Teaching Listening and Speaking, from Theory to Practice

Teaching Listening
and Speaking
From Theory to Practice
Jack C. Richards
cambridge university press
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Teaching of Listening 3
2 The Teaching of Speaking 19
Conclusion 40
References and Further Reading 41

Introduction 1
Introduction
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.
2 Teaching Listening and Speaking
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 repetitionbased
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. Grammarbased
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 the notion of
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.
This booklet explores approaches to the teaching of listening and
speaking in light of the kinds of issues discussed in the preceding paragraphs.
My goal is to examine what applied linguistics research and theory says about
the nature of listening and speaking skills, and then to explore what the implications
are for classroom teaching. We will begin with examining the teaching
of listening.
The Teaching of Listening 3
1
The Teaching of Listening
In this booklet, we will consider listening from two different perspectives:
(1) listening as comprehension
(2) listening as acquisition
Listening as Comprehension
Listening as comprehension is the traditional way of thinking about the nature
of listening. Indeed, in most methodology manuals listening and listening comprehension
are synonymous. This view of listening is based on the assumption
that the main function of listening in second language learning is to facilitate
understanding of spoken discourse. We will examine this view of listening in
some detail before considering a complementary view of listening – listening
as acquisition. This latter view of listening considers how listening can provide
input that triggers the further development of second-language proficiency.
Characteristics of spoken discourse
To understand the nature of listening processes, we need to consider some
of the characteristics of spoken discourse and the special problems they pose
for listeners. Spoken discourse has very different characteristics from written
discourse, and these differences can add a number of dimensions to our
understanding of how we process speech. For example, spoken discourse is
usually instantaneous. The listener must process it “online” and there is often
no chance to listen to it again.
Often, spoken discourse strikes the second-language listener as being
very fast, although speech rates vary considerably. Radio monologs may contain
160 words per minute, while conversation can consist of up to 220 words per
minute. The impression of faster or slower speech generally results from the
amount of intraclausal pausing that speakers make use of. Unlike written discourse,
spoken discourse is usually unplanned and often reflects the processes of
construction such as hesitations, reduced forms, fillers, and repeats.
Spoken discourse has also been described as having a linear structure,
compared to a hierarchical structure for written discourse. Whereas the unit of
organization of written discourse is the sentence, spoken language is usually
delivered one clause at a time, and longer utterances in conversation generally
consist of several coordinated clauses. Most of the clauses used are simple
conjuncts or adjuncts. Also, spoken texts are often context-dependent and per4
Teaching Listening and Speaking
sonal, assuming shared background knowledge. Lastly, spoken texts may be
spoken with many different accents, from standard or non-standard, regional,
non-native, and so on.
Understanding spoken discourse: bottom-up and top-down processing
Two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse.
These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing.
Bottom-up processing
Bottom-up processing refers to using the incoming input as the basis for
understanding the message. Comprehension begins with the received data that
is analyzed as successive levels of organization – sounds, words, clauses, sentences,
texts – until meaning is derived. Comprehension is viewed as a process
of decoding.
The listener’s lexical and grammatical competence in a language
provides the basis for bottom-up processing. The input is scanned for familiar
words, and grammatical knowledge is used to work out the relationship
between elements of sentences. Clark and Clark (1977:49) summarize this view
of listening in the following way:
1. [Listeners] take in raw speech and hold a phonological
representation of it in working memory.
2. They immediately attempt to organize the phonological
representation into constituents, identifying their content and
function.
3. They identify each constituent and then construct underlying
propositions, building continually onto a hierarchical
representation of propositions.
4. Once they have identified the propositions for a constituent, they
retain them in working memory and at some point purge memory
of the phonological representation. In doing this, they forget the
exact wording and retain the meaning.
We can illustrate this with an example. Imagine I said the following to you:
“The guy I sat next to on the bus this morning on the
way to work was telling me he runs a Thai restaurant in
Chinatown. Apparently, it’s very popular at the moment.”
To understand this utterance using bottom-up processing, we have to mentally
break it down into its components. This is referred to as “chunking.” Here are
the chunks that guide us to the underlying core meaning of the utterances:
The Teaching of Listening 5
J the guy
J I sat next to on the bus
J this morning
J was telling me
J he runs a Thai restaurant in Chinatown
J apparently it’s very popular
J at the moment
The chunks help us identify the underlying propositions the utterances express,
namely:
J I was on the bus.
J There was a guy next to me.
J We talked.
J He said he runs a Thai restaurant.
J It’s in Chinatown.
J It’s very popular now.
It is these units of meaning that we remember, and not the form in which we
initially heard them. Our knowledge of grammar helps us find the appropriate
chunks, and the speaker also assists us in this process through intonation and
pausing.
