Teaching Listening and Speaking

 

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Well, in this blog I want to share about Teaching Listening, and Speaking.

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Teaching language is hard work. One must make an effort to understand, to repeat accurately to manipulate newly understood language and use to the whole range of known language in conversation or written composition. Effort is required at every moment and must be maintained over a long period of time. However, with the development of communicative approach to language teaching make the teacher easily to apply the syllabus on their teaching-learning process

Teaching listening and speaking skills has become vital to learning a second language. Listening was thought of as a mastery of skills, such as identifying keywords and recognizing reduced words. It then became bottom-up and top-down, followed by prior knowledge and schema. The current view is that a listener is an active participant that uses facilitation, monitoring, and evaluating strategies.

Speaking was memorizing, repeating, and drill-based, Communicative language changed grammar-based syllabi to communication syllabi and Fluency became popular. 

The Teaching of Listening

2 views: Listening as comprehension and listening as an acquisition.

- Listening as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature of listening. Indeed, in most methodology manuals listening, and listening comprehension are synonymous. Listening as comprehension based on the main function of listening in second language learning is to facilitate understanding of spoken discourse. Spoken discourse is instantaneous, unplanned, uses hesitations, reduced forms, fillers and repeats, and a linear structure.

Two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse. These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension begins with the data that has been received which is analysed as successive levels of organization - sounds, words, clauses, sentences, texts - until meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is viewed as a process of decoding.

Bottom-Up Processing

Using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension is the process of decoding.

Teaching Bottom-Up:

- Retain input while it is being processed 

- Recognizing word and clause divisions

- Recognize keywords

- Recognize key transitions in a discourse 

- Recognize grammatical relations between key elements in sentences 

For example: Identify sequence markers, Identify keywords, and Distinguish between positive and negative statements. 

Top-down Processing

Use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. It could be previous knowledge of a topic, situational/ contextual, or schema.

Teaching Top-down:

- Use keywords to construct schema

- Infer the setting of the text

- Infer the role of the participants and their goals

- Infer unstated details of a situation

For example: KWL charts, Predict another speakers part of the conversation and Read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the news and compare.

Listening as Asquistion

- Listeners extract meaning from the message.

- Use both bottom-u and top-down processing.

- Language of utterances is temporary.

- Teaching listening strategies can make more effective listeners.

- Some tasks to improve acquistion are truefalse, picture identification, and sequencing tasks.

The Teaching of Speaking

- Employs more vague or generic words than written language.

- Show variation between formal and informal speech.

- May be planned or unplanned.

3 functions of speaking :

- Talks as Interaction: primarily a social function. Focus is on the speaker, not the messege.

- Talk as Transaction: focus on what is said or done. The message is #1! (problem-solving activities, asking for directions).

- Talk as Performance: public speaking, form of monolog, mimics written language.

Examples of effective independent speaking activities are:

• Performing a role-play or a dialog,
• Performing real-life tasks,
• Interviewing a native speaker or someone from another country in English, etc.

These activities have many common aspects. They are highly motivating, they have a meaningful context, and the learners can become more independent while engaged in these kinds of activities.

References:

• Savic, V. (2018).Teaching Listening and Speaking, PPT
• Savic, V. (2014). Total Physical Response (TPR) Activities in Teaching English to Young Learners. In Ignjatovic, A. and Markovic, Z. (eds.), Physical Education and Contemporary Society, pp. 447-454. Jagodina: Faculty of Education.