• Using Songs. Songs can be used in several ways:
  1. Beginners can listen for key words, or listen and repeat for pronunciation practice.
  2. Intermediate groups can listen twice, then pair up to try to match the song to one of several titles. Use a gap-filler exercise based on two or three listenings: learners can be encouraged to discuss the possibilities amongst themselves using the target language as much as possible, before correction as a class.
  3. Advanced learners can do this with something harder to decipher, like rap, which often appeals. Choose a controversial song; for French learners, Francis Cabrel's La Corrida, on the subject of the bullfight, is a good example; hard to unravel too, since the perspective is the bull's.
  4. For slightly less advanced groups, who might not comfortably make the leap from listening to discussion in the TL, try bridging the gap by having particular quotations ready on slips of paper for discussion in pairs (if pairs have different quotations, the class will have more information and ideas to share later). Remember to give the discussion a focus, perhaps by working towards a vote at the end.
     
     
• News / current affairs. Radio news bulletins and current affairs interviews are more likely to be used in advanced classes, since it is a harder task (no picture clues). However, a bridge to this kind of activity might be to ask listeners to tick from a checklist what items they heard, while listening to the headlines. They can then justify their choices in discussion ( 'I heard the words … so that must relate to this story', etc). Advanced groups can be asked to summarize the main points of a news item or interview. For a first listening, just use the introduction and ask students to speculate on what issues might be raised, perhaps brainstorming necessary vocabulary. Encourage students to take a critical perspective on an interview:
  • Was there a certain bias?
• Did the interviewee avoid answering certain questions, and if so why?
• Why were some of the issues raised by the class in the pre-listening activity not in fact raised by the interviewer?

Of course, most groups are going to need help with the linguistic tools to do this and some initial modelling by the teacher is likely to be necessary.

• Other possibilities. Some of the activities suggested in 6.3.2 can be adapted for audio stimuli (see particularly 'communication strategies'). For further reading, see chapter 3 on 'Using audio to develop speaking skills' in Barley (1990: 21-27).
  
  
• Communication strategies. Students can often pick up on each others' mistakes more easily than they can their own, so they could work from audio tapes on both each others' and their own errors. Of course, they may not be keen to do this with recordings of their own voices, so another option would be to use recordings from previous years. Teach students how to assess their own speaking skills and monitor their progress, by showing them how the criteria for assessment are applied, how a performance is judged, and then ask them to assess their own performance, on a regular basis.