LISTENING & SPEAKING Summary

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FUNDAMENTOS DE LA ENSEÑANZA Y APRENDIZAJE DEL INGLÉS I

LISTENING & SPEAKING: Theoretical concepts. (Material adapted from different sources)

Communication skills comprise receptive skills and productive skills. Listening and reading are receptive
skills while speaking and writing are productive skills.

In reference to listening and speaking we can say that there are significant differences between them so we
are going to describe these differences and at the same time we will see how we can integrate them.

LISTENING is the skill of understanding spoken language, which is present in most of the activities we
carry out throughout our lives, and at athe same time, it is a complex process due to its double psychological
and social nature: Listening is a psychological phenomenon, which takes place on a cognitive level inside
people’s heads, and a social phenomenon, which develops interactively between people and the environment
surrounding them. It considers listening as a complex process, which needs to be understood in order to teach
it.

THE LISTENING PROCESS: IMPORTANCE AND DIFFICULTIES OF LISTENING IN


LANGUAGE LEARNING It has taken many years to give the listening skill the importance it deserves in
second and foreign language learning among the teaching profession.

According to Nunan, (2001: 23) Listening is a six-staged process, consisting of Hearing, Attending,
Understanding, Remembering, Evaluating and Responding. These stages occur in sequence and rapid
succession. The first one is Hearing and has to do with the response caused by sound waves stimulating the
sensory receptors of the ear; hearing is the perception of sound, not necessarily paying attention, you must
hear to listen, but you need not listen to hear. For this, we have Attention. It refers to a selection that our
brain focuses on. The brain screens stimuli and permits only a select few to come into focus. The third stage
is Understanding, which consists of analyzing the meaning of what we have heard and understanding
symbols we have seen and heard. We must analyze the stimuli we have perceived. symbolic stimuli are not
only words, they can be sounds like applause or even sights, like a blue uniform that have symbolic meanings
as well. To do this, we have to stay in the right context and understand the intended meaning. The meaning
attached to these symbols is a function of our past associations and of the context in which the symbols occur
for successful interpersonal communication: the listener must understand the intended meaning and the
context assumed by the sender. After following with the next stage, it is necessary to make a remark: the
background knowledge is important and people have to take into account several points: general factual
information, local factual information, socio-cultural knowledge and knowledge of context. With these
factors, the information will be correctly received. The next step, Remembering, is an important Listening
process because it means that an individual, in addition to receiving and interpreting the message, has also
added it to the mind’s storage bank, which means that the information will be remembered in our mind. But
just as our attention is selective, so too is our memory, what is remembered may be quite different from what
was originally heard or seen. In the penultimate stage, Evaluating, the listener evaluates the message that has
been received. It is at this point when active listeners weigh evidence, sort fact from opinion and determine
the presence or absence of bias or prejudice in a message. The effective listener makes sure that he or she
does not begin this activity too soon, as beginning this stage of the process before a message is completed
results in no longer hearing and attending to the incoming message and, as a result, the Listening process
ceases. Finally, we have Responding, a stage in which, according to the response, the speaker checks if the
message has been received correctly. This stage requires that the receiver complete the process through
verbal or non verbal feedback, because the speaker has no other way to determine if a message has been
received. Therefore, it is sometimes complicated as we do not have the opportunity to go back and check
comprehension.

When dealing with the listening process, it must be mentioned that there are two possible ways of performing
this task: 1) the Top-down listening process and 2) the Bottom up listening process. The former consists
of understanding the general meaning of a listening selection without paying attention to specific structures,
words and so on. It is like a general overview where the listener gets a general view of the listening passage
while still understanding the general idea. On the other hand, experts talk about the opposite process: Bottom
up listening process. The difference between them is the following: For the Top-down process, students take
into account the context and do not need to pay attention on specific details while in Bottom up listening
process, students have to pay attention because here, specific details are very important to understand the
whole meaning of the conversation or another kind of listening activity. The listener focuses on individual
words and phrases, and achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a
whole. We usually combine both processes in real life listening. According to Lindsay and Knight, people
have four different purposes when they listen: We listen for a purpose, but this purpose can be very different
depending on the situation: listening for specific details, listening for general meaning, listening for the
general idea or gist. There is also a difference between listening: for information; for enjoyment or social
reasons; to learn new language (2006: 46). However, from the point of view of Anderson & Lynch, the
purpose when we are listening can be either: transactional, where “the main purpose is to achieve a successful
transfer or exchange of information”, or it can be interactional, “the use of language for establishing and
maintaining social contact” (1988:15).

HOW TO TEACH LISTENING

When we are working listening in the classroom the best option is to think about how we listen in real life.
Teachers should give students the opportunity to listen actively providing different accents, useful and
different topics, as well as situations that students can use in their real world. A good teaching method would
try to combine both purposes.

