Unit 3: The Teaching and Learning of EFL Listening and Reading
Unit 3: The Teaching and Learning of EFL Listening and Reading
There are courses in English for Specific Purposes, which need to be heavily
weighted in one or two of the skills, eg courses for telephone operators teach
more listening and speaking. However, even courses as specific as that need a
certain amount of the other skills – a telephonist may need to read a memo, or
leave a written message for someone, thus needing the skills of reading and
writing.
There are further sound reasons for including all the four skills in the syllabus
and often in a single lesson:
1. People get tired after a certain period of activity and they need
a change of activity. The saying 'a change is as good as a rest'
certainly applies to the language classroom.
Some textbooks put emphasis on one or two skills and either omit or downgrade
the others. Books which lay great importance on grammar often focus mainly on
reading and writing, whereas audio-lingual course books concentrate on
listening and speaking (they are, however, course books which have been
written and need to be read). Before taking on a new class, look carefully at the
textbook to see if it provides sufficient practice in all the four skills. Plan ahead
and be ready with supplementary material should the book be lacking in practice
in any particular skill. Writing is the most commonly neglected! Authentic texts,
Unit 3 1 Module 2
readers, recordings of dialogues, extracts from DVD and contemporary news
downloads or articles from the internet will be very useful for this purpose. Start
making your collection now!
Although real life communication rarely consists of only one of the four skills, it is
important to look at the skill areas separately to begin with in order to identify
what learners need to be able to do, and how we, as teachers, can best help
them acquire that ability.
The 4 skills are traditionally divided into receptive and productive skills. As the
names suggest, the receptive skills are those which enable the learner to
understand language and to receive information via language. They are
listening and reading. The productive skills are those which enable the
learner to produce language. They are speaking and writing.
One misconception is that the receptive skills are passive and the productive
skills are active. Because any act of listening or reading is supposed to have an
aim – whether it be understanding the main idea of a text, identifying the
characters in a play or deciding on your attitude to the speaker's opinion – the
listener or reader is actively involved in the process.
In this module our focus will be on the two receptive skills: listening and reading.
Unit 3 2 Module 2
When teaching listening skills, we have to make sure a range of training
techniques are employed and not rely on students to 'pick up' by themselves
what the language sounds like. This rarely happens, and a failure to employ
training techniques may lead to the situation where learners may be highly
competent in written skills, or have an excellent knowledge of grammar, but be
unable to comprehend the simplest of listening passages. It is essential that we
recognise areas of potential difficulty and plan our listening activities and
materials accordingly.
First, however, we need to consider problem areas in listening and then possible
solutions to those difficulties.
SELF-CHECK
? SELF-CHECK 1
Listen to the sound file (Listening Task.mp3) and complete the table below:-
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Unit 3 3 Module 2
Students should be encouraged to practise extensive listening, ie listen to the
English language from various sources outside the classroom, listen for
pleasure.
In this section we will focus on the listening activities that take place inside the
classroom and are referred to as intensive listening, ie listening to relatively
short dialogues or texts with a specific purpose. Such listening involves two
main sub-skills: listening for gist and listening for detail.
There are times when we listen to something in order to get a general idea of
the content, or 'the gist', rather than specific details. Sometimes we need to
recognise the function of the dialogue – for example, is the speaker making
arrangements, expressing an opinion, making an enquiry; are the speakers
discussing their opinions of a book they have both read or are they having a
row? At higher levels – intermediate and above – students need practice in
recognising attitude (by work on intonation patterns) and recognising changes in
direction or topic when listening to speeches, long texts, or taking notes in
university lectures.
A pre-listening gist question can prepare the students and encourage them not
to worry about details but to concentrate on understanding the general idea.
They will listen with the question in mind and then give their answer.
Post-listening questions such as 'How would you describe A's feelings?' allow
them to interpret what they have understood without worrying about specifics.
When we listen for detail, our attention is focused and we are searching for
specific information in the listening passage. For example, we could be listening
for details of the weather in our region, a train departure time or the football
results of our favourite team. As we listen carefully, we select the information we
require and ignore the rest. Because we know beforehand what we want to
hear, it becomes easier to concentrate and focus our attention to listen
selectively. There are several ways of training our students to develop the sub-
skill of listening for detail.
a) Prediction
Unit 3 4 Module 2
By asking students to predict what they are going to hear, based on a topic word
or sentence, you are preparing your learners for what to expect. Guided
questions help them decide what to listen for, and keep them focused on the
main points. This technique can be repeated towards the end of a listening
passage by asking students to predict the ending. This can be done in pairs or
groups and it keeps students actively involved in the listening process.
b) Comprehension exercises
Different types of exercises will ensure that listening skills are being developed.
