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As mention in the last entry, English language teachers can assess progress in language or skill acquisition and usage. There are four key language skills that the students will acquire: listening, speaking, reading and writing. The order in which these are list coincides with the class of skill acquisition and the instruction. One cannot learn how to read before learning how to speak. It is crucial when developing lesson plans always keep this sequence in mind, to allow the most natural progression in language attainment. Language skills are grouped into the categories of receptive / productive or oral / written. In this entry, we will focus on listening (Receptive and oral) and speaking (Productive and oral).
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On the other hand, speaking skills are closely related to the listening skills. In conjunction, listening and speaking can be taught as communication skills. Meaningful communication is a very challenging skill for the students as they often feel that they understand their teacher and peers but have trouble communicating outside of the classroom. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to present to students patterns of real interactions. According to the British linguist D.A Wilkins (Rogers and Richards, 2001, 154): the communicative approach stressed for the real communication in the classroom so that the students are inspired to develop their language system, not just proving them the opportunity to practice what they already know. Students will learn the language by struggling to communicate and the teacher will help them by motivating them to work with the language. As stated earlier, effective communication (listening and speaking) is the number one reason that most of your students take English lessons. Even though your students, especially the adult ones, understand how useful and valuable this communication is, motivation may still be a challenge for the teacher.
Types of Listening and Speaking activities
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| Listening activities and Speaking activities in the classroom. |
H.D.Brown (2007) offers a simplified list of micro-skills and
macro-skills (for conversational listening). The macro-skills isolate those
skills that relate to the discourse level of organization while those that
remain at the sentence level continue to be called micro-skills. [1]
In spite of the two models of listening and speaking are identified: the bottom-up and the top-down processing models. For example, bottom-up strategies are based on the language found in the discourse and include listening for details, recognition of related ideas, and word order patterns. The top-down strategies are based on the listener's background knowledge of the topic and include listening for the main idea, forecasting the outcomes, and summarize the discourse.
Speaking
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Listening
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Micro
skills
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Refers
to producing the small chunks of language (phonemes, morphemes, words,
collocations, phrasal units)
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Attending to the smaller bits and chunks of
language, in more of bottom-up process
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Macro
skills
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Imply
the speaker’s focus on the larger elements; fluency, discourse, style,
cohesion
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Focusing on the larger elements involved in
a top-down approach
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In spite of the two models of listening and speaking are identified: the bottom-up and the top-down processing models. For example, bottom-up strategies are based on the language found in the discourse and include listening for details, recognition of related ideas, and word order patterns. The top-down strategies are based on the listener's background knowledge of the topic and include listening for the main idea, forecasting the outcomes, and summarize the discourse.
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For EFL/ESL students, both approaches are needed when teaching listening skills. (Nunan, 1997). |
In the same way, there are particularly aspects of the spoken language that can influence the listening process and comprehension. H.D. Brown (1991) presents a comprehensive list of these factors:
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To conclude, listening and speaking are difficult skills to master, specially for non-native speakers because of the differences between written and spoken language. As a language teacher, we aim to train to all students to become effective communicators, so active communication skills must consider incorporating other linguistic skills such as stress and intonation and morphosyntax. Instead of making use of activities that acquire repetition and memorization of sentences and grammatical patterns, activities that required learners to negotiate meaning and interact with the world listening and speaking is more that coding and decoding information. Nevertheless, since speaking and listening are so closely intertwined, we must pay attention to challenges students face when listening to authentic discourse. Listening and speaking includes: paying attention (eye-contact), understanding (reflect what they just heard) and responding (give feedback either verbal or written).
Hi Yulian,
ResponderBorrarI agree 100% with you when you talk about trying to become our students into effective communicatros, due to the fact that all skills are imprtant. We sometimes just need to relate how close they are in oder to take advantage of this. As you porpose, listening and speaking are closely interwoven, and we as facilitators have to realize how students react at the moment of listening an authentic discourse. To get this, your listening and speaking criterion is very clear(paying attention, understanding and responding).These factors are crucial to establish a good assessment for these skills, always looking for effective communication.
Hello!
ResponderBorrarI think you are completely right when you say Listening and Speaking are intertwined. However, I think that learners should first be exposed to real, spoken language, they should first master the listening skill so they can start producing. We, as teachers must start planning meaningful lessons, with real situations where students have to use language for every day situations; learners should be presented with a listening activity that is real, (shopping, meeting someone, going to a bar, being at school) an then, they should be asked to perform in another situation that is also real and for which they already have previous knowledge.
To conclude, I want to stay that, for me, listening is the first step and the basis to effective communication.
Listening for most students is very difficult to understand, it is thought that to succeed in listening every single sturucture should be perfectly listened and written. Our task as English teachers should be to help them to understand that listening is not only filling in the gaps but it is a process where thinking and connecting ides should be done. Of course it is imposible to achieve this in one class, reason why listening skill should be addressed and estimulated more often, also it is important to expose students to different accents of English in the listening task so they develop awareness of the different existing Enhlishes and that " standard English" do not really exist.
ResponderBorrarTo sum up, it is important that We make our students think of English is a highly useful tool for communication around the world, and not as just a subject they have to pass with flying colors.
I agree with you when you say that when assessing listening there must be other skills integrated in the process. Listening is a really important skill for the improvement and development of students and their learning processes. Teachers need to take into account that repetition is not the best way of assessing students, there must be interesting content and different and innovative exercises in order to engage students, so they have fun and feel comfortable with the activity.
ResponderBorrar