French, Spanish, and Italian Listening Comprehension Practice Activities
I don’t know about you, but for my students, listening comprehension is really challenging. I find that after the first two or three months of school, their ears habituate to my style of speech, including the vocabulary I use, my voice, accent, intonation, cadence, etc. But throw a different speaker at them, especially a native speaker, and they freeze! Even if I slow down the video or audio, my students still really struggle.
I realized over the summer that I wanted to start targeting my students’ listening comprehension skills specifically, but I wanted to do it in a way that would still allow me to recycle target vocabulary and grammar that students are already familiar with. I wanted them to build listening proficiency while practicing course content…but perhaps most of all, I just wanted them to gain confidence.
The videos and audio files that I’ve found on Youtube and various websites were usually decent, but they were never exactly what I was looking for. Why? They had some glaring problems that always tripped my students up:
Speakers spoke waaaayyyy too fast for my novice learners.
There were too many challenging vocabulary words/expressions and grammar structures that my students simply had never seen before (including tenses that they hadn’t learned!).
Oftentimes the content of the audio/video had nothing to do with what we were learning in the classroom.
So, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to make my own listening comprehension activities. Keep reading to learn more — and click the thumbnails below to browse my current selection of listening comprehension practice activities on TPT!
Importance of Listening Comprehension
Listening comprehension is one of the most important skills our students need in order to effectively communicate in the target language. Strong listening comprehension prepares our students to follow conversations without needing every single sentence (or word!) repeated or translated. This skill directly impacts our students’ confidence and their ability to respond appropriately in the target language in real time. And when students don’t understand the person to whom they are speaking, communication tends to break down fast, which nobody wants!
I also think that targeted listening comprehension activities help students reinforce target vocabulary and grammar, especially for our students who are more gifted with auditory processing. Listening provides students with many different exposures to vocab/grammar in a very short period of time, so it’s an efficient way to get them to review content.
I’m sure there are studies out there about the correlation between listening comprehension skills and effective oral output in the target language. In my mind, it makes sense: when students listen and comprehend messages, it increases their phonemic awareness, which in turn improves their pronunciation and fluency.
Improving Student Listening Comprehension
I have created listening comprehension practice activities in French, Spanish, and Italian that will help your students do the following:
Review vocabulary and grammar from commonly-taught thematic units. For example:
Greetings, Alphabet, Numbers
Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, Months
Sports & Hobbies
School Subjects & School Supplies
Family, Food & Drinks, Clothing, City, and more!
Build confidence by being able to actually understand the audio tracks.
Improve overall listening comprehension skills and proficiency.
Each resource features FIVE audio tracks (MP3s) with accompanying listening comprehension practice activities (in printable PDF & digital Google Doc formats) to ensure that students are truly understanding what they’re hearing.
I also include detailed directions, tips, and tricks for how you can optimize your implementation of these listening comprehension activities in your World Language class. I suggest how you can play or share the audio tracks with students, and how you can assess students quickly to deliver important feedback regarding their progress.
French & Spanish Listening Comprehension BUNDLES
If you’re looking to save some money, definitely take a look at my French Listening Comprehension Bundle and Spanish Listening Comprehension Bundle. Each bundle comes with 40 tracks and 40 practice activities that span over 8 thematic units. Well worth the investment if it means your students will increase their listening comprehension over the course of the school year!
You can check them out by clicking the thumbnail(s) below!
Psst… Italian teachers! I don’t have a bundle yet because there hasn’t been as much interest in listening activities as there has been among French and Spanish teachers! If you think I should create more Italian listening activities, be sure to purchase the ones I’ve already created and leave a 5-star review on TPT—that lets me know that there’s a genuine interest for this type of content and allows me to invest more of my time and energy into creating more of them!
Hope you’ll consider grabbing these amazing resources for your students—I am so happy that my students have them so that they can continue to improve their listening comprehension skills, recycle target vocabulary and grammar from our thematic units, and perhaps most important of all…continue to build their confidence in the target language!
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