Exercises can be set midway as well as at the end of a listening passage, and
can be in the form of true/false questions, 'wh' questions (who, what, where),
sentence completion, gap-filling, error correction, table filling, form-filling, etc.
An exercise may require that you listen and identify specific lexical or
grammatical items in a text, eg note all the past participle forms of verbs or all
the superlative adjectives.
Listening for gist and listening for detail should be carried out separately from
each other. It is difficult for students to do both at the same time. Check tasks to
make sure that you do not have them trying to do too many things at once.
When a new listening passage, a monologue or a dialogue, is introduced,
students will naturally want to know what it is generally about first and discover
details later. So it's logical to begin with gist exercises for the first listening and
give detailed exercises for the second listening.
Students often find listening exercises to be one of the most stressful parts of
any lesson. The most stress is aroused when students are asked to listen ‘cold’
(ie they are not prepared) and then perform an exercise. Therefore, it is
important to activate schemata before they listen. That means discuss the
general topic of the text and make students aware of what they already know
about it, so that the new information they hear will be laid on some sort of a
foundation. That, in turn, will improve understanding.
SELF-CHECK
? SELF-CHECK 2
Unit 3 5 Module 2
Identify the type of listening in the following activities:
Unit 3 6 Module 2
Part 3. Reading skills
It does not necessarily follow that because a student can read, he/she is an
efficient reader. Training in the skills involved in reading must be given as
reading is not an inbuilt skill. Reading is not a passive process, either. It is an
active process in which practice in all the sub-skills is vital as no improvement
can be effected without guided practice.
The two common types, or sub-skills, of intensive reading in the classroom, are
skimming (or 'reading for gist') and scanning (or 'reading for detail').
Scanning involves looking for specific information in the text. For example, you
want to find out the score of a game between Real Madrid and Barcelona and
you want to know whether Christiano Ronaldo has scored. You will then read
through the match report looking for numbers and identifying which of them refer
to the final score and you will also look for any mention of Christiano's name in
the text and, when you locate it, you'll read around that to find out whether he
scored a goal.
Scanning may also be in the form of looking for specific language items or
structures, eg “find all instances of the present perfect” or “find all descriptive
adjectives in the text”.
Unit 3 7 Module 2
In another classification there are four sub-skills of reading.
The final sub-skill involves 'practical understanding', and this is when we read
in order to act upon what we read. This is something we do with packets and
instructions - which button to press to make the TV work or how many pills to
take and how often.
Before setting reading tasks for your students, you need to decide what your
aim is. For instance:
Depending on your answers to these questions, you will select the reading text
and the reading tasks. Your choice will depend on the nature of the class - are
they general English students, University students or Business English
students? Where are they now? In their own country or in an English-speaking
environment?
Unit 3 8 Module 2
Similarly to listening, begin a lesson by activating schemata, ie discussing with
students what they already know about the general subject of the text, thus
building the foundation for the new information they are going to read.
SELF-CHECK
? SELF-CHECK 3
Here are two texts and some examples of exercises which have been written to
improve students' reading skills. Study them carefully – which sub-skills are
being taught? Who are they suitable for?
EXAMPLE TEXT 1
Exercise 1
A detached house stands on its own. A semi-detached house is joined to the house next
door along the central wall. The ‘semi’ is the most typical kind of English house. It has front
and back gardens and often a garage at the side.
The outline on the next page shows the ground floor of a typical ‘left-hand’ semi. It has a lot
of rooms, but if you look at the rooms you will see that they are all quite small. People often
‘live’ in the dining room, keeping the lounge for visitors. This means that they spend most of
their time in a room only about 11' 6" x 10' 6". The dining room in this house is connected to
the lounge by a room divider, and the kitchen is connected to the dining room by a hatch in
the wall. Both the lounge and the dining room have open fireplaces. The kitchen has a sink
unit on the back wall of the house and the back door is on the left. The front door opens into
the hall. There is one other way in and out of the house and this is through French windows
which open onto the garden to the rear of the dining room. The house from front to back
measures 24' 6", the lounge being 13' in length.
Unit 3 9 Module 2
Exercise 2
Now read the text more carefully and answer the following questions about the house.
