The “Four dimensions of listening” is based on two workshops I presented for TESOL Spain as part of their annual convention in Sevilla in 2026. In this article, I go into a little more depth about some of the issues raised in those workshops, as well as providing you with all the resources shared in the sessions.

Teachers are often not sure what to do with it, beyond following their trusty coursebooks, and let’s be fair they probably don’t have much time to do anything else. When Sheila Thorn argued (for better or worse) that listening needs to be practiced every day in class for learners to stand any chance of becoming better listeners, I doubt she had in mind tired academy teachers struggling to fit effective exam preparation courses into three (or fewer) hours per week for students with ever-decreasing attention spans.

I’ve spent the last 12 years experimenting with listening teaching in my classes. Don’t worry, I’ve done other things too, but in that time something has changed about the way I see listening. It has gone from being ‘just another language skill’ that’s hard to develop in class, to something complex. It’s a multi-faceted beast that affects learners in more ways than we often realise, and it often has the power to make or break their success in the exam room. I don’t claim to have cracked listening teaching, but I do think I understand it.

That’s what the four dimensions of listening are all about: taking our listening teaching beyond the concept of just planning a task, and considering what aspects of that task we can exploit to make our learners better, more confident listeners.

A tale of two learners: typical experiences of the English learner-listener?

The four dimensions of listening

These stories show us four very typical learner experiences with listening in the language classroom: it can be hard to pick out what the speakers are saying, it’s getting increasingly difficult to concentrate, listening makes learners anxious, and certain exam tasks fill them with dread.

Common problems? Probably.

These problems also help us see where we, as teachers, can focus our attention in class. Listening isn’t just about prepping the task, pressing ‘play’ on the software, and checking the answers at the end. Our learners are struggling, either practically or emotionally, and they deserve more than that.

Read on for more, or jump to the section you need:

1. Effective listening strategies
2. Maintaining attention & focus
3. Managing listening anxiety
4. Decoding the stream of speech

Dimension 1: effective listening strategies (aka Down with the Highlighter).

One of the biggest fallacies in exam teaching is the idea that picking out the keywords helps the learner. Maybe learners in other parts of the world are different, but my Spanish students firmly believe that a highlighted text is an understood one. Ask them to find the important words in the question and, after a moment’s reading and thinking, they will confidently highlight. Every. Single. Word.

Instead, ask them to identify the theme of the question.

The key words will go from being why, she, choose, Adrenaline Sky Tours to simply Adrenaline Sky Tours. If we look at the script for this, we can see how that theme helps the learner pinpoint the exact moment they need to start paying attention:

Anticipation

John Field (2000) outlines a variety of listening subskills which learners need to develop in order to become effective listeners. One of the most practical is anticipation, a skill where the listener is actively predicting which words they expect to come next in an utterance. It all happens unconsciously in a first language, but it is a skill that a language learner might not be applying in their new language.

This is extemely easy if you’re using the coursebook software. When you’ve clicked play, open up the audioscript and select the sentence you wish to play them. Then pause the audio after a few words, and get learners to guess what comes next (you might need to play the text a few times).

They might not get the word spot on, but they’ll probably get the gist.

Right, wrong, or doesn’t say

These are great tasks that build learners’ confidence to say “no, that wasn’t in the text”, but in my experience, they’re often consigned to end-of-term exam activities or obscure textbooks that rarely see the light of day.

Again, using the coursebook software, find a segment of a listening the class has already done and prepare 3-4 sentences about the text. Make sure these are paraphrases of the text (using language suitable for the level of the learner). Play it a couple of times, and ask learners to discuss with their partner what they heard and why they chose their answer.

As a riff on this task, why not get ask learners to create their own sentences from the audioscript to give to their peers, and then play the text for the whole class – with each pair or group doing a slightly different task created by their peers.

Percentage reconstruction

This is an alternative way to use a listening text – recommended for short audio (max. 60 seconds), such as B1 Part 2, B2 Part 1, or C1 Part 1.

Introduce your listening as you normally would, including those schema-activating tasks we all know and love. These are essential to give learners a way into any listening text, and it’s always worth discussing with your B2+ learners exactly why these tasks are valuable. Schema is a fancy term for existing knowledge.

Giving them a chance to think about the topic beforehand allows them to make predictions about what they’re going to hear, as well as make themselves more likely to recognise lexis we often associate with the topic. Even if they can take 10 seconds to do this in the exam, the chances are they’ll connect with the text more than if they went into it blind.

So, let’s say we’ve got a 30 second text from a listening part 1.

