TEACHING LISTENING & SPEAKING (Part 1)

Teaching Listening and Speaking - Introduction –

(One day, one of my students asked me, “Do you like to eat snakes?” And I was like sorry but what? snakes? and she was like yeah snakes! As I was kind of surprised by this question and was going to say “Well, not really, but then her friends helped her with the pronunciation. Actually what she meant was if I like to eat snacks.:)

What is the first question we ask people to check their foreign language skills? “Do you speak English? for example. Of course, we do not mean to exclude comprehension when we say that, but when we think of foreign language learning, we first think of speaking.

When you ask your ESL students what they mostly would like to study, they usually tell you „Speaking‟. “I want to improve my speaking skills. or I want to speak English fluently.” is what you hear from them. Well, at least this has been the case for me most of the time. For this reason, the importance of listening and speaking in language learning can hardly be overestimated.

The importance of Listening~ What does listening involve?

Listening is often implied as a component of speaking. Subsequent pedagogical research on listening

comprehension made significant refinements in the process of listening. Studies looked at the effect of a number of different contextual characteristics and how they affect the speed and efficiency of processing aural language.We all know that language is best learned if it is used in meaningful communication.

Listening involves identifying information, searching memories, relating that information to those memories, filling it the proper spot (or) creating a new place for it, and using it when needed.

What are the key questions about listening? (Elicit ideas from TA’s)

What are listeners doing when they listen?

What factors affect good listening?

What are characteristics of “real life” listening?

What are the many things listeners listen for?

What are some principles for designing listening techniques?

How can listening techniques be interactive?

What are some common techniques for teaching listening?

(Some suggested ideas: listening develop a wide variety of receptive skills- we listen for gist/details- inferring meaning from the context- extract main ideas or information etc.)

Hopefully, you will be able to find the answers of these questions in this paper.

What makes Listening difficult?

Clustering: In written language we are conditioned to attend to the sentence as the basic unit of organization. In spoken language, due to the memory limitations and our predisposition for „chunking‟ or „clustering, we break down speech into smaller groups of words. In teaching listening comprehension, therefore you need to help students to pick out manageable cluster of words. In most listening situations the aim is not to remember the specific words, or phrases used but to extract the main ideas or information.

Redundancy: Spoken language unlike most written language, has good deal of redundancy. In conversations we notice the re-phrasings, repetitions, elaborations, and little insertions of „I mean‟ and „you know‟. Such redundancy can help the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra information. Learners can train themselves to profit from such redundancy by first becoming aware that not every new sentence or phrase will necessarily contain new information by looking for the signals of redundancy. 

...to be continued...