TEACHING LISTENING AND SPEAKING: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

By Jack C. Richards

Presented by Alyssa Savitski

ESL 501

Introduction

• Teaching listening and speaking skills has become vital to learning a second language.

• Listening was thought of as a mastery of skills, such as identifying key words and recognizing reduced words.

• It then became bottom-up and top-down, followed by prior knowledge and schema.

• The current view is that a listener is an active participant that uses facilitation, monitoring, and evaluating strategies.

Speaking was…

Memorizing, repeating, and drill-based Communicative language changed

grammar-based syllabi to communication syllabi.

Fluency became popular.

The Teaching of Listening

• 2 views: listening as comprehension and listening as acquisition.

• Listening as comprehension is based on the main function of listening in second language learning is to facilitate understanding of spoken discourse.

• Spoken discourse is instantaneous, unplanned, uses hesitations, reduced forms, fillers and repeats, and a linear structure (p. 3).

Bottom-Up Processing

• Using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. Comprehension is the process of decoding.

• Teaching Bottom-Up:– Retain input while it is being processed– Recognizing word and clause divisions– Recognize key words– Recognize key transitions in a discourse– Recognize grammatical relations between key

elements in sentences– Use stress and intonation to identify word and

sentence function (Richards, 5).

Task Examples of Bottom-Up Processing Identify sequence markers Identify key words Distinguish between positive and

negative statements.

Top-down Processing

• Use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. It could be previous knowledge of a topic, situational/contextual, or schema.

• Teaching Top-down:– Use key words to construct schema– Infer the setting of the text– Infer the role of the participants and their goals– Infer cause and effect– Infer unstated details of a situation– Anticipate questions related to the topic or

situation (Richards, 9).

Task Examples of Top-Down Processing KWL charts Predict another speaker’s part of the

conversation Read news headlines, guess what

happened, then listen to the news and compare

Strategies for Listening

Cognitive: comprehension, storing/memory process, retrieval

Metacognitive: assessing, monitoring, self-evaluating and self-testing

Listening as Acquisition

• Listeners extract meaning from the message.

• Use both bottom-up and top-down processing.

• Language of utterances is temporary.• Teaching listening strategies can make

more effective listeners.• Some tasks to improve acquisition are true-

false, picture identification, and sequencing tasks.

Input vs. Intake

Schmidt (1990) argued “that we won’t learn anything from input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input” (Richards, 13).

Input- what a learner hears Intake- the part that the learner notices Only intake can serve as the basis for

language development (Richards, 14).

Noticing and Restructuring

Noticing Activities: using the listening texts for comprehension activities and use them for language awareness.

Restructuring Activities: oral or written tasks that involve productive use of selected items from the listening text.

The Teaching of Speaking

Employs more vague or generic words than written language.

Show variation between formal and informal speech.

May be planned or unplanned.

Conversational Routines

Use of fixed expressions “It doesn’t

matter.” “I see what you

mean.” “Just looking,

thanks.”

Styles of Speaking What is appropriate

for the context? “Whacha up

to?/What are you up to?

Differences between formal and informal speech.

Functions of Speaking

3 functions of speaking Talk as Interaction: primarily a social

function. Focus is on the speaker, not the message.

Talk as Transaction: focus on what is said or done. The message is #1! (Problem-solving activities, asking for directions).

Talk as Performance: public speaking, form of monolog, mimics written language.

Implications for Teaching

What kinds of speaking skills does the course focus on?

Identifying teaching strategies for each kind of talk Talk as Interaction: “small talk”, personal

experiences Talk as Transaction: role play, small group

activities Talk as Performance: examples of speeches

Challenges for Teachers

Help develop fluency, accuracy, and appropriateness of language use.

Move from linguistic competence (mastery of linguistic system) to communicative competence (know how to use English appropriately for a range of different purposes).

Resources

Richards, Jack C. Teaching Listening and Speaking: From Theory to Practice.