Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

 

Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

 Handout and Resources

-Mark Cormier, 2025





Introduction: This blog contains content, activities, and support material for an interactive webinar given for Universidad Americana on May 29, 2025 as part of their Second International Symposium on Teaching English as a Foreign Language.  

Goals: 
  • Summarize key concepts in the teaching and learning of listening in a foreign language.
  • Consider more communicative alternatives to traditional listening comprehension questions. 
  • Explore a selection of communicative listening activities created with AI support. 

Guiding Questions: 
  • How do people learn to listen in a foreign language?
  • How can I design more communicative, student-centered listening activities?
  • How can generative AI tools help me develop engaging listening materials? 

Table of Contents

Click the links below to access the section of the blog you would like to see.















Topic 1: Theory Input - Key Concepts in Listening Instruction

Let's start by reviewing some important concepts about the role of listening in foreign language teaching and learning. 



Key Concept 1: Listening is the forgotten skill in language teaching and deserves more attention in the classroom. 


The Cinderella Skill: Many writers consider listening to be a neglected and underdeveloped skill in language teaching. Wilson (2008) says listening is "probably the least understood, the least researched and, historically, the least valued" (p. 17) skill, while Nunan (1999) refers to listening as "the Cinderella skill" because it is constantly "overlooked by its elder sister, speaking" (p. 199). There are many possible reasons for this. Like reading, listening has traditionally been considered by some to be a passive process, compared to the productive skills of speaking and writing. However, processing textual and auditory input is anything but passive. It is actually an extremely complex cognitive process that involves linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic elements and requires learners' active participation (Rost, 2016). 

Another possible reason for listening's lack of attention is its difficulty. Because it involves complex mental processes occuring inside the heads of learners which are invisible to teachers, it can be easy to subscribe to the false notion that listening is something that learners just have to figure out on their own and that there is very little a teacher can do to support its development. However, the truth is listening is like any other skill and dedicating time and attention to it in class aids in proficiency development. Listening deserves more attention in the classroom not just to bring it to the level of the other three skills, but because some argue that it is the most used language skill in real life with Morely (2001) estimating that "on average, we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write" (p. 70). 







Key Concept 2: The four macro skills are not developed in isoloation, so it is good teaching practice to use activities that integrate the skills. 


Skills Working Together: Traditionally, foreign language pedagogy divides language competence into the four macro skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This gives the false impression that the skills can be easily separated and taught in isolation. However, that is not how real language is used. It is helpful to consider how the four language skills actually interact and support each other in real communicative situations. ACTFL's World Readiness Standards framework (Cutshall, 2012) describes three communicative modes, contexts and purposes in which language is used to communicate. 

  • Interpersonal Communication: Learners interact and negotiate meaning in real-time to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions. 
    • Skills Involved: Interpersonal communication involves a combination of listening and speaking in the case of oral interaction and reading and writing in the context of a text message chain.  

  • Interpretive Communication: Learners understand, interpret, and analyze messages on a variety of topics. 
    • Skills Involved: Interpretive communication involves listening or reading to make sense of spoken and written messages.  

  • Presentational Communication: Learners share information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a vareity of topics. 
    • Skills Involved: Although, the presentational mode involves one-way communication through speaking and writing, it is implied that the intended message will necessarily be interpreted by the target audience through listening or reading.  


Listening instruction is compatible with communicative language teaching when teachers design listening activities with the aim of helping learners focus on, comprehend, and respond to the meaning of the texts they hear. Compared to more traditional language teaching methods, the communicative approach has "more room for personal, emotional or critcial responses to the content, and less emphasis on drilling and repetition" (Wilson, 2008, p. 20). This meaning-focused approach to listening can be supported by through speaking, reading, and writing so teachers should see listening as an integral part of their lessons rather than an isolated skill. 






Key Concept 3: Listening is an active process. Learners construct the meaning of what they hear through a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing. It is an essential teaching practice to provide opportunities for learners to use both processing strategies by incorporating PRE-listening activities.   


