Teaching Speaking & Listening

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.

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Teaching Speaking & Listening

by Erin Lowry

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