The first time students listen, there’s no comprehension task – just a simple ‘listen to understand’ instruction. When it’s over, ask students to write a number – a percentage – of how much they think they understood. They can then pair off and discuss this, giving you a chance to circulate and see what the numbers are (great for a quick snapshot of who’s struggling).

Play the audio again, this time telling learners to write down any key words they think they hear. It’s important to stress it’s only a selection of words or phrases – not every single word.

Students pair off and discuss what they heard. I recommend you monitor from a distance here, as they might still feel quite unsure about what they’ve written.

Play a third time, giving the class more time to write.

For feedback this time, they return to their partner and try to reconstruct the text. At this stage you absolutely do want to monitor, as this will give you a clear idea of what parts of the text they felt more challenging than others.

Play a final time for them to check, with the option of reading an audioscript if needed.

You can then continue with the exam task, or jump into the next phase of the lesson.

Dimension 2: maintaining attention and focus

A few months back, Olivia was sitting her first mock exam of the course. That’s when I discovered what had happened in her listening exam last summer, that she’d lost focused and stopped listening.

Everyone’s attention spans are shorter these days, not just teenagers.’ But we’re still expecting them to do the same things in class – and exams – as they did six years ago. So how do we manage that, and try to keep them on task?

1. The hairband trick: Hairbands are great tools to help us re-focus. I first learned about the benefits of them from my therapist, a way of stopping intrusive thoughts from overtaking me. You put it on your wrist, and snap or play with it when you feel your mind wandering. Now, all my learners have one in their schoolbags, ready for the next listening.
2. Normalising distraction: Before you press play, ask your learners what they can do if they get distracted or lose track of what’s going on. Tell them it’s normal for that to happen, and when it does, they just need to wait for the next question to jump back in. It’s okay, they can do it again.
3. Choice boards: Use choice boards to give stronger listeners a new task while you repeat for the weaker ones. I have a rule in my listening activities – if just one student wants to repeat, then we do it (and I reckon there’s at least one more who didn’t have the courage to ask, anyway). With choice boards, learners who feel confident can now channel their attention to a new task, encouraging them to listen in a new way. The pack below includes black and white copies for older learners, and a simpler option for younger ones.

Dimension 3: managing listening anxiety

This is one area of second language learning that is crying out for more research. Writing in 2015, Lili Zhai identified five features which cause learners to feel anxious when doing listening tasks in class:

1. I’m not good at listening;
2. I don’t know how to do it;
3. They speak too quickly;
4. I hate this part of the exam;
5. My friends/teacher will judge me;

I was recently reviewing listening with an adult C1 student, and asked them how the task had been for them. They said it was fine – after all, they were at home where they felt safe. They then said it was nothing like when they did it in their English academy, where they felt so nervous watching their friends writing things when they weren’t, feeling terrified that they were messing it all up.

Worse still, a 2019 study (Adnan et al.) indicated that the presence of listening anxiety can reduce learners’ comprehension skills.

Here are four practical tools to help learners control their anxiety in class:

1. Physicality: When you feel yourself getting anxious, bury your feet in the floor while forcing your back (and seat) into the chair. The physicality of the action counteracts the brain chemistry that creates anxiety, giving you back control. And the best thing: no-one can see you doing it. Shaking your hands (jazz hands!) can have the same effect, albeit being more noticeable).
2. The safe place: Think of a place where you feel safe. Visualise it – the sights, sounds, smells, touch – and how you feel when you’re there. For me, it’s this river in Muker, Yorkshire, where I used to play on family holidays as a young boy. When you feel the anxiety taking over, just picture yourself in that place. It’s literally your safe place, where nothing can get at you. It recently got me through a rather nasty outpatients surgery, and several learners have told me they like to do it, too.
3. Checking in: Ask your learners how they felt during the listening, and why. I get them to write their answers on a paper, along with a sentence or two about how it went for them (I let them use Spanish if they want, although few ever do). It’s just between you and them, but it can give you a real sense of how they’re doing – both in terms of the task and themselves. Over time, you’ll find they feel less scared about the whole idea of listening.

Dimension 4: Decoding the stream of speech

You’ve probably heard of top-down and bottom-up processing. Top-down refers to the knowledge we access when we listen: knowledge of the world, the social context, the type of listening text, the speaker’s intentions and our needs and expectations (and the exam task). This is all stuff that we’re probably activating with those pre-listening tasks.