When teaching listening, apart from the purpose, it is very important to follow a pattern. Bueno, Madrid and
McLaren establish the following pattern:

1) Pre-listening would be the first stage, where the context is established. The teacher creates motivation and
students do some activities with the purpose of preparing them for what they will hear.

2) The following stage is listening, where learners carry out the mentioned tasks or find answers.

3) The last stage is post-listening, the part where students have the opportunity to check their answers, to
give feedback and consolidate what they have learnt. It is useful for teachers because it helps to analyze
particular difficulties the students could have with the listening activity.

SPEAKING

Speaking is one of the most difficult skills language learners have to face. In spite of this, it has traditionally
been forced into the background while we, teachers of English, have spent all our classroom time trying to
teach our students how to write, to read and sometimes even to listen in a L2 because grammar has a long
written tradition (Bueno, Madrid and Mclaren, 2006: 321).
For most people, the ability to speak a language is synonymous with knowing that language. Nevertheless,
“speaking in a second or foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding of the four skills”
(Bailey and Savage 1994: 7). What specifically makes speaking in a second or foreign language difficult?
Brown (1994) labels speaking as the most challenging skill for students because of the set of features that
characterize oral discourse:

- Contractions, vowel reductions and elision;

- The use of slang and idioms:

- Stress, rhythm and intonation;

- The need to interact with at least one other speaker.

The most difficult aspect of spoken English is that it is always accomplished through interaction with al least
one other speaker and this is one reason why many of us were shocked and disappointed when we used our
second or foreign language for the first time in real interaction: We had not been prepared for spontaneous
communication and could not cope with all of its simultaneous demands.

Speaking is an “activity requiring the integration of many subsystems…all these factors combine to make
speaking a second or foreign language a relevant task for language learners…yet for many people, speaking
is seen as the central skill” (Bailey and Savage 1994: 6-7).

There are numerous daily life situations where people need speaking, such as talking to someone face to face,
communicating through the phone, answering questions, asking for directions, in shops, meetings or chatting
with their friends, to name a few. People spend great deal of their time interacting with more people and, each
of these situations requires a different register according to the formality of the moment. We speak for many
reasons- to be sociable, because we want something, because we want other people to do something, to do
something for someone else, to respond to someone else, to express our feelings or opinion about something,
to exchange information, to refer to an action or event in the past, present, or future, the possibility of
something happening, and so on (Lindsay and Knight, 2006: 58).

However, human communication is a complex process. People need communication when they want to say
something, transmit information or need to speak. Speakers use communication when they want to express or
inform someone about something. They use language according to their purpose and it is necessary for there
to be a listener and a speaker for effective communication. (Harmer, 2007: 46). Harmer. J. also explains that:
When speaking, we construct words and phrases with individual sounds, and we also use pitch change,
intonation, and stress to convey different meanings (2007: 29).

This skill is the most complicated due to the fact that speakers have to interpret not only the message that
other speakers try to express, but also take into account other possibilities explained in the following
quotation: Speakers have a great range of expressive possibilities at their command. Apart from the actual
words they use they can vary their intonation and stress which helps them to show which part of what they
are saying is most important. By varying the pitch and intonation in their voice they can clearly convey their
attitude to what they are saying, too; they can indicate interest or lack of it, for example, and they can show
whether they wish to be taken seriously. At any point in a speech event speakers can rephrase what they are
saying; they can speed up or slow down. This will often be done in response to the feedback they are getting
from their listeners who will show through a variety of gestures, expressions and interruptions that they do
not understand.

And in a face to face interaction the speaker can use a whole range of facial expressions, gestures and general
body language to help to convey the message (Harmer, 2007: 53).
Apart from the formerly mentioned expressive possibilities, L1 speakers use some mechanisms to facilitate
their speech. These mechanisms are not too easy for L2 speakers and consist of simplifying the language
making simple structures: they usually omit parts of a sentence and use idiomatic expressions to facilitate the
oral fluency and fillers and hesitation devices are also frequent.

In order to compensate their difficulties, L1 speakers can correct themselves, reformulate or rephrase
sentences, a frequent kind of alteration accepted by the community of speakers (Bueno, Madrid and
McLaren (2006:325).

Spoken English cannot usually be planned or organized, unless is preparing a speech or a presentation, there
is not much time for reflection so, it is frequently full of repetitions, pauses, incomplete sentences, hesitations
or fillers. It needs the response of another speaker or listener, it usually comes into the form of turns and
when speakers are talking, they must also pay attention to gestures, intonation, stress or even pauses that
other speakers are doing because are clues to understanding the meaning of what they are trying to say.

