Cambridge University Press ELT Webinar: Teaching Listening Skills in the Virtual Age

Presented by Gaby Lawson Listening is a skill which is challenging to teach and also difficult for learners to gauge their progress in. Currently, we are in the beginning of the Virtual Age, a period in which teaching and learning online is becoming necessary and popular and involves using apps such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts combined with Google Docs. This webinar uses the work of John Field on better teaching of listening skills as a basis for ideas on integrating decoding skills into lessons. The webinar provides practical ideas for online and face-to-face learning and can be used effectively with a multi-national or monolingual group. These ideas can work with any syllabus and take a short time to prepare. They aim to help learners’ decoding so they can listen for main ideas or higher order concepts more easily. By integrating small activities into our lessons which help students to recognise the beginning and ends of words, connected speech, chunks of language and phoneme discrimination exercises, we can both improve the teaching of listening skills and the listening ability of learners.