Interactive Processing: Learners make use of both linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge in order to accurately process the meaning of messages they hear (Buck, 2001). The combination of bottom-up and top-down processing described below is known as interactive processing (Hegelsen, 2003). 
  • Bottom-Up Processing: We build understanding of what we hear by combining sounds to form words, words to form phrases, phrases to form sentences, etc. We use our knowledge of the language to make meaning of what we hear. 
  • Top-Down Processing: We use background knowledge to make logical inferences about what is happening and interpret what learners mean. We use knowledge of the world and context to make meaning. 
  • Adequate Comprehension Requires Both: When unfamiliar words, structures, or accents are encountered, we use knowledge of topic and context to infer meaning. When this knowledge is missing, we must rely more on our understanding of sounds, words, and sentences to construct meaning. It is important to do preparation activities (PRE-listening stage) before having students complete a listening task in order to:
    • Activate or build background knowledge and understanding of the context of the listening for students to apply top-down processing.
    • Review known vocab, grammar, and pronunciation features and/or pre-teach unknown elements that are essential to gain adequate understanding of the text in order to help students apply bottom-up processing. 






Key Concept 4: Checking listening comprehension requires a response from learners (physical, oral, or written). There are MANY ways to do this! The phrase "students listen and..." should feature prominently in your lesson plans and instructions for listening activities.


Show what they Know: Because listening comprehension is a mental process, teachers can only check that learners have adequately understood a text by eliciting a response from them. Listener responses come in two types:
  • Productive Responses: These include answering questions orally as well as "note-taking, writing answers to questions, correcting errors and completing tables, charts, diagrams and sentences" (Wilson, 2008, p. 81).
  • Recognition Response: These include "answering multiple-choice and true/false questions, ticking words and phrases that are heard, matching and choosing pictures" (p. 81).   
Always give your students a reason to listen. Quoting Gary Buck, Wilson (2008) says, "People never listen without a purpose, except perhaps in a language class" (p. 60). For each time you play the audio track, your students should be instructed to "listen and ..." perform some type of response. 
  • Listen and repeat
  • Listen and identify
  • Listen and point
  • Listen and select
  • Listen and write
  • Listen and move
  • And many other response possibilities that will be explored in the next section. 






Key Concept 5: Checking comprehension does not have to come at the end of the listening text. The WHILE-Listening stage of a listening lesson is critical and often overlooked. You can break the text up into multiple sections with small comprehension checks and processing tasks along the way.


Teaching not Testing: Teaching listening is not the same as testing listening. When we design listening activities, we need to incorporate listening response tasks that support understanding of the message and personal engagement with the text. Wilson (2008) says that effective listening activities: 
  • "Provide a focus, showing students what is important about any given passage;
  • Allow them to perceive the text's structure (causes and effects, problems and solutions, etc.)
  • Help them to 'chunk' the listening into sections or units of informatin;
  • Provide clues as to how they might respond;
  • Keep them concentrating throughout the passage;
  • Contribute towards the entertainment factor of the lesson by highlighting points of interest, irony, humour, etc." (p. 81).

Let's consider some ways teachers can do this!










Topic 2: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Instruction and Task Design

The long-established Pre-While-Post framework (Axbey, 1989) provides an excellent template for designing listening lessons. The primary aim of this blog post is to explore alternatives to traditional activities in the WHILE-listening stage, but it is important to review the purpose of each of the three stages first. 




Pre-While-Post Instructional Sequence 

  • Pre-Listening Activities: Engage students in activities to activate background knowledge about the topic of the audio and raise interest in the task to come. This builds contextual knowledge needed to apply top-down listening strategies. Review important vocab from the audio that students already know and “pre-teach” any unfamiliar terms to aid their bottom-up processing.
    • How: Questions, images, predictions, vocabulary review, make personal connections with the topic, etc. 

  • While-Listening Activities: Help students process the audio by breaking it down into manageable chunks in a variety of tasks to demonstrate their understanding of what they hear. Tasks should occur during the audio, not just at the end. Replay sections of the audio if needed, but always give students a task to complete.
    • How: See Lund's (1990) taxonomy of listener response types below.

