Another school year is underway, and you’re doing whatever it takes to meet your students where they are. It’s your responsibility to help them meet speaking and listening standards. But the reality is that you only have a short amount of time to actually do it. 

No matter what your focus area is—whether you’re an elementary school teacher or a subject area teacher at the middle school or high school level—it’s imperative that your students develop solid listening skills. After all, reading, writing, listening, and speaking are crucial to success in all subject areas. 

We hear from many teachers— particularly those with English learners in their classrooms— that finding rigorous material that aligns with speaking and listening standards can be challenging. Research shows that oral proficiency will not increase without opportunities to practice speaking using academic language. Broadening students’ academic vocabulary promotes deeper understanding of curriculum content, as the specificity of language helps to clarify and differentiate meaning. English learners need to hear academic language in the context of authentic speech, and they need to practice speaking using academic language. 

“I believe that students’ listening and speaking skills were seriously impacted by the pandemic and school closures. Listenwise is a great way to get students back up to grade level with weekly practice.”

– Elementary teacher, CA

Teach Speaking and Listening Standards Using Listenwise

Our comprehensive library of thousands of podcast and video lessons for students in grades 2 through 12 includes thousands of short podcasts specifically geared to an elementary, secondary, and ELD audience. Every lesson is a great opportunity for students to practice the skills needed to meet speaking and listening standards. 

Watch Stanford’s Dr. Jeff Zwiers and author Monica Brady-Myerov share speaking and listening standards-aligned teaching strategies to help English learners acquire academic vocabulary using podcasts.

Listenwise podcasts go hand-in-hand with the content you’re already delivering—allowing you to integrate your classroom instruction quickly and easily into the lessons they provide. They’re also aligned with both grade-level and ELD standards for English learners which means that all of your students are able to further develop the 4 Key Language Uses as identified by WIDA.

Plus, our lessons give students access to the 5 research-based listening skills exercises that are proven to help all learners. Designed to meet the rigor expected for each grade level, the lessons created by Listenwise use podcast, video, and visual formats to engage your students on multiple levels. They also reach across content areas and target key features of language development such as decoding and academic vocabulary.

“We’re so glad to have discovered Listenwise. There are tons of short, fun and engaging podcasts for students to listen to. Listening is one of the most overlooked skills. Students learn a lot when they are listening while reading a transcript. They can learn about fluency, proper pronunciation, intonation, etc.”

– District Instructional Specialist, TX

Tips for Using Listenwise to Practice Speaking and Listening

We recommend using sketch notes as a pre-listening or first listen activity. By incorporating note-taking and group discussions in your classroom, you can ensure that students are developing good study habits that will build their dependence on tools, not on their teacher. This is an especially critical distinction to make when teaching English learners.

Don’t be afraid to get creative! Many graphic organizers work well for this kind of note taking assignment and you can go over them together as a class, having students add interesting facts to their own notes that their peers came up with. Moreover, many online tech tools can be app-smashed with Listenwise to allow students to orally respond to the lesson they just completed so that they can practice speaking.

Get more strategies on how to support multilingual students using podcasts and video from our recent webinar with career teacher, consultant, and author Tan K Huynh.

Not only are Listenwise lessons an incredible way to increase your students’ access to interesting and high-quality audio in the classroom, they’re also a way to ensure an equitable education for all.

“Listenwise provides students with high interest and relevant content that allows them to practice listening and responding in a low stakes environment. The content is international and works in newcomer and ELD classes to heighten student’s listening abilities.”

– High School ELD/ELA teacher, CA

In a world that is becoming more digitally inclined all the time, taking advantage of high-quality virtual learning opportunities is of far more benefit to your students than having them listen to a recording you play over your own speakers. Seeing the visuals right in front of their eyes, listening to expert speakers lead a discussion, following along with a transcript, and having the chance to make notes or practice speaking with their peers provides your students with a rich learning experience.

Ready for your students to become expert readers, writers, listeners, and speakers? Check out how our listening comprehension platform can help.

Know students’ current language proficiency

When working with ELLs, teachers need to know where their students are starting from. For schools in the U.S., students speaking a language other than English at home are tested for their English-language fluency before they’re enrolled in a public or charter school. If a student is not fluent, then an LEP (limited English proficiency) plan is created to help track their progress as they learn English.

Students are assigned a level based on their language proficiency (p. 333) on a scale of 1-6 (least proficient to most proficient), with specific learning targets for:

• Interpretive communication, which includes
  • listening
  • reading
  • viewing
• Expressive communication, which includes
  • speaking,
  • writing
  • representing

Teachers who are building skills in either communication mode should have some idea of where EL students are starting, so begin by gathering their LEP plans. EL teachers have the added benefit of being familiar with these fluency assessments to break down the various aspects for a fuller picture of individual students.