Exercise 3
EXAMPLE TEXT 2
Pre-reading question
The following words will be used in the text. What do you think the text will be about? What
events will happen in the text? Make notes of your ideas.
careless
criticized
violation
freeway
damage
Exercise 1
Unit 3 10 Module 2
Read the following text and answer the question after each paragraph. Then read on and
find out if your guesses are correct. [Note: the text is projected onto a screen. Students are
not shown the next part of the text until the teacher has elicited their answer to the question
on the previous part].
1 Colleen was in a hurry, which made her driving even more careless than usual.
Her boyfriend Simon had already criticized her many times for failing to stop
completely at stop signs. That's what they call a “California, or rolling, stop,” he
told her.
5 “If the cops catch you sliding through a stop like that,” he said, wagging a finger at
her, “they'll give you a ticket for running a stop sign. That's a moving violation. That
means at least a $100 ticket, plus eight hours of driving school for another $30.”
9 “I know, I know,” she replied. “But I never do it when they're around, so how can
they catch me?” Simon was about to tell her that cops have a habit of suddenly
appearing out of nowhere, but Colleen told him to stop thinking so negatively. “You
are bad luck,” she said. “When you talk like that, you make bad things happen.” He
told her that life doesn't work that way.
15 Colleen was in a hurry because she needed to drop off a package at the post
office. It had to get to New York by Wednesday. She exited the freeway and
pulled up at the stop sign. No cars were coming. It was safe to pull out. She hit
the gas pedal.
19 Bang! The car in front of her was still sitting there. The driver was a young
woman, who got out of her car, walked back to look at the damage to her new
car, and started yelling at Colleen.
From http://www.eslfast.com/eslread/ss/s052.htm
Now read the notes you made before you read the text. Were any of your initial guesses
about the text correct?
Exercise 2
Unit 3 11 Module 2
Make notes of the expressions and structures used in the text to
a) warn somebody
b) reply to a warning
Exercise 3
Exercise 4
Explain what is meant by the following words ie what the author is referring to.
1. that – line 3
2. it – line 9
3. they – line 9
4. it – line 16
5. there – line 19
Unit 3 12 Module 2
The main stages of a receptive skills lesson, ie a lesson in which
reading or listening skills are practised, are as follows:
In real life, we bring a level of knowledge, our expectations and purpose, ie why
we are reading / listening, what we already know, the knowledge and
expectations of the topic and the text etc. This needs to be replicated in the
classroom. Activate schemata, don't make them listen or read 'cold'.
This also needs to resemble real life reading. We ‘process’ the texts we read in
different ways depending on the type of text and the aims of reading. We can
read for the main idea, specific facts, for practical use of the information, etc, ie
use different strategies or sub-skills of reading.
Breaking these main stages down into smaller stages, your lesson plan
could be like this:
1) Arouse interest in the general topic. Find out what students already know and
what their experience of the topic/text type is.
Rationale: To activate the knowledge that will assist learners in
understanding the text. To provide motivation to read / listen.
2) Set the scene. Give any essential background information. This context will
vary according to the nature of the text, but may include such information as
who is writing/speaking, to whom, about what topic, why? where?
Unit 3 13 Module 2
Rationale: To provide students with a context to help them decode
meaning. To activate students’ knowledge and enable them to make
predictions about the type and nature of the text they are about to
read / hear.
4) Set an achievable task for the first reading / listening. This will usually
be a gist comprehension task.
Rationale: To provide learners with a reason to read / listen.
To motivate students and develop confidence that the text is
manageable.
2) Set further tasks to guide more detailed comprehension of the text, and
give students time to do this. The nature of the task will depend on the
text and should be determined by how the text would be processed in
real life.
Rationale: To help students to identify specific information, infer
opinion etc. depending on the nature of the text.
4) Check the answers with the class and refer back to the text as
necessary.
Rationale: To ensure that everyone understands the text and
understands how the answers have been arrived at.
Unit 3 14 Module 2
III. After Reading / Listening
1) Select some useful vocabulary of grammar items from the text and
develop understanding of these through formal exercises or oral use.
Rationale: To expand students’ vocabulary and grammar.
3) Set a writing task (eg write a letter to someone in the text, fill in a form
or write a for-and-against essay about the topic in the text).
Rationale: To develop writing skills and enable students to use the
language of the text in other contexts.
Pre-reading/Listening:
1) Predicting: Ask students to look at the title and / or pictures and try to
identify the topic.
2) Lead-in Questions: Ask students to ask each other questions about the
topic.
5) Speed Read: Ask students to read the first paragraph, the first
sentence of subsequent paragraphs, and the last paragraph. The
students then make predictions about the passage, or answer
comprehension questions.
