Hörenswert: Listening Activities for GCSE AQA German (2nd Ed.)

Structured according to the course assessment, over 80 activities based on 24 recordings cover all four contexts of Society, Learning, Employability and Culture. Contemporary topics engage students: Family and Friends, Healthy Living, Teenage Problems, Modern Media, School, Work Experience, Education and Work: Future Plans, The Relevance of Modern Foreign Language Learning, Berlin, Recycling in Germany, TV in Germany and German Festivals.

Brilliant learning structure to support and engage students who find listening a challenge:

  1. Extensive pre-listening activities prepare students and build their confidence
  2. Monologue listening activity provides a chance to ‘tune in’
  3. Dialogue listening activity practises listening skills in a natural context
  4. Post-listening writing or speaking activities consolidate learning and build on the topic, ensuring students feel well-prepared to tackle it in future.

Written by an experienced teacher who is also a native speaker, the activities are designed for use in class, cutting teacher preparation time and giving valuable listening support. Native speaker recordings build students’ pronunciation skills.

What do teachers say about this resource? (8889, 8890)

The resource provides a vast range of listening material which would be appreciated by any German teacher as a welcome addition to the course book. It is well-structured, pedagogically sound and does fully live up to its promise of being a “time-saver” for the busy languages teacher.

Listening is for many students the most challenging skill when they prepare for in their GCSE. This is a useful resource designed to help teachers to develop their students’ listening skills. It contains pre-listening activities, monologues as well as dialogues and post-listening activities which consolidate learning and help develop vocabulary. It would also lend itself for independent study as a transcript and an answer key is provided at the end.

The resource does not only develop students’ listening skills, listening counting for 25% of the marks at GCSE, but also supports the development of the other three skill areas. The pre-listening activities develop students’ vocabulary and practice these with short reading tasks, many of which are similar to the type they would encounter in the GCSE exam. There is also some grammar work, e.g. on relative pronouns, connectives, word order or adjective endings. Whilst not all of these are relevant to the listening tasks that follow, they come into their own in the post-listening tasks, where students are asked to complete writing assignments, also in the style of GCSE task types.

E Lamb, Teacher of German & Peer Reviewer