Abstract
Background. The up-to-date vision of a foreign language competence in listening, amongst other competences, is represented in the recently published Companion Volume of Common European Framework of References (2020) which sheds light on the skills developed at each of the levels. The newly distinguished level Pre-A1 describes Overall listening competence as understanding of very slow and clear speech containing mostly concrete lexis related to everyday facts and events, with pictures/gestures assisting recognition and repeating speech fragments if necessary. The analysis of skill descriptors correlated with the analysis of available literature on a range of topics (pedagogy and age psychology, general methods of teaching listening competence and teaching English to young learners) as well as prior research conducted by the authors, allowed them to form a hypothesis: teaching listening competence to young learners can be effective if it utilises the elements of drama techniques. Purpose. The article, therefore, aims to present the authors’ testing the hypothesis by employing a critical theoretical and experiential analysis, and further developing a series of activities and piloting it in the classroom. Methodology. The main research method is a critical analysis of theoretical sources as well as the authors’ expertise in the use of dramatization in teaching listening to elementary school students in an English classroom. Results and discussion. The in-depth examination of methods of teaching listening competence led the authors to selecting the approach, namely the three stages in which teaching is implemented, the focus and content of each stage. Accordingly, the series of activities is arranged in traditional three stages (pre-, while-, and postlistening), with the pre-listening being comprised of anticipation and prediction sub-stages. The authors provide a detailed description of the activities included in each stage. They further illustrate the typology of activities with a lesson plan highlighting the types of activities, tasks, visual aids, type of audio, expected speech product and assessment. Based on the implementation of the series of tasks in the classroom, the authors argue that drama technique is an effective means to optimize teaching of English listening competence of primary school learners.
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