6) Word Clouds:
Version 1 (Brainstorming): Write the topic on the board and draw a
cloud shape beneath it. Elicit any words that students associate with
Unit 3 15 Module 2
the topic and write them in the cloud. Assign pairs or small groups and
ask students to connect the words in sentences related to the topic.
Follow up with a class check.
Version 2 (Predicting): Select several words from the reading or
listening, directly related to the topic. Try to make the connections a
little obscure. Draw a cloud shape and write in the words one at a time.
Students should try to guess the topic as you write up the words. Then
in pairs or groups students should try to make predictions about the
text based on the words, and try to guess in what ways the words are
related to the topic. Elicit the predictions from the students without
giving away the correct answers. With reading texts you could follow up
with a scan reading where the students check their predictions.
7) Mind Maps (Nuclear notes - see the Study Skills unit for an example):
This allows students, in pairs or small groups, to brainstorm the topic by
starting with one word and linking it to new words to create word fields.
8) Mix and Match: Make up and write a headline for every paragraph in
the article. Make enough copies for each pair/small group. Cut and
separate each headline and mix them up. Students then have to place
the headlines in the correct order and try to speculate about the text in
detail.
While Reading/Listening:
1) Comprehension Race: This can be carried out individually or in teams.
With the reading texts closed, the teacher asks the first comprehension
question and the students open their books and try to find the answers as
quickly as possible. The first person or team gets a point for each correct
answer.
Unit 3 16 Module 2
then read and summarise their paragraphs. Regroup the students so that
each student in the group represents a different paragraph. Each student
should then summarise their paragraph to the group in the correct
sequence.
5)Read and Listen: Elicit / teach vocabulary. In pairs, student A reads the
first paragraph while student B listens and takes notes. After student A
has finished reading they should ask student B a few general
comprehension questions. Change roles after each paragraph. Model
with the first paragraph.
7) Cloze Reading: Make two copies of a reading text with different words
blanked out for A and B students. Assign pairs. Each student then asks
their partner questions to elicit the missing words, eg if a student has the
sentence ‘I had a ………….day’, student A must ask student B, ’What
kind of a day did you have?’ Student B would then answer according to
their text, ’You had a terrible day.’
Unit 3 17 Module 2
Brainstorm in pairs / small groups vocabulary related to the topic. A
competitive element and time limit can be used.
Use mind maps to introduce key words from the text; elicit their
meaning from students
Give students short lists of vocabulary. Ask them to work together
in small groups to look up or describe to each other the meaning of
the words.
Give students lists of mixed up words and definitions. They can
work individually or in pairs to try to match the words to the correct
definitions.
Give students a list of words with example sentences of the words
used in context. In pairs or individually ask the students to guess
the meaning of the words and formulate their own example
sentences using those words.
Avoid translating the words for students; instead define, give example
sentences, use gestures and modelling or pictures, or encourage
students to look up the words in their dictionaries.
When carrying out reading and listening tasks, always remind students
that they do not need to know every word; encourage them to initially
ignore the unknown words and focus on understanding the overall topic.
Still ignoring the unknown words, move on to identifying specific details.
Continue analysing the texts, showing students how far they are able to
understand a text even when they do not know all the words. Once the
text has been analysed as far as possible, then you can follow up with
vocabulary work. You can prepare quick controlled practice exercises,
such as matching, gap-fill or multiple choice. After that, students should
be encouraged to use the words from the text in context, such as talking
about themselves, acting out a role-play or discussing their opinions.
Unit 3 18 Module 2
task
TASK
4. Q) How can you ensure that you are considering the needs of every
learner?
A)
Unit 3 19 Module 2
10. Q) “Reading is an inbuilt skill.” Is this statement true or false?
A)
11. Q) What decides which sub-skills of reading will be necessary in a
particular reading exercise?
A)
12. Q) Is reading a novel for pleasure an example of intensive or extensive
reading?
A)
13. Q) What name is given to the sub-skill involved in running over a text to
identify its general topic?
A)
14. Q) Which reading sub-skill involves in-depth study of the text?
A)
15. Q) Why do you need to know whether your learners are eg university
students, business English students etc?
A)
16. Q) In Example Text 1 are your students required to understand every
word before completing the exercises?
A)
20. Q) For which stage of a receptive skills lesson would you plan
exercises on grammar structures used in the text, a role-play based
on the text or an essay on the topic of the text?
A)
Copyright INTESOL Worldwide 2016
Unit 3 20 Module 2