This site includes three video clips for beginning to intermediate levels and several exercises for the three stages of listening. Each video clip is accompanied by activities relating to the three phrases of listening: pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities. The listening phrase is comprised of global-listening (listen for the main idea or the gist), specific-listening (listen for detailed information) activities, and post-listening (integrated skills) activities.

As a teacher, you can either:

1) assign students to view and do listening activities in this site at home to practice listening comprehension and have them submit the post-listening activities as homework.

2) introduce chosen video clip in class and start with pre-listening/viewing activities. If your class session is only 45-50 minutes long, you can have students do global activities next, then assign specific-listening activities and the written post-listening activities as homework. The next class session can be devoted to review the video clip together, discuss any related culture notes, and do the oral post-listening activites in pairs or in groups.

However, there are several ways for you and your students to make the most of the listening comprehension exercises offered on this site.

1) Listen and watch first:
This is the most challenging technique. If you’d like to get an idea how good your students' listening skills are and/or if you feel comfortable with their listening skills, let them follow the viewing and listening activities as instructed to see how much they understand by doing the related exercises. Remember to emphasize that they do not have to understand everything they hear in order to have general comprehension of the scenario and complete the exercises. They should get the keywords then guess what have been said based on context and visual cues.

2) Read first:
For those students who don’t feel up to the challenge of viewing and listening first, you might choose to do just the opposite:having them read or skim the transcript first to get an idea of what the video clip is about, then show them the video clip later to see how much they are able to pick up and understand.

3) Listen and read:
This third option is best for students with very weak listening skills. Have them open up the transcript or translation in a new window or print out the transcript to hand out. Then start showing the video clip so that your students can follow the script as they listen. Doing this will help them to make the connection between what they hear and what it means. It is like watching a video with subtitles in Vietnamese.

Whatever technique you choose to approach and use the video clips on this site to teach your students, remember our goal is to improve your students' listening comprehension. Encourage your students to keep viewing and listening and checking the transcript as many times as it takes until they can understand the sound without looking at the transcript. If your students can do these kinds of listening exercises regularly, we guarantee that their listening comprehension will improve. Keep checking back because in the near future, we will upload more video clips and listening activities on this site.