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problems in time that turn up in class. [15] The second process is that the students could not really control their foreign language listening experiences but the teachers can control them for students in various ways: 3.5.1 Interest level You can select materials of appropriate interest level. Students perform better with materials they want to listen to because they enjoy them. Apart from catering for any specialist interests you may know about, you should find the following generally useful: jokes, personal anecdotes, human-interest stories, materials containing some puzzles to be solved and serialized stories. 3.5.2 Length of materials You can control the length of the materials. Listening exercises should be shorter than reading texts, especially in the earlier stages. If you want to use a longer exercise, split it up into short sections and ask questions appropriate to each short section as you go along. 3.5.3 Listening guiding You can use your prior knowledge of the materials to guide the students by introducing the topic with a short discussion. For example, you could announce the title or say the first sentence and ask what they think it will be. This arouses certain expectations and makes the students mentally prepared for the topic; it may also activate latent knowledge of vocabulary associated with the topic. Some teachers use the time as an opportunity to ensure that vocabulary essential to an understanding of the exercise is known. Only essential items whose meaning cannot be worked out in any other way should be dealt with like this, however, as one of the important skills students must develop is how to deal with “new” vocabulary themselves. It is sometimes useful to prepare students by mentioning a particular word first and saying, “you will hear this word in the exercise. I don’t think you know it but you will hear this word in the exercise. I don’t think you know it but you should be able to work out what it means.” 3.5.4 Materials repetition You can repeat the materials. This is obvious but needs to be done with care. In most target situations, materials will be heard only once. It is, therefore, a good idea to give students something specific to listen for, even on first hearing, to prove that they can get some information from a single hearing. It may be something very simple like the number of people involved or “what happened in the end?” It is amazing how often students are prepared to listen to the same thing over and over again provided that they are given a good reason for doing so, like trying to answer specific questions or solving some sort of problem. 3.5.5 Other consideration You can control the speed of delivery and clarity of diction. This is obvious but it is very easy to take it too far. Students who will eventually have to listen to speech at full speed and with native-speaker’s fluency (with short forms, unstressed words, etc.) should be weaned off careful, slow speech as quickly as possible. An important reason for not going too slowly is that “STM (short-term memory) has a limited capacity store with rapid input and retrieval”. [16] Because by the time the voice reaches the end of a sentence, the students may have forgotten how it started. If you want to make thing easier in the early stages by controlling speed, it is better to deliver each sentence at a moderate speed but pause rather longer than you normally would, between sentences, this gives the students a little more time to p