Bottom-up processing refers to how we make sense of the sounds of language. When we do it in our own language, our brains are seemlessly interpreting phonemes into syllables, syllables into words, words into phrases and sentences. In the real world, fast speech is a ‘mush’ where word boundaries are blurred, and our brains are constantly working out where those boundaries should be, along with what other sounds (or whole words) have been squeezed out of all recognition.

When we listen in a language we’re learning, that’s much harder to do.

If we don’t even know we have to do it, or that the language sounds different to our own, it might be nigh-on impossible to figure out what’s happening.

Decoding is a pretty big deal.

And it’s given little to no attention in most mainstream coursebooks for young learners.

Let’s experiment with this, using a technique devised by Richard Cauldwell called The Botanic Walk (2013).

Take this sentence: that could have been embarrassing

Put yourself in your learners shoes, and think about what they want the sentence to sound like. Every sound, every syllable is clear to hear and has no interaction with the ones around it.

TH-A-T C-OU-LD – HAVE – BEEN – EM-BA-RASS-IN-G

Cauldwell refers to this as the greenhouse variety – where each sound is like a plant in a greenhouse, separate from those around it with no interaction, able to grow perfectly as nature intended.

Now think about what it might sound like in your English coursebook. There’s a little bit more mixing of the sounds, but they’re still all very easy to identify and distinguish from one another. It’s like we’re moving from the greenhouse into the garden. The plants are now interacting, but they’re all very carefully planted and controlled.

THAT COULD’VE BEEN EMBARRASSING!

Finally, we take a step out of the classroom and into the real world. In fast connected speech, there’s going to be a syllable near the end of the sentence that carries the most stress, with some others further back getting a little bit less stress.

In our sentence, the main syllable is probably BA in embarrassing, with COULD getting some secondary stress. Everything before and after is squeezed together and becomes indistinguishable from the words (or the sounds our learners want them to have).

thaCUdabeenemBArrasing

It’s called the botanic walk because, once you’ve drilled this idea with your students, you can walk them from the greenhouse to the garden and into the jungle – saying the sentence in the three different ways as they go. As they do this, ask them to focus on what their mouths are doing, and if they can notice the way it literally moves less the faster the speech gets.

The Botanic Walk is powerful because it shows students that they aren’t ‘bad’ at listening – the words they’re looking for simply aren’t there in the way they expected.

The Botanic Walk can be done with any chunk of a listening that learners find hard to hear. Ask them to review the script after the listening, and highlight parts that sound weird to them. Board it, drill it, and experience the physiology of it all.

Then, focus on that same sentence and ask students what they’ve noticed about it. There’s no need to be technical here – it’s about giving students the space to experience what’s making the listening difficult to hear. Over time, they’ll become more conscious of it.

A masterclass on decoding: let’s make listening visible

Decoding the stream of speech is one of the four dimentions of listening, but it can be daunting to integrate this in your teaching if you’re new to it. If you’d like to know more about decoding and how to start using it with your learners, here’s a recording of a webinar I prepared for TESOL Spain in February 2026

My Staffroom Pack from 2023 includes a handy guide on connected speech for listening, with sound files to illustrate many of the different changes that happen in fast connected speech:

A note on creating listenings for class

Many teachers working in academies will have access to their coursebook software. These apps, designed for use on IWBs, often permit the teacher to select specific segments of an audio to play to the class.

My experience shows these features vary widely – even different books from the same publisher may come with apps offering more or less functions than others – and teachers working online or with 1-to-1 clients are often prevented from getting access to it altogether.

Audacity is a free app for Windows, Mac and Linux that allows you to easily edit audio files. This means you can make short MP3s with the exact chunks of listening you want – great for running decoding or micro-listening activities in class. Here’s a short video tutorial showing you how you can use Audacity to edit existing audio files.

References

Adnan et al. (2019), ‘Listening Comprehension and Listening Anxiety’, in Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 411, pp, 200-206

Brook-Hart, G., Hutchison, S., Passmore, L. & Uddin, J. Complete First for Schools 2nd Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cauldwell, R. (2013), Phonology for Listening: Teaching the stream of speech, Birmingham: Speech in action.

Thorn, S. (2021), Integrating Authentic into the Language Classroom: practical guidance on how to teach real-life listening, Shoreham by Sea: Pavillion Publishing and Media Ltd.

Zhai, L (2015),  ‘Influence of Anxiety on English Listening Comprehension: An Investigation Based on the Freshmen of English Majors’ in Studies in Literature and Language, 11 (6), pp. 40-47.

This research uses Cambridge Assessment English tests which are available online: http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams-and-tests                  © UCLES 2019.