Improving ESL Listening Skills

The following is a speech I gave at my regional teacher’s conference in Japan, on the topic of improving English listening skills. Whilst it was obviously intended for a Japanese audience, I hope it may be useful for ESL teachers and ESL assistant teachers in many countries.

I had a very tight wordcount, so apologies if it sounds a little strange.

Improving Listening — an ALT’s Perspective

Whilst listening seemed okay in lessons, in the corridors students could not understand simple conversation, and gave up attempting to converse very easily. Natural English, at any speed, was difficult to impossible for them to follow. It was very important to find out what their issue was, as they did well in my games and quizzes when the topic stayed within recent textbook English.

Photo by Ling App on Unsplash

First, I looked at individual sounds. Although r and l errors are common in the speech of native Japanese speakers, they actually do not hinder comprehension when speaking to a native half as much as other mistakes.. For example ‘s’ errors, i vs e, and th, s, and sh sounds. (Lindsay, 2018).

Then, I used a karuta style game to have them listen to individual words that contained common errors, for example ‘leaf’ vs ‘leave’ or ‘He’s’ vs ‘his’. I chose pairs of words I had noticed students of all years making in lessons. After…