Improving listening skills through student-generated listening activities

Listening skills have long been considered the most used of the four skills of language (White, 2006;Scarcella & Oxford, 1992).However, despite the importance of teaching listening skills, it has also been noted that listening is often overlooked in language classrooms (Nunan, 1997;White, 2006).There are several reasons for this.Many teachers feel that listening skill is acquired naturally by teaching speaking and reading and that students will just develop listening skills through conversation with peers or by simply listening to the instructor.There is also a complaint that despite the multitude of online listening materials available, there is limited access to level-appropriate listening material.This paper looks at a project to develop student listening ability without relying on material that comes from textbooks or online resources.This paper will focus on three activities in which students created their own listening materials in order to recognize the rhythmic structure of English, the functions of stress and intonation to convey information, typical word order patterns, and vocabulary used in common conversational topics.