Teaching bottom-up processing
Learners need a large vocabulary and a good working knowledge of sentence
structure to process texts bottom-up. Exercises that develop bottom-up processing
help the learner to do such things as the following:
J Retain input while it is being processed
J Recognize word and clause divisions
J Recognize key words
J Recognize key transitions in a discourse
J Recognize grammatical relationships between key elements
in sentences
J Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence functions
Many traditional classroom listening activities focus primarily on bottom-up
processing, with exercises such as dictation, cloze listening, the use of multiplechoice
questions after a text, and similar activities that require close and detailed
recognition, and processing of the input. They assume that everything the
listener needs to understand is contained in the input.
6 Teaching Listening and Speaking
In the classroom, examples of the kinds of tasks that develop bottomup
listening skills require listeners to do the following kinds of things:
J Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance
J Recognize the time reference of an utterance
J Distinguish between positive and negative statements
J Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance
J Identify sequence markers
J Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text
J Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text
Here are some examples of listening tasks that develop bottom-up processing:
Example
Students listen to positive and negative statements and
choose an appropriate form of agreement.
Students choose the
Students hear correct response
That’s a nice camera. Yes No
That’s not a very good one. Yes No
This coffee isn’t hot. Yes No
This meal is really tasty. Yes No
Example
The following exercise practices listening for word stress as
a marker of the information focus of a sentence. Students
listen to questions that have two possible information
focuses and use stress to identify the appropriate focus.
(Words in italic are stressed.)
Students check
Students hear information focus
The bank’s downtown branch Where When
is closed today.
Is the city office open on Sunday? Where When
I’m going to the museum today. Where When
The Teaching of Listening 7
Example
The following activity helps students develop the ability to
identify key words.
Students hear
My hometown is a nice place to visit because it is close to
a beach, and there are lots of interesting walks you can
do in the surrounding countryside.
Students’ task
Which of these words do you hear? Number them in the
order you hear them.
beach shops walks hometown
countryside schools nice
Top-down processing
Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background
knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Whereas bottom-up
processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from
meaning to language. The background knowledge required for top-down processing
may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse, situational or
contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the form of “schemata” or “scripts” –
plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships between them.
For example, consider how we might respond to the following
utterance:
“I heard on the news there was a big earthquake in China
last night.”
On recognizing the word earthquake, we generate a set of questions for which
we want answers:
J Where exactly was the earthquake?
J How big was it?
J Did it cause a lot of damage?
J Were many people killed or injured?
J What rescue efforts are under way?
8 Teaching Listening and Speaking
These questions guide us through the understanding of any subsequent discourse
that we hear, and they focus our listening on what is said in response to
the questions.
Consider this example – Imagine I say the following to a colleague at
my office one morning:
“I am going to the dentist this afternoon.”
This utterance activates a schema for “going to the dentist.” This schema can be
thought of as organized around the following dimensions:
J A setting (e.g., the dentist’s office)
J Participants (e.g., the dentist, the patient, the dentist’s assistant)
J Goals (e.g., to have a checkup or to replace a filling)
J Procedures (e.g., injections, drilling, rinsing)
J Outcomes (e.g., fixing the problem, pain, discomfort)
When I return to my office, the following exchange takes place with my
colleague:
J “So how was it?”
J “Fine. I didn’t feel a thing.”
Because speaker and hearer share understanding of the “going to the dentist”
schema, the details of the visit need not be spelled out. Minimal information
is sufficient to enable the participants to understand what happened. This is
another example of the use of top-down processing.
Much of our knowledge of the world consists of knowledge about
specific situations, the people one might expect to encounter in such situations,
what their goals and purposes are, and how they typically accomplish them.
Likewise, we have knowledge of thousands of topics and concepts, their associated
meanings, and links to other topics and concepts. In applying this prior
knowledge about things, concepts, people, and events to a particular utterance,
comprehension can often proceed from the top down. The actual discourse
heard is used to confirm expectations and to fill out details.
Consider the meaning of the expression “Good luck!” and how its
meaning would differ if said as a response to each of the following statements:
J I’m going to the casino.
J I’m going to the dentist.
J I’m going to a job interview.
The meaning of “good luck” differs according to the situation we mentally refer
it to and according to the background knowledge we bring to each situation
when it is used.
The Teaching of Listening 9
If the listener is unable to make use of top-down processing, an utterance
or discourse may be incomprehensible. Bottom-up processing alone often
provides an insufficient basis for comprehension. Consider the following narrative,
for example. Read it carefully one or two times. What is the topic?
Sally first tried setting loose a team of gophers. The plan
backfired when a dog chased them away. She then entertained
a group of teenagers and was delighted when they brought
their motorcycles. Unfortunately, she failed to find a Peeping
Tom listed in the Yellow Pages. Furthermore, her stereo system
was not loud enough. The crabgrass might have worked,
but she didn’t have a fan that was sufficiently powerful.
