Listen A Minute: free listening and reading material with some great extra games

If you are looking for reading and listening content for levels around PET (A2) then you might like to take a look at the website Listen a Minute. It offers free texts, listening materials and exercises but perhaps most interesting some nice online activities that the students really seem to engage with. What’s more all the material are free and easy to access.
Listen a Minute-The Basics
Essentially Listen a Minute provides you with lots of free listening and reading material. Open the site, click on a topic and you will see some text and a below a few exercises. This is only the ‘Quick View’ so you can scroll down and look at what exercises come with the text. You can also play the listening by clicking on the ‘Listen’ button. If you right click on the link, you can also download the listening file and save it on your computer. This is sometimes easier if you are going to use the listening material in the class, as you don’t need to have an internet copy.
I have used this material extensively in my lessons. The best things to do is to click on the PDF or Word versions of the hand-out as they don’t have any advertisements and are ready to be photocopied or cut up. I don’t always use all the material; I sometimes just select certain things.
Listen a Minute-The Extra Stuff
The basic material is great and can be very useful but what I really like are the extra games that are also available. Let me start by just explaining the extra games to you. They are called Quiz 1 and Quiz 2.

Quiz one
In Quiz one the students need to rebuild the whole text sentence by sentence. They can do this after they have listened to the text a few times or read the text a few times and perhaps done some of the exercises. I always ask them to do Quiz One in pairs or in groups of 3. The students have to read the sentences and choose the best answer. They slowly have to rebuild the whole text sentence by sentence. In doing this, they will be doing lots of reading, thinking about word order, syntax and grammar. The quiz automatically keeps a record of how many correct sentences and wrong sentences the students choose. I find the students really get engaged in this activity but it is important they are already really familiar with the text.
Quiz two
For some reason, my students love this game. Again I always do this activity in pairs/groups of three once the students are familiar with the text. The students have to think of all the words in the text and try and rebuild the text word by word. Students write in a word that they think is in the text, press the button and the word will appear in the text if it is in the text or appear on the left if the word is not in the text. For some reason my students love this activity and it generates lots of brainstorming of vocabulary. It is a sort of ‘dictogloss’ where students rebuild a text word by word.
A lesson plan
I am going to describe a lesson plan that I have used many times when working with Listen a Minute. I am going to use the example of ‘Calories’ which is one of the topics in Listen a Minute.
This is only the basic plan. Obviously I provide feedback at certain points. It practices lots of skills for including listening at different levels, note-taking, writing, vocabulary brainstorming, grammar, syntax, word order and speaking.

How to use Listen and Write

This is a quick video that shows you how to use Listen and Write:

http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/language-learning-content-sites/listen-a-minute.html

 

Russell Stannard

Educational Director

NILE associate trainer ( Norwich Institute for Language Education)

Winner of:

Times Higher Outstanding Initiative in ICT

British Council ELTons award for technology

University of Westminster Excellence in Teaching and Learning

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