Listening is an essential activity for any language learner. In listening we come up against a series of obstacles that prevent progression. It can be a depressing experience for a student to study hard yet be left not understanding a word when listening to a native speaker. It is therefore essential for a teacher to prepare listening activities that are achievable and at an appropriate level of difficulty that will boost a student's confidence. It is also a good idea to instill in students the attitude that listening skills develop over time and that it is not necessary to understand everything in order to make progress. This is because the development of listening skills is a process of exposure to the new sounds a new language will have.

Languages have different sound systems, containing sounds that do not necessarily exist in other languages. In addition a language can be tonal, stress timed or syllable timed, meaning that the rhythms, cadence and intonation of a student's language can be radically different to English.

Successful listening activities in the classroom will start with some form of introduction activity that will set up expectations for students. The context of the listening should not come out of the blue. The students should have a reason to listen and they should have the opportunity to listen as many times as they need in order to achieve the activity. The teacher should be able to isolate and play particular problem passages repeatedly.

Activities should be structured to address different listening styles. When we listen to things we do so in different ways depending upon our needs. If our plane is late we will listen intently to any announcements because we want to catch the detail of what is being said. If we are listening to a radio programme while driving we will sometimes just listen for the jist and not take in every detail; if we hear something of particular interest we will tune in more closely. The consequence of these ideas for listening activities is that the first time we let students listen we often just ask them a general question - Where are the speakers? What are they talking about? How do they feel? Then, subsequently the teacher may ask questions that require the students to listen for specific pieces of information - What time? Where? When?

Finally a third round of questions for the listening may be based on inference, questions that require the students to understand the context of the interaction of the speakers, their motives and their feelings.

Activities for detailed listening can include gap fills where students listen and fill in missing words. If this is done skilfully with specific students in mind it can focus on particular problems. In general listening to English is difficult because of the discrepancy between the written word and the spoken word. This, in the main part, is caused by contractions and elision which is the process where words squash together in order for easier or quicker speech. It is the reason why 'ice cream' sounds like 'I scream'.

The fact that English is a stressed timed language causes the additional problem of weak and strong forms. It causes a lot of words to disappear for the foreign listener. The weak form of 'a' sounds more like 'uh' and the weak form of 'for' sounds more like 'fuh' and these are the kinds of sounds that a foreign listener will not always pick up. Listening activities provide a great opportunity to analyse and focus on these problems.

A carefully designed listening activity can be a valuable item in any English language course. It is important for a teacher to understand the particular problems that the nationalities of his or her students typically have and to address these through structured listening activities.