HOME-MADE YL LISTENING TASK – ANIMAL DEFINITION GAME

A quick listening activity you can prepare in 10 minutes for your YL classes, to give them practice with animal definitions.

BULLETPOINTS:

Level: Pre-A1, A1 (Starters, Movers); 
Age: Young Learners (6-10); 
Group size: any; 
Aim: to train students' ability to listen for keywords and identify animals, or the order in which they are mentioned; 
Skill: Listening; 
Grammar: has got, can, to be; 
Vocabulary: describing animals; 
Length: 30 min; 
Preparation time: 10 min (print worksheet, think of sentences); 
Material: worksheet attached.

PROCEDURE:

A quick activity to prepare for Cambridge Starters Listening Part 3, Movers Part 4 (and also Flyers Part 4). There are three sets of pictures (here, only animals) and a question. Students listen to a short dialogue (or monologue) twice and choose the correct one. This is the format used in the exam itself.

Very little preparation is needed for this exercise, and it's entirely possible to improvise. One tricky feature of this type of exercise is that all three items are mentioned on the recording, so students need to listen for clues to work out the correct answer.

So, after printing the worksheet, you can proceed in several ways:

1. You can write one question on the whiteboard and assign a name to each number (picture set). The first question could be: What's my favourite animal? The first person could be Matt. You could then write this short monologue for the picture: 
   "Hi, my name is Matt and I love animals. When I was a child, I loved zebras and I always asked my parents to buy me one. But I could only have Goldie, our goldfish. We still have fish at home. I like them too, but the animal I love most is the brown bear. They are big, dangerous, but also intelligent." 
   Students should hear the short comment twice and circle the bear. You can then continue with number 2, using another name (Lucy, May, Tom, Pat, Sam, Nick, Jack, Jill, Mary, Ann, etc.).
2. You can write several questions for the pictures before photocopying them, and invent a short monologue for each. 
   For example, for number 2: Which of these animals was the main hero in the film? 
   The text could be: "Have you seen the new Ringo Jones's film? It's fantastic. Ringo is looking for a treasure in the jungle and he has lots of adventures. He even meets a crazy elephant, and a group of monkeys follows him. They also want to find the treasure. And do you know what the treasure is? A duck which laid golden eggs! When the monkeys see that the treasure is not a city with banana trees, they run back to where they came from."
3. You can also ask your students to number the animals in the order they hear their names. For example, for question one: 
   "I went to the zoo yesterday afternoon and I had a great time. I saw a lot of animals. My favourite was the giant goldfish, but before that I saw a funny bear. It acted like a clown. But before I got to the bear, I saw three zebras. They really looked like horses in pyjamas!" (1 – zebra, 2 – bear, 3 – fish)

The same worksheet is excellent to practise the odd-one-out exercise in Cambridge Movers Speaking Part 3. Mind that in the real exam, students have four pictures and need to find the different one.

NB: The picture sets 1–5 on the worksheet come from the Starters' word list, 6–8 from Movers', and 9–10 from Flyers'.

You can design your own exercise on many topics using this fantastic website: 123Listening.com. Unfortunately, you cannot type in the questions, but it still gives you many ways to use them. For younger children, you can even use a similar worksheet with the song "Old MacDonald", where children circle the animals they hear in the song (there are many versions of the song, and you can even make up your own — better still with a guitar).

Download the WORKSHEET here.