However, offering a listening pre-assessment can help determine where to begin if fluency information isn’t available. For intermediate English speakers, Listenwise gives teachers the ability to quiz students on their listening comprehension skills to get a general idea of where to begin. Students listen to a short audio story and then answer questions based on that story.

But students brand new to the language can listen to a short audio clip, work with a small vocabulary list, and identify specific words they hear. They can even draw a picture of what they hear to demonstrate the level of their understanding.

Watch this episode Listenwise Sticky Notes where we share a clip from our webinar with Tan K. Huynh. He shares his approach to teaching multilinguals using podcasts and video using comprehensible input.

Clarify listening learning targets

WIDA’s “can-dos” clarify listening goals for students at each grade level, as well as language proficiency level. For instance, in grades 2-3, students who are moving onto language proficiency level four should be “[illustrating] events in response to audio recordings of stories or poems.”

A teacher targeting a student at that language and grade level could now find an audio clip that details a clear sequence of events and have the student draw pictures about what happened at each step in the story. If they can do more, they are getting more proficient with the language (and their listening skills).

Knowing the target learning goal helps the teacher know to select an audio clip thinking about:

• length (keep it short)
• genre (narrative)
• complexity (simple sequence of events)
• clarity (simple sentences and elementary vocabulary)

Robbi Holdreith, an EL teacher in Minnesota, explains a lesson she created to boost her students’ exposure to – and understanding of – authentic, academic language. With that goal in mind, she selected an interview with Sandra Cisneros from the Listenwise library that helped the class explore LatinX writers. She focused her students on listening strategies like listening again and metacognitive vocabulary identification.

By knowing her goal before she began selecting audio clips, Holdreith was able to target a specific “can do” for her group of students and find an audio interview that perfectly suited her purpose.

When teaching listening, track student progress

Once listening lessons become part of classroom practice, teachers need to keep them going and track student progress as they go. Tracking where students begin with their WIDA “can-dos” is an excellent place for teachers to start. Alternatively, looking to the state ELA standards provides a slightly less language-focused progression but a valuable one, especially for students nearing fluency.

As listening goals are identified, taught, and assessed, teachers and students can track student progress on each learning target. Students should be encouraged to reflect on their progress and metacognitively assess what’s working and what’s not in their own learning.

If students are successful overall, wonderful. Move on to the next skill. If students clearly need additional support, teaching specific listening comprehension skills helps support that learning target, reassess, and move on.

One overlooked vital element to assessing listening comprehension skills is to note that while listening assessment mirrors reading assessment in a lot of ways, there are some differences. Listening to an audio story provides more information than reading the transcript, which can change a listener’s understanding of the main idea, for example.

Not all classes are alike

While there is almost no way to cover all ideas, one further consideration of how to teach listening skills to ESL students is class type. While the tips above are aligned to most classes with ELLs, an ESL teacher will have more familiarity with language proficiency protocols and have a much stronger focus on listening comprehension skill support.

It might be more prudent for a teacher in ELL classrooms to focus on grouping within the class. Small-group or individual listening activities to help students with specific instruction or additional scaffolding while intentional grouping – both heterogeneous and homogenous- by language level or interest can encourage students to work outside of their comfort zones.

On the other hand, a regular classroom teacher may only have one or two EL students in her classroom. While grouping should always be on the list of strategies, classroom teachers can help EL students with the small extra step of adding a listening and speaking goal to the daily lesson. What word did they hear that they didn’t understand? Did they recognize when the teacher used a word on the vocabulary list? It can be as small as listening to their classmates and giving one solid response in English.

Teachers tend to overestimate how significant an activity needs to be to have value, and especially when it comes to listening comprehension for ESL students, there is high value in the little things done intentionally.

Watch Erin Reaves share how Listenwise has complemented her curriculum and gotten her students excited to be engaged in their learning.

According to Yilmaz & Yavuz (2015), there are several difficulties in listening comprehension that teachers can help students with:

1. Difficulty remembering what they listened to
2. Understanding the speaker’s accent or rate of speed
3. Limited listener vocabulary

Remembering the information

Many students struggle with listening comprehension assessments because they don’t remember the information they may have just listened to. There are many reasons that a student might have difficulty remembering something that they just listened to. They might have trouble because the clip is longer than they’re used to tracking, the student might be diagnosed with ADHD or an auditory processing difficulty, or they might have an underlying learning disorder.

