A basic workshop for public school teachers on teaching listening and speaking in an EFL context

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

2. 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

3. TEACHING LISTENING

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

5. 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

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

7. 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

8. 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

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

10. 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

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

12. 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

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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. TEACHING SPEAKING

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

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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

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

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

29. 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.