  • Post-Listening Activities: Wrap up the cycle by checking and clarifying answers, reviewing difficult sections, asking students opinions about the audio, or doing a speaking or writing task inspired by the topic of the listening.
    • How: Check answers, help with misunderstandings, analyze languagein the text, audio also serves as stimulus for speaking or writing. 







Listening Response Types 

Teachers have many options when it comes to deciding how students will listen and respond to a text. Let's start by reviewing traditional types of comprehension questions before considering more student-centered and communicative alternatives. 

  • Traditional Response Types: Traditionally, students are asked to complete listening comprehension questions in a sequence that helps them identify information from general topic to specific details. Nunan (1999) provides a comprehensive list of typical questions:
    • Listen for Gist: Is the speaker talking about a family celebration or a work meeting? Is the podcast episode about sports or politics?
    • Listen for Purpose: Are the speakers making plans to travel or discussing a past trip? What is the speaker trying to do?
    • Listen for Main Idea: Why is the woman giving the man directions? What is the speaker's opinion about the movie?
    • Listen for Specific Information: What time does the bus leave tomorrow morning? How many guests are expected at the event? 
    • Listen for Inference: What can we guess about the man's relationship with his boss? What does the woman mean when she says, "Well, that's one way to handle it"?
    • Listen to Identify Attitude: Does the speaker sound enthusiastic or bored? Is the speaker being sincere or sarcastic?
    • Listen for Stress: Listen to how the man says, "I just bought the watch here yesterday". What sounds more important, where he bought the watch, or when?
    • Listen for Phonetic Distinctions: Did the man say "sheet" or "seat"?

  • Lund's Taxonomy: Randall Lund's (1990) taxonomy of listening response types includes answering traditional comprehension questions along with eight other alternatives which teachers can use to develop listening activities that engage learners and support their processing of the text. 
    • 1) Doing Activities: Require a physical response of some kind rather than a spoken or written one. For example, learners listen and point, sit or stand, move from one side of the room to another, perform gestures, raise thier hand or perform other actions based on what they hear. 
    • 2) Choosing Activities: Require selection from among alternatives. Examples include selecting the right pictures, objects, texts or actions; matching, placing pictures in the right order, or picking up objects according to description.
    • 3) Transferring Activities: Require learners to take information in one form and transfer it to another. Most of the time this involves drawing a picture or completing a graphic of some kind. Examples include making a map, tracing a route, completing a chart or table, or labeling a diagram. 
    • 4) Extending Activities: Require the listener to provide a text that goes beyond what is given. Examples include creating some kind of ‘finish’ to an incomplete story, solving a problem, and filling in missing lines of dialogue.
    • 5) Duplicating Activities: Require the learners to replicate all or part of the message, either verbatim in the L2 or as a translation in the L1. Examples include repeating the exact message orally or in writing in either the L2 or a translation in the L1.
    • 6) Condensing Activities: Require the listener to represent the message in a reduced form. Examples include completing outlines, notes, bullet points, oral or written summaries.
    • 7) Modeling Activities: Require the listener to use the text as a model for imitation or for another action. For example, parts of the audio are used for a pronunciation lesson or the audio models a similar speaking activity to come.
    • 8) Conversing Activities: Require the listener to have an interactive exchange with the teacher or peers about the content of the audio. Examples include giving opinions about the topic, story, characters, or ideas in the audio.
    • 9) Answering Activities: Require the listener to answer traditional true/false, multiple choice, or short answer questions about gist, main idea, purpose, specific details, inference, and other aspects of the text.  








Topic 3: Sample Listening Activities Created with AI Support

Merging Lund's Taxonomy with AI Supported Materials Development: Until very recently, teachers' choice of audios to include in a listening lesson was limited to audio tracts from the textbook, authentic materials, homemade recordings, and in-class dictations. Now, with the advent of generative AI tools, it is easy for teachers to write audio scripts that better fit their learners' needs and interests and they can easily utilize online text-to-speech tools to generate lifelike audio recordings.  The following sample activities include scripts, recordings, images, and response tasks that were developed with AI support. 

Note: The following sample activities only show the WHILE (and some POST) stages of the listening lesson and do not indicate what teachers and students can do to prepare learners to engage with the  audio. 