For the most part, all these reasons come down to a single issue: lack of focus.

1. Start short and work your way to longer clips.

Listening comprehension requires a fair bit of stamina, but stamina is not built overnight. If students are struggling with longer audio clips, the natural response is to shorten them. Teachers could break longer clips into various pieces, or, alternatively, teachers could start with smaller clips and work their way up to longer ones.

2. Teach students active listening skills.

Teachers know when a student has parents who encourage active listening skills at home. They always seem to get directions on the first try, and they seem to be listening to everything that’s going on in the classroom.

Many students, though, haven’t had the reinforcement at home to get used to the assortment of actions and habits that make up active listening. Conditions like ADHD and auditory processing disorders can also disrupt students’ focus, causing them to miss important information or get distracted by thoughts, movements, or their environment.

The time spent teaching and practicing active listening strategies should never be denounced or overlooked. The time spent to teach and practice active listening strategies always pays dividends in increased listening comprehension.

3. Incorporate graphic organizers.

Teachers tend to assume that notetaking is a natural activity, but it’s another that needs some focused instructional attention in the classroom.

The benefit of graphic organizers is twofold: organizers can support students in choosing which information to write to be able to remember what was said, and they help students illustrate the relationships between the various story elements.

Teachers can begin by offering pre-designed graphic organizers that students can fill in as they listen. But taking time to help students analyze why a particular graphic organizer helps students understand a particular story builds students’ capacity to choose organizers that suit what they are listening to independently.

Speaker accent and rate of speed

One of the biggest challenges to overcome, especially for ELLs, is understanding the speaker’s delivery. A radio broadcast journalist from Atlanta is going to pronounce many words differently than a journalist from Nigeria, and this can often provide challenges for students who are still developing phonemic awareness in English.

1. Choose audio clips with a neutral American accent or an accent the students are used to.

Sometimes the best teaching strategies consist of choosing materials wisely. If students are new to a language or listening to comprehend, strong regional or foreign accents can throw them for a loop. Begin where they are and with what they already know.

As they listen to texts more and more often, begin slowly incorporating other voices.

Using class discussion or written reflections, the teacher can then guide students to an understanding of:

• Second-language speakers and accents
• How various languages are similar and different
• Why people speak the same language differently in different parts of the country
• Empathy and respect for difference

Students must be aware that people will speak differently in different places, and it helps to get them to think about the idea that everyone has an accent. Theirs is just very common for them to hear. A global education helps build empathy and understanding for others, showing students that we don’t exist in isolation and that our way is only one way.

2. Use audio clips with built-in transcripts and speed controls.

When students struggle to keep up with a speaker, reinforcing the listening with closed captions or a transcript can support listeners when necessary.

Teachers need to understand their state and district tests to know whether students will be allowed the support of textual reinforcement of what they hear. However, even if students must listen without visual support on the exam, it is perfectly appropriate to build listening capacity with transcripts and slowly remove them through the year (or as appropriate).

Audio speed control can also slow down (or speed up) the audio clip for better listening comprehension, depending on the student or class. If a moderately proficient ESL student can slow down the text to increase processing time, they stand a far better chance of being successful on the assessment.

Listenwise offers teachers high-quality audio with assessments already created for teachers. It includes transcripts and listening speed controls to customize the experience for each student.

Limited listener vocabulary

For students with limited background knowledge and vocabulary, listening to a news story might be especially frustrating if they can’t understand most of the individual words used to relate events.

Young learners may not feel any shyness asking about words or ideas they don’t know about. However, older students often feel shame and embarrassment when they don’t know something that the students around them do.

1. Frontload challenging (and not-so-challenging) vocabulary.

The surest way to increase vocabulary is to provide words to look for before listening. But knowing what words to choose requires a solid understanding of their own students.

A general procedure for this kind of vocabulary building might look like this:

• Give students a list of words with which the teacher thinks most students are unfamiliar.
• Explain them before listening.
• Have students raise their hands when they hear a word used.
• Listen again, and have students use a thumbs up or down signal to indicate whether they understand the words when they occur in the clip.
• Review troubling vocabulary afterward.

However, students who have more difficulties may benefit from common words being thrown into that vocabulary list. Teachers can have a specific student in mind when choosing vocabulary for the whole class–perhaps an ELL student, a student who has had an interrupted education, or even a student who was artificially promoted and is struggling to keep up with the class.

It doesn’t require them to speak or call out attention to themselves when they don’t know the words, but they learn them all the same.

2. Use leveled audio texts.

For students with listening comprehension difficulties, the teacher could search for a closely related audio text with a lower level of complexity for that individual student. She could also provide a supplemental clip to provide individual students with essential background knowledge and vocabulary to participate more easily with the class.

