Now, you are going to listen to a passage, which tells you why Tom is so angry about the restaurant. In this way, students can be aware of the purpose of the exercise in general and the nature of the specific task in particular before they listen to the passage. Above all, it makes students feel interested and gets them involved in the listening activities. Using Pictures I often use pictures in listening class. Pictures have the advantage of being easy to prepare, easy to organize, being interesting, meaningful and authentic.
Pictures can bring images of reality into the unnatural world of the language classroom.
Pictures are useful in developing students' listening comprehension, particularly 'directed listening' They not only help to guide the student' listening, they can provide a general background and context. They especially contribute to interest and motivation. Tell them that they have pictures that are very different from each other, and ask them to describe these pictures to each other with the aim of finding as many similarities as they can. After several minutes, ask them to look at the two pictures and see what other similarities they can find. Sometimes, I read descriptions of faces, maps, diagrams for students to draw.