Teaching Listening and Speaking

Teaching Listening and Speaking

        Courses in listening and speaking skills have a prominent place in language programs around the world today. Ever growing needs for fluency in English around the world, because of the role of English as the world’s international language, have given priority to finding more effective ways to teach English. It is therefore timely to review what our current assumptions and practices are concerning the teaching of these crucial language skills. Our understanding of the nature of listening and speaking has undergone considerable changes in recent years, and in this booklet I want to explore some of those changes and their implications for classroom teaching and materials design.

The teaching of listening has attracted a greater level of interest in recent years than it did in the past. Now, university entrance exams, exit exams, and other examinations often include a listening component, acknowledging that listening skills are a core component of second-language proficiency, and also reflecting the assumption that if listening isn’t tested, teachers won’t teach it.

Earlier views of listening showed it as the mastery of discrete skills or microskills, such as recognizing reduced forms of words, recognizing cohesive devices in texts, and identifying key words in a text, and that these skills should form the focus of teaching. Later views of listening drew on the field of cognitive psychology, which introduced the notions of bottom-up and top-down processing and brought attention to the role of prior knowledge and schema in comprehension. Listening came to be seen as an interpretive process. At the same time, the fields of discourse analysis and conversational analysis revealed a great deal about the nature and organization of spoken discourse and led to a realization that reading written texts aloud could not provide a suitable basis for developing the abilities needed to process real-time authentic discourse. Hence, current views of listening emphasize the role of the listener, who is seen as an active participant in listening, employing strategies to facilitate, monitor, and evaluate his or her listening.

In recent years, listening has also been examined in relation not only to comprehension but also to language learning. Since listening can provide much of the input and data that learners receive in language learning, an important question is: How can attention to the language the listener hears facilitate second language learning? This raises the issue of the role “noticing” and conscious awareness of language form play, and how noticing can be part of the process by which learners can incorporate new word forms and structures into their developing communicative competence.

Approaches to the teaching of speaking in ELT have been more strongly influenced by fads and fashions than the teaching of listening. “Speaking” in traditional methodologies usually meant repeating after the teacher, memorizing a dialog, or responding to drills, all of which reflect the sentence-based view of proficiency prevailing in the audiolingual and other drill-based or repetition-based methodologies of the 1970s. The emergence of communicative language teaching in the 1980s led to changed views of syllabuses and methodology, which are continuing to shape approaches to teaching speaking skills today. Grammar-based syllabuses were replaced by communicative ones built around notions, functions, skills, tasks, and other non-grammatical units of organization. Fluency became a goal for speaking courses and this could be developed through the use of information-gap and other tasks that required learners to attempt real communication, despite limited proficiency in English. In so doing, learners would develop communication strategies and engage in negotiation of meaning, both of which were considered essential to the development of oral skills.

The notion of English as an international language has also prompted a revision of the notion of communicative competence to include intercultural competence. This shifts the focus toward learning how to communicate in cross-cultural settings, where native-speaker norms of communication may not be a priority. At the same time, it is now accepted that models for oral interaction in classroom materials cannot be simply based on the intuitions of textbook writers, but should be informed by the findings of conversational analysis and the analysis of real speech.

x