Listenwise’s leveled audio assignments make it so easy to target individual learner needs that teachers can be assured that they’re not leaving students behind.

Listening and reading skills are closely related, but how do they interact?

For years, schools have been chasing down the reasons behind dropping scores on the national assessment for educational progress (NAEP). In fact, in 2019, the NAEP reading assessment showed that two out of three students did not meet the standard for reading proficiency in either the fourth or the eighth grade.

Despite all of the intense focus on literacy instruction over the past two decades, Reading scores have not improved significantly overall.

But what if there is a missing piece of the literacy puzzle?

The literacy mindset

Interpretive communication consists of methods that allow a student to receive and interpret information. There has been much-focused attention on various forms of reading instruction to support students who aren’t reading on grade level.

The various literacy and reading instruction camps might find that incorporating listening strategies could be a missing link to helping students make strides in their reading comprehension since reading and listening skills are so deeply intertwined.

Think of structured reading classes with texts at a specific reading level and instruction that focuses on identifying the main idea or inferring information about a character. Students who listen to a story might try the same exercises with even more success and learn to apply those skills to their reading.

Even with this sustained focus on literacy skills, reading scores haven’t budged. Researchers are now finding that the answer may not be a sustained, isolated focus on reading comprehension of the recent past.

Where listening and reading comprehension meet

The simple view of reading, developed by Gough and Tumner in the 1980s, theorizes that students’ ability to understand what they read depends on both decoding and oral language comprehension.

In other words, a student must not only be able to look at a word and read it off the page. They must also have an understanding of the word’s meaning, its associations, and its context.

Surprisingly, many students who struggle with reading comprehension can easily comprehend a passage that they listened to and answer questions about it. When listening to a text, students don’t worry about what the word looks like on a page. They gather the information they need through listening.

Stitch and James (1984) find evidence strongly suggesting that children’s listening comprehension typically outpaces reading comprehension until the middle school years when students are mostly “reading to learn” rather than “learning to read.”

Monica Brady-Myerov, the founder of Listenwise, tells the story of listening to an NPR broadcast in the car with her seven-year-old daughter. She assumed that her daughter would be “tuning it out,“ but after listening to the piece about CIA torture, her daughter asked, “What is waterboarding?“

She had been listening the whole time and understanding it – at least mostly. What she lacked was background information and vocabulary. She probably would not have been able to comprehend a transcript of the same radio broadcast.

This is the case for many students who have been labeled struggling readers.

Boosting listening and reading comprehension

Luckily, improving listening comprehension is no more difficult than working with reading comprehension. Listenwise offers audio material paired with questions, graphic organizers, and quizzes that are intentionally similar to the tasks a reading comprehension assessment would ask of students. In fact, teachers who are new to deliberately including listening comprehension in their lessons might be surprised to see how closely their listening activities mirror reading activities.

Students listening to a podcast, for instance, would summarize the piece and identify the main idea, essential vocabulary, speaker’s purpose, point of view, et cetera. Once students begin to absorb information on the first listen, they’re really on their way toward improvement.

Suppose students can listen to and comprehend audio texts that are more advanced than they would be able to read. In that case, they are then exposed to more advanced vocabulary, ideas, and life situations that their lower reading level might afford if only reading printed texts.

A study published in 2020 found that increasing time spent teaching generalized reading strategies did not improve reading ability, but increased instructional time focused on learning content knowledge in social studies did. Students need exposure to a broad range of vocabulary and background knowledge and understanding of the world to have an easier time making sense of advanced reading material.

A trifecta of literacy

Is content-area knowledge and a solid vocabulary base the key to better reading scores overall? Right now, the answer is we don’t know.

• Listening opportunities offer access to a wider range of instructional texts;
• A more comprehensive range of texts means more background knowledge and a more substantial vocabulary base;
• A wider range of background knowledge and vocabulary improves reading comprehension.

Providing listening opportunities could be as simple as finding a radio broadcast or a podcast to replace a written news article or as involved as committing to using a monthly podcast in the classroom. Then follow up with a related written text.

Or combine them entirely! Listening while reading (LWR) is a strategy that has students read the text simultaneously along with an audio recording of the same text.

There are many benefits to having students listen to the text they’re reading while they’re reading it. For instance, ESL students increase their English fluency, and all students experience greater comprehension overall.  By meeting students with both skills combined, teachers are using listening to effectively support students’ cognitive load while reading complex texts.

With listening and reading skills so closely related, it makes sense to bring them together so that the skills can begin to augment one another.

