Teaching Speaking & Listening
through Communicative
Activities
Erin Lowry
Senior English Language Fellow
Workshop for Manizales Bilingüe
February 17, 2009

The Challenge
• To integrate skills
• To provide opportunities for authentic
communication contexts
• To give a reason for communication
(information gaps)
• To assess these skills in an objective manner

TEACHING LISTENING

What Makes Listening Difficult?
• Clustering
• Repetition
• Reduced forms
• Performance variables
• Colloquial language
• How fast someone speaks
• Stress, rhythm, and intonation
• Interaction

Principles for Teaching Listening
1. Expose students to different ways of
processing information
– Bottom-up vs. Top-down
– Interactive
2. Expose students to different types of
listening
3. Teach a variety of tasks
4. Consider text, difficulty, and authenticity
Helgeson, 2003

Types of Classroom Listening
• Reactive
• Intensive
• Responsive
• Selective
• Extensive
• Interactive
Brown, 2001

Principles for Designing Listening
Techniques
• Use techniques that are intrinsically
motivating
• Use authentic language and contexts
• Carefully consider the form of listeners’
responses
• Encourage the development of listening
strategies
• Include bottom-up and top-down listening
techniques
Brown, 2001

Successful Listening Activities
• Purpose for Listening
– A form of response
(doing, choosing, answering, transferring, condensin
g, duplicating, extending, conversing)
• Repetition depends on objectives and students’ level
• A motivating listening text is authentic and relates to
students’ interests and needs
• Have the skills integrated
• Stages: Pre-task , While-task, Post-task

Activities for Beginners
• Top-down Activities
– identifying emotions, understanding meaning of
sentences, recognizing the topic

Activities for Beginners
• Bottom-up Activities
– discriminating between intonation contours,
phonemes, or selective listening for different
morphological endings, word or sentence
recognition, listening for word order

Activities for Beginners
• Interactive Activities
– listening to a word and brainstorming related
words, listening to a list and categorizing the
words, following directions

Listening Strategies
• Teach student how to listen
– Looking for keywords
– Looking for nonverbal cues to meaning
– Predicting a speaker’s purpose by the context of the
spoken discourse
– Associating information with one’s existing
background knowledge (activating schema)
– Guessing meanings
– Seeking clarification
– Listening for the general gist
– For tests of listening comprehension, various test-
taking strategies

Easy-to-plan Pre-Listening
Activities
• Brainstorming
• Think-Pair-Share
• Word Webbing/Mind
Mapping
• Team Interview

Easy-to-Plan Listening Tasks
• Agree or disagree (with explanation)
• Create Venn diagrams
• List characteristics, qualities, or features
• Strip story (sequencing game)
• Match speech to visuals
• Compare and contrast to another speech or
text
• Give advice

More Listening Tasks
• Compare and contrast to your own experience
• Create your own version of the missing
section
• Plan a solution to the problem
• Share reactions
• Create a visual
• Reenact your own version

Activities in a Listening Lesson
• Introductory
– Intro to topic of the listening text and activities
that focus on the language that will be used
• Main
– Comprehension activities developing different
listening subskills
• Post
– Learners talk about how a topic in the listening
text relates to their own lives or give opinions

Easy to Plan Post-listening
Assessments
• Guess the meaning of unknown vocabulary
• Analyze the speaker’s intentions
• List the number of people involved and their
function in the script
• Analyze the success of communication in the
script
• Brainstorm alternative ways of expression

TEACHING SPEAKING

Distinctive Feature
PHONOLOGY Phoneme
Syllable
Morpheme
MORPHOLOGY
Word
STRESS
Phrase
SYNTAX RHYTHM
INTONATION
Clause
DISCOURSE
Utterance
Text

What Makes Speaking Difficult?
• Clustering
• Redundancy
• Reduced forms
• Performance variables
• Colloquial language
• Rate of delivery
• Stress, rhythm & intonation
• Interaction

Tips for Teaching Speaking
• Use a range of techniques
• Capitalize on intrinsic motivation
• Use authentic language in meaningful
contexts
• Give feedback and be careful with corrections
• Teach it in conjunction with listening
• Allow students to initiate communication
• Encourage speaking strategies

Fluency vs. Accuracy
• Speaking at normal • Speaking using correct
speed, without forms of grammar,
hesitation, repetition, vocabulary, and
or self-correction, and pronunciation
with the smooth use of
connected speech

Principles of Teaching Speaking
Beginners
• Provide something for the learners to talk
about
• Create opportunities for students to interact
by using groupwork or pairwork
• Manipulate physical arrangements to promote
speaking practice
Bailey, 2005

Principles of Teaching Speaking
Intermediate
• Plan speaking tasks that involve negotiation
for meaning
• Design both transactional and interpersonal
speaking activities
• Personalize the speaking activities whenever
possible
Bailey, 2005

Tasks & Materials
1. Conversations, guided conversations &
interviews
2. Information gap & jigsaw activities
3. Scripted dialogues, drama, & role-play
4. Logic puzzles
5. Picture-based activities
6. Physical actions in speaking lessons
7. Extemporaneous speaking

Communicative Tasks
• Motivation is to achieve some outcome using
the language
• Activity takes place in real time
• Achieving the outcome requires participants
to interact
• No restriction on language used

Example Communicative Tasks
• Information gaps
• Jigsaw activities
• Info gap race (p. 83)
• Surveys
• Guessing games

Questions?
• Email: erin.lowry@gmail.com
• Website: http://colombotech.pbwiki.com

References
• Bailey, K.M. (2005). Practical English Language Teaching: Speaking. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Bishop, G. (2006). AP State English Lecturers Retraining Program Teacher’s Handboook.
Senior ELF Seminar Series given in Hyderabad, India.
• Brown, H.D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy.
White Plains, NY: Longman.
• Helgesen, M. (2003). Listening. In D. Nunan (Ed.). Practical English Language Teaching. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
• Liao, X.A. (2001). Information Gap in Communicative Classrooms. EL Forum, 39 (4). Retrieved
from http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol39/no4/p38.htm.
• Lynch, T. (2003). Communication in the language classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Richards, J.C. & Renandya, W.A. (eds.) (2002). Methodology in language teaching: an
anthology of current practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Slagoski, J.D. (2006). Teaching Listening Skills. Senior ELF Seminar given in Samara, Russia.
Retrieved from http://slagoski.googlepages.com/downloadpresentations.