercise where students observe, write and discuss. Usually, images are posted around the room and students visit the images as they contemplate a research question or collect evidence for a task. Although a gallery walk can focus on images, you can also use any other source you would like them to chat about!

Click for activity

Famous pairs

Want to break up cliques in you classroom, or mix up the discussion groups to diversify an activity? Famous pairs randomly matches students for a discussion, through a fun "find your match" activity.

Click for activity

modified debate

Modified debate is a great way to get students writing, speaking and listening without all the prep time needed for a traditional debate. Choose a high interest topic, print out the debate materials, and you have a great activity ready to go!

Click for Activity

Next, some great websites with ready to use activities!

Listening Resources

Listenwise

Think Newsela but without the levels and for listening: many differents news stories with discussions questions and assignments ideas accompanying them. The stories are engaging and the audio is easy to listen to and share with students!

Listenwise

Lit2go

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in MP3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages.

Lit2Go

ESL CYBER LISTENING LAB

Although not super user friendly, this site offers many different dialogues at different levels with accompanying listening exercises and vocabulary quizzes. The dialogues are socially relevant and there are several possible extension activities offered.

ESL Cyber Listening

podbay

Podbay is user-friendly, simple way to listen to tons of podcats! It is a great option for our students who might be interested in listening to podcasts but aren't super tech-savvy. It's also a good option for those without smartphones.

PodBay

Speaking resources

mindtools

Mind Tools has a whole "Toolkit" page devoted to communication skills with numerous activities that cover key aspects of communication. If you are looking for resources on problem solving and strategy, they have those topics and more!

Mind tools

the right question institute

This resources helps to foster better oracy in students through asking questions. They have a free educator resources area that provides graphic organizers and tips on teaching question formulation to students.

Right Question