Read more research-based strategies in Brady-Myerov’s book Listen Wise: Teach Students to be Better Listeners.

Research on how to improve listening comprehension skills explains that listening, along with the ability to decode words, is one of the essential building blocks to excellent reading comprehension. Reading and listening are inherently linked, and they are developed in very similar ways, which is good news for students.

Teachers are starting to get better about including explicit instruction on listening. While speaking and listening skills have been listed in state standards and the Common Core for over a decade, state testing of listening comprehension is only now beginning to catch up as more and more districts make the switch to digitally-delivered exams. Of course, there’s more information about how to – prepare for state listening exams here.

Why do we need to be good listeners? We know that listening is critical to effective human communication. It’s so essential that many believe listening develops naturally.

In some respects, this is true. When small children grow up in households that encourage demonstration of good listening, they tend to repeat those actions naturally while in school. Parents might ask a child to repeat back directions regularly. Or they might read stories out loud together. Maybe they’ll listen to the radio in the car and talk about things they heard.

Many students, however, do not come to school with the skills already in place. Therefore, teachers need to learn how to improve listening comprehension skills for kids who, for whatever reason, may need more instruction and practice.

Improving Listening Comprehension with Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are perfect for determining starting places. They don’t need to be intensive, and there are plenty of ready-made options to give teachers data to ascertain students’ listening comprehension levels.

They also provide an opportunity to assess why students might have lower listening comprehension skills. Listening is made up of three interconnected elements:

• Hearing – the physical element of listening; the ability to discern sounds; phonemic awareness
• Attention – the mental discipline and skills to focus on specific sounds and to block out other environmental stimuli
• Comprehension – the ability to make sense of the ideas being related via others’ speech

Formative assessment can help identify areas students might need extra attention and identify specific students who might need a specialist’s help (low hearing ability, language delays, ADHD, etc.).

There is a lot of flexibility in teaching listening at different grade levels. It’s always surprising how much high school students enjoy the occasional game of Simon Says! But knowing which element of listening to focus on, teachers can focus on various strategies to help their students make better sense of information obtained by listening.

Listening for kids in grades K-5

The younger the student, the more the focus needs to be on hearing and processing language, and turning these exercises into games is a time-honored way to get kids on board.

Read a sentence. What do students hear? Can they identify word pieces? Teachers could also have students close their eyes while listening to a sound chosen by the teacher. Can they identify the sound?

Blending hearing with attention, a teacher might have a classroom procedure to say directions and have students repeat them back to make sure they both heard and paid attention. As students get older, teachers can encourage the responsibility of paying attention to spoken directions by not repeating directions for students on demand. Instead, students who missed directions the first time ask their classmates; the teacher is available if no classmates can help the student.

Games like Simon Says! and Red Light-Green Light are fun ways to get young kids on their feet and practice listening and paying attention. Find other excellent listening comprehension exercise ideas here.

Finally, offering students opportunities to listen and respond is the keenest way to encourage comprehension skills and attention. Students can listen to a radio broadcast or a podcast and have a class discussion afterward (Listenwise combines podcasts with ready-made listening comprehension quizzes). Or they can read a book out loud together and have students recall facts and details, discuss vocabulary in context, or even make inferences about the characters.

Listening for kids in grades 6-12

It’s tempting for middle and high school teachers to assume that all student impairments were caught in elementary school with their battery of testing and specialists. But some issues like dyslexia, ADHD, hearing loss, and certain specific learning disabilities can hide from classroom teachers and parents.

In upper grades, including specific listening material in lessons is the best way to incorporate listening comprehension instruction into the curriculum. If teachers notice that a student is really struggling, they shouldn’t shrug it off. Soliciting special education services can sometimes pinpoint an underlying reason that a student is having difficulties. Then additional supports can be arranged.

As students progress through middle and high school, they should be expanding their listening comprehension skills to determine the purpose of listening and the speaker’s reasoning, identify evidence (or a lack thereof), and draw conclusions.

And older kids still need support focusing their attention! Instruction and review of good note taking habits and listening behaviors (like when multitasking is or isn’t appropriate) can guide students toward better listening comprehension skills.

Looking for strategies on how to teach listening skills to English learners? 

Improving listening comprehension takes practice.

Good listening comprehension supports good reading comprehension (and has proven to increase test scores). While using different strategies across age groups will always be a judgment call, there are some things to keep in mind for students of any age when working to improve their listening comprehension skills.