Sample 1 - Office Mystery


Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio in sections giving the students instructions about what they must do in the next panel before playing the audio. 
    • Audio 1: CLICK HERE - Listen and circle Jake's lunch.
    • Audio 2: CLICK HERE - Listen and draw the map to trace Jakes's steps.
    • Audio 3: CLICK HERE - Listen and copy the question Lucy asked.
    • Audio 4: CLICK HERE - Listen and perform the actions and emotions.
    • Audio 5: CLICK HERE - Listen and complete the summary
    • Audio 6: CLICK HERE - Listen and continue the story.

Comentary: This audio is rather long but it is broken into manageable chunks with specific learner response tasks for each section. It shows a variety of Lund's listening response types including: choosing, transfering, duplicating, doing, condensing, and extending. For Audio 4, the teacher selects two students to be actors. They must carry out the actions while expressing the emotions listed on the worksheet as they listen to the track. Their classmates will decide who the better actor is. 

Tools: The audio script, listening tasks, and images were created with ChaptGPT. The audio was generated using Microsoft Clipchamp's text-to-speech tool. 








Sample 2 - Teenage Dilemmas



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio the first time and students listen to three teenagers describing a problem they are facing. For each speaker, students need to identify key details by drawing a line between the speaker and images. Not all images will be relevant. Then they discuss their choices with a partner. In the second listening students complete a chart by putting a checkmark next to any people mentioned by each speaker. For the thrid and final listening, students articulate the speakers' dilemmas using simple phrases, and put a check next to what they think the speaker should do next. Then they discuss their choices with a partner. They finish by chosing one of the characters and improvising a brief roleplay exploring what might happen next in the story.

Comentary: The audio is long but broken into three segments that the teacher can easily pause between to allow students to think and process the information. The worksheet requires the students to listen to the audio multiple times, each for a different purpose and a number of Lund's response ideas are included: choosing, transferring, condensing, conversing, and extending. Tasks one and two make use of pictures that represent key details from the audio but it is up to students to interpret what these images represent which encourages more personal engagement with the task.

Tools: The audio scripts and tasks one, two, and three were written by the author. The images in task one were sourced from www.flaticon.com. The voices were produced using Google Gemini and ChatGPT conversation function and the roleplay cards in task four were created using ChatGPT.  







Sample 3 - Daily Routines, Habits, and Eating Preferences



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the three audios and students are asked to identify the speaker of each audio by matching them with a picture. They should also be encouraged to recall as many details about each person as they can. Then the teacher plays the audios again and students take keyword notes in the table. After each track, students can compare their responses with the person sitting near them. The tracks can be played one more time if needed before students complete tasks three and four in which they analyze and respond to the ideas mentioned by the speaker before creating a similar text about themselves using a narrative frame. 

Comentary: This worksheet makes use of a very useful technique called guided note taking which is a combination of Lund's transfering and condensing response types. The note taking table identifies specific information learners must find and includes short phrases to help them write the required details. Each audio script follows a similar structure and students are required to extract the same information. Once they complete the note taking table, they can refer to the information there in order to complete the personal response in task three and the audios serve as a kind of model for students to describe their own habits and routines in task four.

Tools: The audio scripts, character images, and discussion questions were created using ChatGPT. The notetaking table in task two and narrative frame in task four were created by the author. The audios were generated using the text-to-speech feature at luvvoice.com.  








Sample 4 - Animal Behaviors



Materials and Procedure: Students access the worksheet below. The teacher plays the audio the first time and students identify the animals and the order they were mentioned by drawing a line between each picture and the numbers in the chart. Then the teacher assigns each student two numbers at random. On the second listening, students have to take keyword notes to complete the chart about their two assigned animals. The teacher can play the track a third time if needed. Then students are put in small groups. First they help their partners complete the missing information from their chart and then they discuss the questions. 

Comentary: This worksheet includes a variation of the note taking response strategy mixed with a jigsaw listening task in which students are only responsible for taking notes about portions of the audio. After listening, students complete a speaking task in which they help each other complete the missing portions of their table. The audios also serve as a model for the students' description of an additional animal in task three.

