Teaching Listeners, Not Accent Labels: Information-Centred Listening with Multiple English Voices

Abstract

Listening lessons can introduce a wider range of English voices without changing the activity that follows: learners identify an accent, answer isolated questions, and proceed to the next recording. A more consequential use of voice diversity asks learners to obtain information from identifiable people, inspect a misunderstanding, and use the corrected interpretation to complete a task. This article specifies that form of listening instruction through a complete community-exhibition unit for adult and tertiary EFL learners working at approximately B1--B2 level. Three contributors participate twice each: a hall coordinator, a collection volunteer, and an access volunteer. Across three fifty-minute lessons, learners combine six messages to determine opening arrangements, exhibit placement, visitors' choices, and an exact closing sequence. The article draws on Global Englishes, talker adaptation, perceptual effort, bottom-up listening, and communicative teaching. It provides the six complete speaker scripts, a hall diagram, a timed lesson plan, individual listening questions, a fourteen-item answer key, and a transparent scoring guide. The distinction between perceived ease and demonstrated understanding is maintained throughout, as is the distinction between a correct group briefing and independent comprehension of unheard speech. The messages are authored teaching texts; they have not been recorded or tested with learners. Its practical contribution is a fully specified procedure in which the speech of each contributor determines what the listener must know and do.