• Start small. Meet students where they are. If they are younger or clearly behind, it might be a great idea to start with audio clips instead of complete broadcasts. Work up to longer audio texts.
• Practice regularly. Regular practice will help improve listening comprehension skills for kids at any age. Make it part of the daily or weekly plan rather than an afterthought in the curriculum.
• Make it authentic. Students know when they’re being given busy work. Make sure that the listening is valuable and relevant with audiobooks, radio broadcasts, and podcasts. Many students listen to these on their own outside of school and will often see more value in their use than a contrived “listening exercise.”

When discussing listening comprehension, education professionals often think of it as a single skill. In reality, however, it makes more sense to think of listening as related skill sets:

• Passive listening or appreciative listening – oral reading, theater, music
• Discriminative listening – distinguishing sounds, phonemes, and non-verbal cues
• Informational or precise listening – finding details, retelling, sequencing
• Strategic listening – finding the main idea, summarizing, inferring
• Critical listening – analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating

Those skills need to be explicitly taught and practiced in multiple ways throughout a student’s school experience for them to really grasp the nuances. Four of the five skills are grouped in what some people may call active listening. We will explore the five different listening categories below.

Defining listening comprehension

When teachers and administrators discuss developing student listening comprehension skills, they tend to lump all listening skills together. However, Dr. Sophie Haroutunian-Gordan (2011) at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy explains that there are four elements to which listening comprehension can be attributed:

• the goal of the listener in that specific situation
• the situation in which the listening is happening
• the role the listener takes, and
• the relationship between the speaker and the listener.

Generally, listening can be broken down into a few types.

Appreciative or passive listening comprehension

Passive listening – sometimes called appreciative listening – gets a bad rap amongst educators, but it’s what most of us do while we listen to a podcast while we’re driving or an audiobook while we walk the dog. Passive doesn’t mean not listening – it’s just listening with a different purpose. Perhaps strictly for entertainment, perhaps to learn informally, maybe even to reduce the number of outside distractions.

Passive listening is generally motivated by the listener’s personal, informal interest. It’s important to note that passive listening usually still results in some comprehension and learning.

There also seem to be benefits to passive listening in language learning. Dr. Paul Sultzberger ran a study out of Victoria University in New Zealand that explains that passively listening to a spoken language – even if you don’t understand the word meanings – creates connections between sound patterns and words that are critical to learning and fluency.

Active listening comprehension

Active listening is generally where most teachers focus their attention when working with students. The listener is often expected to do something with the information they’re listening to, and so it must be processed differently than just hearing it in the background.

To comprehend and incorporate information gathered through listening, teachers need to encourage students to make listening the primary activity – not something they’re doing while they’re doing something else.

While there are many ways to break down the various types of listening (e.g., Opitz & Zbaracki’s Listen Hear! framework ), active listening can be broken down into the following categories:

Discriminative listening

Discriminative listening is when the listener determines and defines both auditory and visual information. It involves distinguishing among sounds, identifying their sources, and using nonverbal communication to contextualize them.

If a child is playing on a busy playground and hears someone yell her name, she will look up to see if her mother called her. Discriminative listening encompasses:

• hearing her name (determining that a sound applies to her),
• looking around to see her mother was sitting on a bench reading (visual cue indicating the sound does not apply to her), and
• seeing another parent nearby calling their child with the same name (defining the sound and using visual information to confirm its applicability).

Discriminative listening also incorporates how a message is delivered. For instance, a student who speaks only Romanian attending an English-speaking classroom in the U.S. might pay attention to the teacher’s facial expressions and body language to determine what is happening and what they should be doing.

With so many schools increasing their focus on social-emotional learning (SEL), defining and teaching discriminative listening comprehension is an underused avenue toward helping students navigate social situations, such as those involving intent and irony.

Precise listening or informational listening

Generally employed when students listen but defer any critical analysis or processing, precise listening is simply information gathering.

Students might be listening to a lecture or podcast in the classroom, attending a classmate’s speech, or even watching a group of classmates perform. Note taking is often an activity that demonstrates informational listening comprehension because it preserves thoughts and ideas to be analyzed at a later time.

However, after informational listening, students should be able to define what they listened to, perhaps even paraphrasing some of it. The key indicator is that students haven’t had the time or need to analyze the information.

Strategic listening

When students are listening strategically, they actively look for connections to their own knowledge and try to make sense of the information. They can generally summarize, identify the main idea, make inferences and connections, as well as compare and contrast the information against what they know.

In a classroom, a teacher might be reading a story to the students and asking them questions along the way:

• What did the main character look like?
• Why did the main character make that decision?
• Do you know another story like this one?
• Describe the story in one sentence.

All of these tasks make sure the students actually understood and could make sense of what they were listening to.

