Trần Đình Gia Bảo
TDIP201 – 209140111106
FOCUS 8 – SUMMARY
Thornbury, S. (2012). Speaking instruction. In A. Burns and J. Richards, (Eds). The Cambridge Guide to
Pedagogy and Practice in Second Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter
21
Key Issues
Teaching speaking needs to target the following outcomes:
+ Acquiring a working knowledge of the language systems that underlie a proficient speaker’s communicative
competence
+ Achieving the capacity to enlist this knowledge, in real time, in the production of fluent, intelligible, interactive, and
contextually appropriate speech.
Neither of these goals will be achieved rapidly:
+ Learning to deploy a range of coping strategies so as to achieve an acceptable degree of communicative competence
with an only partially developed knowledge base and/or performance capacity.
Language Systems
+ At the most basic level, speech is sounds, and hence the production and comprehension of speech presupposes a
mutually intelligible phonological system on the part of speaker and listener.
+ Speakers need to be able to encode their communicative intentions using the resources of the target language grammar
and lexicon.
+ At the level of lexis, estimates vary as to how large a lexicon learners need in order to realize their communicative
needs.
+ Speakers need to be able to mobilize their grammatical and lexical knowledge in the service of producing connected
discourse in different genres.
Strategies
+ Some learners achieve impressive levels of fluency with only minimal means, simply through the use of
communications strategies. (techniques systematically applied in order “to compensate for some deficiency in the
linguistic system, and focus on exploring alternate ways of using what one doe know for the transmission of a message.)
+ The assumption that, so long as the learner had amassed s sufficient store of grammar and lexis, and so long as some
attention had been paid to the accurate phonological articulation of this stored knowledge, speaking would take care of
itself. many programs of SL instruction discouraged premature “free” production”.
+ The advent of the communicative approach heralded a radical reappraisal of speaking instruction. By shifting the
emphasis from accuracy to fluency, and by redefining the latter as “natural language use, whether or not it results in
native-speaker-like comprehension or production”, the architects of the communicative approach asserted the importance
of freer speaking activities, preferably those that involve natural language use.
+ Task-based instruction has found validation in sociocultural learning theory, which argues that, to achieve autonomy in
a skill such as speaking, the learner first needs to experience the mediation of a “better other”, whether parent, peer, or
teacher.
Current Practice
+ Where there is a separate speaking thread that targets discrete features of spoken interaction, the choice of feature tends
to opt for one of a variety of approaches:
1. The situational approach.
2. The speech act approach.
3. The skills and strategies approach.
4. The genre approach.
5. The corpus-informed approach.
+ Pronunciation continues to occupy a strand in the syllabus of most language courses although it is more often associated
with the practice of grammar than treated as a component of fluency as such.
+ In terms of methodology, current practice still follows closely on Byrne’s (1976) instructional model, in acknowledging
a role for explicit instruction, controlled practice and freer production.
Assessing Speaking
+ Key concerns that need to be addressed in designing tests to assess speaking:
- How far the test is designed to assess ability to communicate versus linguistic knowledge.
- How far the test conditions affect the capacity for natural interactions to occur.
- How far personal or psychological factors affect oral performance under test conditions.
+ To help ensure construct validity, the use of rating criteria and performance descriptors, in the form of check-lists or
speaking scales, is common practice.
Field, J. (2012). Listening instruction. In A. Burns and J. Richards (Eds). The Cambridge Guide to
Pedagogy and Practice in Second Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter
22.
Background
Current Practice
+ Typically, a listening lesson conducted by an experience teacher follows the following format:
- Pre-listening
- Extensive listening
- Preset questions or task
- Intensive listening
- Language of the recording
- Final play
Key Issues
Methodology
Adapting the standard approach
+ By asking learners to justify the answers they give, a teacher can gain insights into how they are listening and diagnose
where their problems lie.
+ Teachers are less interventionist: encouraging learners to discuss possible answers, then to listen again to the recording
in order to establish for themselves which one seems most likely.
Augmenting the standard approach
+ Use microlistening practice.
+ Teachers base course content on a subskills approach similar to that adopted in relation to reading skills.
+ As well as phonological features of the L2, target areas might include lexical segmentation and the recognition of
recurrent chunks, intonation patterns, turn-taking signals, linkers and patterns of logical argument.
Strategy Instruction
+ The most important benefit of including authentic materials in listening practice is that it accustoms learners to real-life
situations where they cannot count on familiarity with every single item of vocabulary, idiom, or syntax that they
encounter. It therefore needs to go hand-in-hand with training in compensatory listening strategies.
+ Drawing attention the value of strategies increases self-efficacy.
+ There is some lack of agreement as to the precise form that strategy instruction should take: “direct” approaches -
involve a program of practicing individual strategies and “indirect” ones – strategies are discussed in relation to learners’
experience of listening to a recording.
+ A further option is to raise learners’ awareness of their own strategy use.
Other Key Issues
Testing Listening
+ There is a tension between the wish to employ methods that are close to real-life listening and the pressure on
international exam boards to adopt methods that are familiar to candidates and allow for rapid and reliable marking.
+ A second long-term concern is how to calibrate difficulty.
+ Another issue is the relevance of featuring a wide range of accents in a test of English listening.
+ A final issues is the convention of allowing candidates to hear a recording twice.
Multimodality
+ An important topic of discussion concerns the use of subtitles on DVDs, which provide potential support for self-study
listening or for classroom-presented clips.
Listening in EIL contexts
+ Earlier discussion of intelligibility in relation to users of English as an International Language emphasized phoneme
production and paid curiously little attention to the role of listener.
+ The judges asked to rate L2 speakers were usually native listeners. However, recent research has recognized that much
communication in EIL takes place between two or more second-language speakers.
