Listening activities, in general, should consist of some well-structured pre-, while-, and post-listening stages.

The pre-listening phase is a kind of preparatory work which can make the context explicit, clarify purposes and establish roles, procedures and goals for listening.

1. Pre Listening

In real life situations a listener almost always knows in advance something which is going to be said, who is speaking or what the subject is going to be about. The prelistening stage helps learners to find out the aim of listening and provides the necessary background information.

Pre-listening work can consist of a whole range of activities, including:

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the teacher giving background information; the students reading something relevant; the students looking at pictures; discussion and answer session; written exercises; following instructions for the while-listening activity; consideration of how the while-listening activity will be done

2. While Listening

While-listening activities can be shortly defined as all tasks that students are asked to do during the time of listening to the text. The nature of these activities is to help learners to listen for meaning, which is to elicit a message from spoken language.

The aim of activity do in the while-listening stage is to help students understand the message of the text not catching every word, they need to understand enough to collect the necessary information. While-listening exercises should be interesting and challenging, they should guide the students to handle the information and messages from the listening text.

There are a few suggestions activity for this stage:

o comparing the listening passage with the pre-listening phase o Obeying instructions; where students are given certain instructions and show their understanding by a physical response (they draw, write, tick, underline etc.) o filling in gaps; while listening to a dialogue students hear only the utterances of one of the speakers and are asked to write down those of the others o detecting differences or mistakes from a listening passage; students respond only when they encounter something different or contrary to what they already knew about the topic or the speakers

o ticking off items (bingo); where students listen a list of words and categorize (tick off) them as they hear o Information transfer; where students have to fill grids, forms, lists, maps, plans etc. o sequencing; where students are asked to give the right order of a series of pictures o information search; that is listening for specific items, e.g. answer a particular question from the pre-listening stage o filling in blanks of a transcript of a passage with the words missing (e.g. lyrics of a song) o matching the items which have the same or opposite meaning as those the students hear, or matching the pictures with the descriptions heard.

3. Post Listening

The post-listening stage comprises all the exercises which are done after listening to the text. Some of these activities may be the extensions of those carried out at pre- and while-listening work but some may not be related to them at all and present a totally independent part of the listening session.

Post-listening activities allow the learners to reflect on the language from the passage; on sound, grammar and vocabulary as they last longer than whilelistening activities so the students have time to think, discuss or write.

Post-listening exercises should be interesting and motivating. Before a teacher chooses a certain activity he/she must consider how much language work they wish to do with the particular listening passage. How much time they will need to do a particular post-listening task; whether the post-listening stage will include speaking (discussion), reading or writing (ticking, writing short notes, dialogues or essays) and whether they want students to work individually, in pairs or in groups

Many post-listening activities are the prolongation of the while-listening work but in such a case the while listening stage should be a matrix for the post-listening tasks which are usually more complex and require more time o write, read or speak, since there is not much time for reflection during the while-listening stage.

Here a few post listening activities suggested:

o Answering multiple-choice or true/false questions to show comprehension of messages. o Problem solving activities during which students hear all the information relevant to a particular problem and then try to solve it by themselves. o Summarising, students are given several possible summary sentences and are asked to say which of them fit a recording. Summarising can also be done by elaborating the notes made by students themselves during the whilelistening activities or by depending on their memory; o Jigsaw listening, this term was firs coined by Marion Geddes and Gill Sturtridge in the late 1970s to describe a listening exercise during which different groups of students listen to different but connected passages and then the groups exchange information in order to complete a story to perform a certain task letters, telegrams, postcards, messages etc. as a follow-up to listening activities;

Conclusion

However, teachers need to prepare learners psychologically for the listening activity, telling them that they will not be able to understand everything they hear, and that they should not panic because of this problem.