Critical listening

Critical listening is evaluative in nature. The listener is making judgments and measuring new information against current information to make decisions or ask the next question.

Students are often critically listening when they engage in classroom or group discussions, project planning with other students, or engaged in debate because they must not only listen, but respond with the delivered information in mind.

If you’re trying to teach active listening skills to kids, this is a great place to start.

Eight key listening comprehension skills

To promote student proficiency in listening comprehension, Listenwise has identified eight key listening comprehension skills, which align with Common Core State Standards and Smarter Balanced Assessment evidence statements.

Eight key listening comprehension skills assessed through Listenwise quizzes:

• Recognizing literal meaning. Questions about facts, details, or information explicitly stated in the audio story.
• Understanding vocabulary. Questions about the meanings of words as they are used in the context of the audio story.
• Making inferences. Questions asking students to make inferences as they listen to audio stories, interpreting what is said by going beyond the literal meaning.
• Identifying the main idea. Questions asking students to identify the central idea or gist of an audio story.
• Determining purpose. Questions asking students to determine the purpose of an audio story.
• Drawing conclusions. Questions asking students to draw conclusions by synthesizing information in an audio story.
• Analyzing reasoning. Questions asking students to analyze reasoning supporting a claim in an audio story.
• Finding evidence. Questions asking students to identify statements or details in an audio story that provide evidence to support claims or conclusions.

There’s value in building active listening comprehension skills

Listening skills are increasingly crucial to success in college and careers. The 2017 GMAC survey of 1,000 employers indicated that listening is the 2nd highest skill employers want from new hires. However, knowing that student listening needs to be improved and going about it are two very different things.

For years, it’s been challenging to find specific strategies that teachers can employ in the classroom to increase student listening comprehension. Teachers might create individual listening exercises for their students on a given day, but there’s often little opportunity to reinforce any skills developed (or demonstrated).

One of the challenges to teaching listening, especially at the higher grade levels, is the insistence that teachers “don’t grade behavior.” When listening is seen as a behavior, it’s challenging to incorporate lessons to improve it in the same way a teacher might approach reading comprehension.

One way to deal with this mindset is for teachers to set specific listening goals for their lessons; then, it becomes a standards measurement.

And with the proliferation of online exams, many states have begun to add listening comprehension to their end-of-year state tests.

All of this means more schools and districts are looking for tools to support the development of their students’ listening comprehension skills.

So what next?

Need some quick instructional strategies to get students’ listening ears on?

• Specific approaches for how to teach listening comprehension skills
• Critical listening exercises
• Preparing students for listening comprehension tests
• Download the Literacy Coach’s Toolkit: Proven Strategies for Teaching Listening Comprehension

Try bringing podcasts into your teaching using Listenwise, an online platform that supports equitable learning with easy-to-use podcast lessons and comprehension quizzes for grades 2-12.

Critical listening and strategic listening are vital pieces to building active listening comprehension – and are especially crucial to both success on listening exams and in the classroom, generally.
Strategic listening asks students to listen to identify and process what they’ve heard, while critical listening asks the listener not only for comprehension of the message but also for evaluation.

Using critical thinking in listening might include analyzing a message to identify gaps in logic and reasoning, identifying and analyzing speaker bias, distinguishing between fact and opinion, and detecting propaganda techniques.

Why is teaching critical listening so challenging?

Haroutunian-Gordan’s (2011) identified four interrelated elements of listening (the listener’s goal, the situation, the role the listener takes, and the relationship between the speaker and listener), and there can often be a disconnect between teachers’ expectations and students’ beliefs about each.

Consider this pairing during a whole-class discussion:

Even though we tend to believe that listening is one of the most important foundational skills, it is very often neglected within school curriculums (although at least 22 states now test listening). Teachers talk of curriculums that are so tightly packed with other content that they rarely have time to teach soft skills like critical thinking in listening. However, there is also a lack of concrete, applicable strategies that teachers can use to improve students’ critical listening skills (Erkek & Batur, 2019).

Paired with the current prevalent idea that teachers “shouldn’t grade behavior,” listening becomes an activity that happens by chance rather than a deliberate skill to be planned and practiced, especially at the higher grade levels.

Strategic and critical listening skills exercises

It can be challenging for teachers to find specific activities to focus on these components. There are many lists of tips to improve cognitive listening comprehension, but few include clearly-defined student exercises to accomplish critical listening goals in the classroom.

Below are several specific listening skills exercises suggestions to improve comprehension, paired with classroom activities.

