I love to teach listening comprehension strategies to children! Seeing a child’s response to making a connection, understanding, or finally just “getting it” is so rewarding. Listening comprehension exercises can be critical for the academic success and social, emotional, and behavioral aptitude of many students. Specific strategies will be discussed that can facilitate how to improve the listening skills of your students.
One of the most heart-wrenching observations as a school-based SLP has always been walking into a classroom and seeing students disengaged in learning. These disengaged students often have deficits in listening comprehension stemming from disabilities and/or other social-emotional or behavioral deficits. Despite many reasons for this scenario, Speech-Language Pathologists are the perfect candidates to support this concern. Our training in communication disorders perfectly aligns with taking in verbal information, comprehending the information, and applying or acting on that information.
Practical & Research-Based Listening Comprehension Strategies that Deliver
By using metacognitive strategies and other tricks I have picked up during my 30+ years of being an SLP, I have seen significant success with my student’s ability to follow directions and gain an understanding of academic content. Here are just a few of the should-dos in how to teach and improve listening comprehension:
- Teach basic listening comprehension strategies such as a chant, song, game, etc. Try to add gestures or other actions that require motor movement. I have included a printable FREEBIE visual reference of Listening Comprehension Strategies as well as a corresponding Video. My TpT and Boom Learning stores have listening comprehension resources in either printable or digital formats.
- I find the “I Do, We Do, You Do” model from Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher (2007) helpful when teaching new concepts. A great little blog that simply breaks down this strategy is the “I Do, We Do, You Do Model Explained” by Shaun Killian. Similarly, the Gradual Release Model, originally from Pearson & Gallagher (1983), is the basis of the aforementioned model.
- Activate prior knowledge to focus attention and retrieve previously learned related information. Pictures are great for this.
- Explicitly teach visual imaging. I have discovered that many of our children with communication disorders have either a limited or almost absent ability to create visual/mental images upon hearing or reading information. Without imagery, concepts and information cannot be learned efficiently. In other words, in one ear and out the other! I firmly believe in the Lindamood-Bell program of Visualization & Verbalization that develops concept imagery. After being introduced to this program and taking courses, I have utilized all or parts of this program with almost all of my language-disordered students over the past 20 years.
- Model self-talk or self-questioning to show children how to sort through and locate relevant information. Focus on the Who, What, Where, When, and possibly How and Why. Often children with language disorders are unable to sift information and easily get bogged down or overloaded by extraneous information or stimuli. This overstimulation results in unproductive behaviors in the classroom.
- Building language by associating new information with old information helps store and organize information in the brain for later retrieval.
- Practice quick sketches of important information. We remember pictures easier than words. I have always encouraged students to have note cards, sticky notes, etc. close at hand. Content notes can be written, but making a quick sketch in a fast-paced classroom is often easier. Often, I hand out a sticky notepad to each child. Then, I read a content paragraph (often on the science or social studies classroom topic). They are required to listen during the first read-through. On the second read-through, each student makes quick sketches. We then discuss which information is relevant and which is extraneous and compare each sketch. I am always surprised at how much my students are able to recall from their sketches even weeks later! When the sketches reflect classroom content, allowing children to take them back to class to support understanding and verbalization of content is always a confidence booster!
