Teaching Listening and Speaking Strategies

This break between teaching has given me time to consider how I approach teaching. Specifically, I'm thinking ahead to the advanced listening and speaking course I will be teaching this spring. Last semester my low-level students seemed to struggle with exercises that focused on inferencing. They also had difficulty with paired speaking tasks.

So I'm wondering if I can take the approach that I used in my reading lab and apply it in the listening and speaking task I'm going to be teaching, namely creating tasks that will require the students to use specific approaches to interacting with other students and developing inferencing strategies.

In my reading lab last semester I focused on a set of specific strategies and returned to them throughout the semester in order to attempt to automatize the strategic approaches my students took towards the reading tasks they were faced with. For example, I used a number of tasks which required them to look up words in the dictionary and highlight them in the text, while writing the translated word in their L1 in the margin of the text they were reading.

I wonder if I can take a similar approach to teaching listening and speaking strategies. I don't think it would deviate much from the present curriculum to make my teaching approach in the classroom more focused on developing strategies.