Distinguish between facts and opinions

One of the essential individual components of critical listening is the ability to recognize the difference between assertions of fact and assertions of opinion. It is also important to recognize when our own views might be clouding our understanding or reception.

Erkek & Batur (2019), Turkish researchers who identified specific classroom exercises to boost critical listening comprehension, suggest that guided student government activities might provide excellent critical listening examples for students.

Student government provides the perfect opportunity for students to listen critically to campaign platforms and student speeches. Teachers, then, can engage the voting student population to recall and analyze each candidate’s assertions and campaign promises. Students can write statements they remember on the board, then sort them in a t-chart: which are fact-based assertions, and which are assertions of opinion?

Then, the teacher can model critical thinking by guiding the class through what is possible given school rules. Are the campaign promises based on factual information, or are they based on the students’ feelings and opinions? Students can then discuss in small groups or cast ballots based on their improved understanding.

The goal here is both analysis and evaluation of the stated assertions through critical thinking in listening. So if students have shown that they understand the speaker’s role and can distinguish between the speaker’s factual statements and assertions of opinion, then the activity was successful.

Understanding bias and assumptions

Assumptions are gaps in logical reasoning that lead to feeling a certain way about a topic or group. We might look at a student who sleeps during class and assume that they are unmotivated without having all the facts that lead to this action in the classroom. Spotting the assumptions of others can help us communicate more clearly, ourselves.

One way to enhance students’ critical thinking in listening is to present them with oral stories or roleplay scenarios featuring one person’s assumptions. For instance, to introduce the plot of Othello to students, a pair of students is given a scenario to perform for the class where one friend tries to convince the other that his girlfriend might not be loyal. Then another pair performs an improv skit where one tries to convince the other that their significant other has been “checking out” another guy (Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Twelfth Night and Othello. Folgers Shakespeare Library. 1995) .

Then the class discusses the various assumptions and implications of the different parties – of course, driving to a preview of what they’ll be studying in Othello. But allowing students to listen to the scenarios allows for practice with acquiring information to process critically apart from reading.

Improving logic and reasoning skills

One of the more challenging skills to teach is reasoning. Even adults have trouble identifying the logic and reasoning of various statements. But if we can get students to at least consider and question supporting details, then we’re off to a good start.

So, how is listening connected to critical thinking? Erkek and Batur (2019) offer an exercise that presents a situation for students to listen to: an eight-year-old boy describes his morning preparing to sell bagels while watching other children go to school (p. 643). The boy is sweet and honest while explaining what is clearly a typical morning for him.

Students applying critical listening should be able to identify the problem with the story, which is, of course, that an eight-year-old boy is working instead of going to school.

Offering situations that allow students to identify a line of reasoning or identify gaps or problems within a presented sequence gives them opportunities to practice acquiring information through listening but holding it long enough to analyze it.

Hold up new ideas next to old ones

Being able to relate new information to ideas students already hold – essentially, making comparisons – is the hallmark of a good teacher and a good reporter. Students who are practicing critical listening can use recorded material like an NPR radio news story to gather information and then clearly explain it to another student (or in a recorded video) in terms that they understand.

Alternatively, a teacher might present two radio news stories on the same topic. Students could identify why they might accept one as more believable than another (considering tone, word choice, assertions, etc.)

Be receptive to new ideas and perspectives

Often, students get especially invested in their own perceptions of situations, but good critical listening requires an open mind. One way to practice seeing alternative perspectives is to explore them through familiar stories.

Students could listen to a familiar story like “Little Red Riding Hood,” then retell the story from various other characters’ perspectives. Students might tell the story from the wolf’s perspective or the woodsman’s.

When students listen to their classmates’ stories, the teacher could have them evaluate the authenticity of the stories in relation to the original story. They could also consider the variations in stories written by all the students who chose to write from the grandmother’s point of view, for instance.

Students should be encouraged to reflect on what surprised them about their classmates’ retellings.

The relationship between critical thinking and critical listening

At this point, we could be forgiven for thinking that there’s no difference between critical thinking and critical listening – and in some respects, we’d be right. In developing critical listening comprehension, what we’re really doing is building critical thinking.

However, what most of us think of as critical thinking is actually critical reading. Whether critically reading or listening, we are taking information from the outside and bringing it in to analyze it against what we already know.

Rather than always relying on critical reading, teachers have a clear opportunity to integrate more listening practice, and these listening skills exercises are a wonderful place to start. Teachers can then begin finding additional opportunities to shift critical thinking exercises from reading to listening to ensure more equal distribution.

Focusing on helping students acquire information from listening as well as reading results in more balanced skill development and students who understand that their own actions can dictate their learning.