Tools: The audio scripts and images were created with ChatGPT. The audio was generated with Microsoft's Clipchamp text-to-speech tool and the table and task instructions were written by the author.









Topic 4: Employment Opportunity and Free Professional Development Resources 

I work at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where we are always looking for new teachers to join the team. In addition, I help organize three free professional development initiatives that I encourage you to take advantage of. 





Great Place to Work
CLICK HERE to learn more about the benefits and requirements of being an English teacher at CCCN and start your application. 






PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions
CLICK HERE to register for the talk Decolonizing the Curriculum: Empowering Educators to Center Students' Voices and Experiences by Yuliana Brenes on May 30. PD Talks is a free monthly webinar series for English teachers organized by Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano and hosted by me. Usually held on the last Friday of the month from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, these sessions consist of a 90 minute online workshop with breakout room tasks which allow you to meet and interact with other teachers from around the world. In 2024 alone, teachers from 62 countries connected to our 12 talks. All attendees receive a personalized virtual certificate of participation and badge. 






NCTE 2025 - July 8-11
CLICK HERE to visit the website of the 40th National Conference for Teachers of English Costa Rica "Transforming Lives in ELT: AI Integration with Human-Centered Innovation". NCTE is an annual event that brings together language teachers from around the country and beyond. For the last five years, NCTE has had a free online component with the option to connect to twelve professional development webinars. 







Join the CoP
We also have a private website called CCCN's Community of Practice which hosts our Teacher Development Video Library, a collection of over 160 video recording of talks and workshops from NCTE, PD Talks, and other professional develpment events over the past five years. They are organized into categories to help you find something relevant to you. All of the resources are free but you must register to access the site. CLICK HERE to create your profile. 











References:

Axbey, S. (1989). ‘Standard exercises in self-access learning’. Presentation at British Council course on self-access learning, Cambridge, May 1989.

Buck, G. (2001). Assessing Listening. Cambridge University Press.

Cutshall, S. (2012). More Than a Decade of Standards: Integrating “Communication” in Your Language Instruction. The Language Educator. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Helgesen, M. (2003). Listening. In D. Nunan (Ed.), Practical English Language Teaching (pp. 23-46). McGraw Hill.

Lund, R. J. (1990). A taxonomy for teaching second language listening. Foreign Language Annals, 23. 105-115.

Morley, J. (2001). Aural comprehension instruction: Principles and practices. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (pp. 69-85). Heinle Cengage.

Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Heinle & Heinle.

Rost, M. (2016). Teaching and Researching Listening (3rd ed.). Routledge.

Wilson, J.J. (2008). How to Teach Listening. Pearson Education Limited.











Session Details and Author Information

Session Title: Communicative Listening Activities: Exploring Frameworks for Listening Task Design

Session Abstract: Listening is an essential language skill that supports learners’ ability to engage in real-world communication, but it also comes with its own set of challenges for both teachers and learners. The well-established Pre-While-Post instructional framework for receptive skills (Axbey, 1989) provides a powerful guide for sequencing listening lessons, but teachers often find it difficult to design appropriate activities in the “While-Listening” stage that genuinely support skill development rather than simply test comprehension. This talk will explore Lund’s (1990) taxonomy of listening response types, a helpful resource for designing listening tasks that are focused on communication and skill-building rather than assessment. Participants will engage in demonstration activities to better understand the framework and will leave with practical ideas for implementing it in their own classrooms, including strategies for generating listening tasks with AI support.

Keywords: Listening Instruction, Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Artificial Intelligence

Author: Mark Foster Cormier

Author Bio: Mark Foster Cormier is an English teacher and teacher educator who is passionate about materials development, reflective practice, and professional development in ELT. He earned a master of arts in TESOL from Marlboro College and bachelor’s degrees in English teaching and Latin American studies from Universidad Americana and Appalachian State University. Mark has been an EFL teacher in Costa Rica for 16 years and has specialized in teacher development for over a decade. He currently works as Head of Training and Professional Development at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where he is in charge of new teacher recruiting and training, planning ongoing professional development initiatives, and hosting the monthly webinar series for language teachers called PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions. Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-cormier-elt/
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