In relation to the activities in order to develop the speaking skill, there are many ways to promote oral skills
in the classroom. Discussions, speeches and role-play, among others, are the most typical speaking activities.
Discussions are probably the most commonly activity in the oral skills class. A selected topic is given to the
students through a reading, a listening passage or a videotape and are then, in pairs or groups, they discuss the
chosen topic in order to come up with a solution. Students will be more involved with and motivated to
participate in discussions if they choose the topics in relation to their likes and dislikes.

Many English teachers claim that the best way to acquire speaking skills is by interacting. This aim is
fulfilled by means of communicative language teaching and collaborative learning. Communicative language
teaching is based on real-life situations that require communication. Following this method in ESL classes,
there will be opportunities for the students to communicate with their partners in the target language. It is
teachers´ task to create situations in class where students have real-life communication, activities related to
their daily life and meaningful tasks that give them the chance to practice oral language.

Teaching Speaking & Listening Skills in the Young Learners’ Classroom

There are some reasons to teach English to young learners at school since children who have an early
start, develop and maintain some advantages in some areas of language e.g. listening comprehension mostly
benefits from this early start, and pronunciation also benefits in longer term.

Teaching Listening
Teaching young learners is really very challenging. Teachers are not only to understand methodologies,
but also to have skill and teaching competencies. How can teachers scaffold children’s listening
comprehension and foreign language acquisition in the beginning stages? More importantly, how can
children be taught to use the acquired language for meaningful communication in new contexts?
First of all, listening is as a complex interactive process in which meaning is being attached to sound
and two-way communication is being achieved (Shin,2011). In order to foster development of listening skills,
we should include in our lessons a variety of listening activities. These activities should focus on developing
micro-skills (described by Richards 1983, in Shin 2011) such as retaining language chunks in short-term
memory, discriminating among the English sounds, recognizing English stress patterns, reduced forms, and
grammatical word classes, patterns, systems and rules. Listening micro-skills also involve distinguishing
word boundaries and interpreting word order patterns, processing speech at different speeds of delivery,
detecting sentence components, recognizing cohesive devices and communicative functions, developing
listening strategies using nonverbal clues to understand meaning.
Activities that support development of these micro-skills in young learners are songs, chants, role plays
and drama, because they provide authentic language and real-world context that make language learning
meaningful, motivating and useful (Brown 2001). Arnold (2005) emphasizes the delicacy of choosing
appropriate materials for listening activities caused by the fact that such materials “need to have an authentic
meaning to young learners“. Davanellos (1999, 13) argues that songs have a great teaching potential because
they provide examples of everyday language and present the natural opportunity for meaningful repetition.
That is why young learner classes have a variety of fun songs and chants that help children learn vocabulary
and grammar while improving their oral skills.
Listening strategies are found to be very important for young learners especially intelligent guessing
like predicting, guessing from context and recognizing discourse patterns and markers (Brewster, Ellis and
Girard 2004, in Shin 2011). Shin (ibid.) points out that ‘building that help students improve their listening
comprehension beyond the classroom’ is of paramount importance. Listening strategies can be developed by
encouraging young learners to guess from context and supporting their listening comprehension by using
visuals, mime and facial expressions. Demonstrating language by using realia in contexts that are of interest
to children or personalizing a context can also be effective. Total Physical Response (TPR) activities have the
power to immediately tell the teacher how successfully children have understood commands because children
have to respond to them physically. A very useful and engaging listening activity can be related to teacher’s
instructions for making an origami (paper folding) object; it can be a very simple one, but its potential for
developing listening skill and engaging all children is great.

