Encouraging students to enhance their listening performance

Spanish-speaking students constantly complain about the difficulty they have comprehending spoken English. It seems teachers do not often provide them with strategies to alleviate that. This article reports on a pedagogical experience carried out at a Colombian university to help pre-service teachers at an intermediate level of English to improve their aural comprehension. The students were given the task of designing listening activities to be worked on as micro-teaching sessions and were asked to describe their experience by answering a survey. The results showed that students developed the ability to think critically since they needed to make the best decisions regarding the audio level and the design of the activities. They also appeared to have become more autonomous as they realized they could be responsible for their improvement in listening. Additionally, there were evident changes in the teachers’ roles.