ESL Listening Activities You Read Aloud: 12 Tasks from A1 to C2
Open the 12 activities online or download the printable PDF: two for every level from A1 to C2, each with a script, reading instructions and a full answer key. No sign-up for either.
Plenty of ESL listening activities begin with "play the audio". That's fine until the speakers hiss, the Wi-Fi drops, or the only recording you have is two levels too hard. Then you have a plan that needs a machine and a room with a machine in it.
These ones need your voice. Every script on the page is written to be read aloud by you, with instructions for how many times to read it, how fast, and where to pause. That's not a downgrade from a recording. It's a different tool, and in a live classroom it has some real advantages.
Why read it yourself?
You control the speed. A recording plays at one speed for every class. You can read the same script at a gentle pace for one group and at natural pace for another, and you can stop when half the room is lost. Keep the rhythm natural, though: slowing each word down produces English nobody actually speaks. Each script says where to pause instead of where to slow down.
You can see who's listening. With a recording you watch the audio player. When you read, you watch faces, and you can tell within one sentence whether to carry on or go back.
It costs nothing. No licence, no download, no file to lose. The scripts are original and every person, place and event in them is invented, so there's nothing to look up, and nothing a student can find online and read ahead.
What's in the set
The task type changes with the level, because what students can do with a listening text changes with the level.
- A1: dictation, and true/false with short answers. Five short sentences read three times each (normal speed, slowly in chunks, normal again), then a short description of a family photo with questions about it. Dictation is a good first listening task: it needs no reading, only attention to the sounds.
- A2: gap fill and ordering. A phone message with a time, a place and a price to catch, then a recipe whose seven steps students put in order. The sequencing words (first, next, then) are the clue, and the reading instructions tell you to stress them.
- B1: a short announcement and a two-voice conversation. A radio-style announcement with questions answered in a few words, and a conversation between two friends planning a weekend, with multiple choice.
- B2: true, false or not given, and a dictogloss. The first asks students to tell what wasn't said from what was, which is harder than it sounds. The dictogloss gives them a short story to rebuild in groups from notes.
- C1: lecture notes and who-said-what. Gap-fill notes of no more than five words from a short talk, then a two-voice discussion where students decide whether Sara, Tom or both hold each opinion.
- C2: stance and implied meaning, and a second dictogloss. Questions about irony, tone and what a speaker implies rather than says, then a dense paragraph to reconstruct in register as well as meaning.
Together they cover the formats students meet in most coursebooks and exams: dictation, gap fill, ordering, multiple choice, true/false/not given, note-taking and matching speakers to opinions.
How to run them
The set comes with five short routines, and they matter more than the scripts:
- Rehearse the script once, aloud, before the lesson. Reading cold makes you stumble in the places students will. One run-through shows you where to breathe and how long the script really takes.
- Set the task before the first listen. Hand out the questions and give thirty seconds to read them. Listening with a purpose is the skill. Listening first and reading the questions afterwards turns it into a memory test.
- Change difficulty by changing the number of listens. Two readings instead of one, or a pause after each sentence on the second pass, makes the same script easier without distorting it.
- Make two-voice scripts sound like two people. Step left and right, change pitch, or hand the script to two confident students after a rehearsal. For the who-said-what task, students need to hear who is speaking to answer fairly.
- Check the answers against the script, then move to speaking. After marking, read the key sentence again so students hear exactly where the answer was. Then use the topic as a speaking task: the festival, the career change and the remote-work debate all make natural discussion prompts. If you need questions for that stage, the ESL conversation questions are organised by level too.
Dictation and dictogloss: why they earn their place
Two of the twelve tasks are dictoglosses and one is a dictation, so it's worth saying why they're in there.
Dictation gets a bad reputation as old-fashioned. It isn't. It forces students to turn sound into spelling, punctuation and word boundaries all at once, and it shows you exactly where they mishear. The A1 set ends by asking students to check their own capital letters and full stops, which turns the task into a proofreading habit.
Dictogloss is dictation's more sociable relative. Students listen to a short text twice, write only key words the second time, then work in groups to rebuild the passage so the grammar and meaning are right. It doesn't need to match word for word. The talk inside the group ("was it 'had left' or 'left'?") is where the learning happens, and one task practises listening, writing, speaking and grammar. The B2 story and the C2 paragraph are written for this: dense enough that nobody can remember it all, and short enough that the group can.
The answer key tells you which mistake to listen for
Every answer is written out in full, and where a question has a deliberate trap, the key says so. At B2, for example, the earnings item looks like a "false" but is really "not given": the speaker says money is tight but never compares his pay. Knowing that in advance lets you steer the discussion afterwards: "Which sentence did you hear that made you say false?" Usually the answer is that they didn't hear one, which is the lesson.
In the printable, the scripts and answers sit on separate teacher's pages at the back, so the pages you photocopy for students don't give the script away. Online, they're behind a Show script and answers toggle on each activity.
Using them in a four-skills lesson
A listening task works best as one stage of a lesson, not a lesson of its own. If you're building that lesson, the four-skills lesson plan template shows how a receive-receive-produce-produce sequence fits together, and the free sets for the other skills slot into the same pattern: the reading comprehension passages feed the second receive stage, and the conversation questions give the speaking stage.
When you want audio, and more of it
Reading aloud solves the "no equipment" problem. It doesn't solve the "I need a fresh script at B1 about job interviews by tomorrow" problem. For that, Listening, no kidding is the suite's listening tool. You pick a topic, a CEFR level and a listening type; it writes the script, records multi-speaker audio from its voice library (30+ voices), and generates multiple-choice, true/false, gap-fill, short-answer and matching questions to go with it. You can also build a lesson from a podcast clip, and run it live in class with students joining by QR code, with no student accounts.
It's one account across the whole suite (Speaking, Writing and Listening), one plan, so a teacher who already uses one of them has already got the others. The overview of ESL listening lessons by level explains how it works in more detail, and the pricing page has the current plan.
Download and use
- ESL listening activities online: all 12 activities, grouped by level, with scripts and answers behind a toggle.
- Printable PDF: A4, black and white, seven pages: student pages first, scripts and answers on teacher's pages at the back.
FAQ
Can I use these ESL listening activities with adults? Yes. The B1 to C2 sets are mostly adult situations: a career change, a remote-work debate, a council scheme to close a street to cars. The A1 and A2 scripts are about family, a phone message and cooking, which suit adult beginners as well as younger learners.
How many times should I read each script? It depends on the task, and each script says. Dictation sentences are read three times. Most gap-fill and multiple-choice tasks are read twice. At C1 the lecture is read once, with a second reading optional, since the point at that level is to cope with a single pass.
Do I need to read it like a recording? No. Aim for natural speed and natural intonation, and don't slow down for numbers or names. Pausing where the script says so is enough. For the two-voice scripts, a clear change of voice or position is all students need.
What's the difference between dictation and dictogloss? In dictation, students write what they hear, sentence by sentence, exactly. In a dictogloss, they listen to a whole short text, note key words, and then rebuild the text in groups in their own words, so grammar and meaning matter more than copying.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.