Teaching speaking
When teaching young learners, we must consider the fact that they are a mixed class with different
abilities, motivations level, expectations, knowledge and different learning styles. So, we have to vary our
approaches and offer as many opportunities as possible to make the whole class find a little something to hold
on to, expand and grow.
Learning to communicate in a foreign language is a process of complex activities and for young
learners, it is like to start learning one’s mother tongue. They need some more time to listen to a foreign
language in the classroom and they should have also more chances to repeat some of the utterances they hear.
According to Slattery and Willis in their book of English for Primary Teachers (2001:43), although
repetition of set phrases does not mean that children are acquiring language, it is still very important. They
argue that repetition prepares children for meaningful communication in several ways i.e. by helping them
get used to saying English, by allowing them to practise the intonation pattern, and by enabling them to gain
confidence, especially if the teacher gives a lot of praise. Accordingly, for teacher of YL it is suggested to
open chances and more time for the learners to listen words, utterances, set of phrases as a process of
developing learners’ speaking skill.
Teaching young learners is actually not as difficult as we imagine, they are like sponges, they absorb
everything we say and how we say it. The ability of teachers in pronouncing every words, phrase and
sentences is of vital importance, since young learners will repeat exactly what they hear. It is believed that
what young learners have learned at an early stage is difficult to change later on. For this reason, the teacher
can apply the rules i.e. slowly and steadily, through continual and constant revision and recycling.
In addition, the relaxed and positive atmosphere will be essential in young learners’ classroom, as it is
a decisive factor in achieving maximum results. There are many varied activities e.g. dialogues, songs,
poems, rhymes, choral revision, and chants that can be adopted to grow students’ speaking abilities as well as
to build their pronunciation.
An important element to foster children’s communication, is the fact that they need to acquire the
necessary vocabulary and structures to achieve it successfully.
In the beginning stages of language learning, new vocabulary should be presented orally with
extensive support of pictures, drawings, puppets, realia, video, and/or mime, gesture, facial expressions or
acting out. Miming driving a car and presenting a picture of a car helps children grasp the meaning of ’drive’
and ’a car’ extremely quickly. This means that the teacher will have to prepare materials for teaching young
learners such as posters, masks with animal faces, puppets, puzzles, paper birthday cakes, birthday presents,
balloons, videos that help all children learn the names of dangerous sports e.g. ’skydiving’, ’rock climbing’,
“rodeo riding’, ’scuba diving’ with big enjoyment, and the like.
Information gap activities provide appropriate opportunities for guided communication activities, while
role plays lead children from fully to less controlled language use and prepare them for free speaking
activities. “Talking on the phone” or ’having tea’ will motivate children to take part in the activities because
of the element of game and fun associated with them; if the classroom atmosphere is informal and non-
competitive (Scott & Ytreberg 1990, 42), the activities will help children get ready for similar real-life
contexts. Moreover, in such activities children don’t just use words, but also all other parts of speaking a
language – tone of voice, stress, intonation, facial expressions, etc. (ibid., 41) which contributes to achieving
fluency.
Using songs, poems, rhymes and chants is a wonderful way of making students sing/talk and at the same
time (unconsciously) work at their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. Try to include the above-mentioned
activities by providing learners with those that require total physical response, shortly known as "TPR".
Confidence and motivation are built through the process. Note: There never seems to be enough of the TPR-
based activities in class – they are a great tool in satisfying different learner types: visual, aural and
kinesthetic (the so-called VAK distinction), further expanding positive opportunities for the varied classroom.

Other Techniques and Activities


There are many other techniques and activities that teachers can use for their speaking classroom. We
live in, what Professor Kumaravadivelu describes as, post method era, where there is no such a thing as the
best method. It is the teachers’ decision to determine which kind of method that suits their students most.

Games
Play is a purposeful activity and games are a part of playing. Games are a very appropriate teaching
technique in the young learner classroom. There are many kinds of games the teachers can create. The
examples are Memory games, This and That, Role play, Guessing games, etc.

Talking and Writing Box


Teachers can experiment with this kind of method. They can put the pictures or topics in the box and the
students can choose one that is interesting to them, or teachers can do it like the example below:

We can show a funny picture, the funnier the better, and give students some multiple choices relating to the
language focus and also give them choice to give their own opinion.

Tongue Twisters
This method can be used to teach pronunciation in a fun way. Children may have trouble pronouncing
certain English language sounds. For example, children who speak some Asian language may have difficulty
pronouncing the English – language /r/ and /l/ because of the way that they occur or their absences in their
native languages. Sometimes, the difficulty also occurs because children often do not know how to form their
lips and mouth in such a way as to correctly articulate the sounds.
Children adore tongue twisters because they perceive saying the sounds as a game or challenge. Tongue
twisters generally have the same phoneme repeated over and over again, which is quite hard. The examples
of tongue twisters are:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.


A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

I saw Susie sitting in a shoe shine shop.


Where she sits she shines, and where she shines she sits.

How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?

Denise sees the fleece,


Denise sees the fleas.
At least Denise could sneeze
and feed and freeze the fleas.

The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.

Can you can a can as a canner can can a can?

Six sick hicks nick six slick bricks with picks and sticks.

I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish, but if you wish the wish the witch wishes, I won't wish
the wish you wish to wish.

Picky people pick Peter Pan Peanut-Butter, 'tis the peanut-butter picky people pick.

Luke Luck likes lakes.


Luke's duck likes lakes.
Luke Luck licks lakes.
Luck's duck licks lakes.
Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes.
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.

Conclusion
Tough teaching listening and speaking to young learners could be demanding for the teachers, it is
essential to be aware of the different processes learners go through when dealing with it.
If teachers understand children’s needs for developing listening micro-skills and strategies, for having
opportunities to use language in meaningful communication, and for engaging in a variety of listening and
speaking activities that are fun, interesting and meaningful, they will help children build a very solid
foundation for language acquisition.

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