The obscene phone calls gave her hope until the number was
changed. She thought about calling a door-to-door salesman
but decided to hang up a clothesline instead. It was the
installation of blinking neon lights across the street that did
the trick. She eventually framed the ad from the classified
section.
(Stein and Albridge, 1978)
At first, the narrative is virtually incomprehensible. However, once a schema is
provided – “Getting rid of a troublesome neighbor” – the reader can make use
of top-down processing and the elements of the story begin to fit in place as the
writer describes a series of actions she took to try to annoy her neighbor and
cause him to leave.
Teaching top-down processing
Exercises that require top-down processing develop the learner’s ability to do
the following:
J Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse
J Infer the setting for a text
J Infer the role of the participants and their goals
J Infer causes or effects
J Infer unstated details of a situation
J Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation
The following activities develop top-down listening skills:
J Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear about a
topic, then listen to see if they are answered.
J Students generate a list of things they already know about a topic
and things they would like to learn more about, then listen and
compare.
10 Teaching Listening and Speaking
J Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the
other speaker’s part, then listen and compare.
J Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then listen
to see which ones are mentioned.
J Students listen to part of a story, complete the story ending, then
listen and compare endings.
J Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to
the full news items and compare.
Combining bottom-up and top-down listening in a listening lesson
In real-world listening, both bottom-up and top-down processing generally
occur together. The extent to which one or the other dominates depends on
the listener’s familiarity with the topic and content of a text, the density of
information in a text, the text type, and the listener’s purpose in listening.
For example, an experienced cook might listen to a radio chef describing a
recipe for cooking chicken to compare the chef’s recipe with her own. She
has a precise schema to apply to the task and listens to register similarities and
differences. She makes more use of top-down processing. However, a novice
cook listening to the same program might listen with much greater attention
trying to identify each step in order to write down the recipe. Here, far more
bottom-up processing is needed.
A typical lesson in current teaching materials involves a three-part
sequence consisting of pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening and
contains activities that link bottom-up and top-down listening (Field, 1998).
The pre-listening phase prepares students for both top-down and bottom-up
processing through activities involving activating prior knowledge, making predictions,
and reviewing key vocabulary. The while-listening phase focuses on
comprehension through exercises that require selective listening, gist listening,
sequencing, etc. The post-listening phase typically involves a response to comprehension
and may require students to give opinions about a topic. However,
it can also include a bottom-up focus if the teacher and the listeners examine
the texts or parts of the text in detail, focusing on sections that students could
not follow. This may involve a microanalysis of sections of the text to enable
students to recognize such features as blends, reduced words, ellipsis, and other
features of spoken discourse that they were unable to process or recognize.
The Teaching of Listening 11
Listening Strategies
Successful listening can also be looked at in terms of the strategies the listener
uses when listening. Does the learner focus mainly on the content of a text, or
does he or she also consider how to listen? A focus on how to listen raises the
issues of listening strategies. Strategies can be thought of as the ways in which
a learner approaches and manages a task, and listeners can be taught effective
ways of approaching and managing their listening. These activities seek to
involve listeners actively in the process of listening.
Buck (2001:104) identifies two kinds of strategies in listening:
J Cognitive strategies: Mental activities related to comprehending
and storing input in working memory or long-term memory for
later retrieval
J Comprehension processes: Associated with the processing of
linguistic and nonlinguistic input
J Storing and memory processes: Associated with the storing
of linguistic and nonlinguistic input in working memory
or long-term memory
J Using and retrieval processes: Associated with accessing
memory, to be readied for output
J Metacognitive strategies: Those conscious or unconscious mental
activities that perform an executive function in the management of
cognitive strategies
J Assessing the situation: Taking stock of conditions
surrounding a language task by assessing one’s own
knowledge, one’s available internal and external resources,
and the constraints of the situation before engaging in a
task
J Monitoring: Determining the effectiveness of one’s own or
another’s performance while engaged in a task
J Self-evaluating: Determining the effectiveness of one’s
own or another’s performance after engaging in the
activity
J Self-testing: Testing oneself to determine the effectiveness
of one’s own language use or the lack thereof
12 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Goh (1997, 1998) shows how the metacognitive activities of planning, monitoring,
and evaluating can be applied to the teaching of listening.
Metacognitive strategies for self-regulation in learner listening
(Goh 1997, 1998)
Planning This is a strategy for determining learning objectives and
deciding the means by which the objectives can be achieved.
General
listening
development
J Identify learning objectives for listening development.
J Determine ways to achieve these objectives.
J Set realistic short-term and long-term goals.
J Seek opportunities for listening practice.
Specific
listening task
J Preview main ideas before listening.
J Rehearse language (e.g., pronunciation) necessary for the task.
J Decide in advance which aspects of the text to concentrate on.
Monitoring This is a strategy for checking on the progress in the course of
learning or carrying out a learning task.
General
listening
development
J Consider progress against a set of predetermined criteria.
J Determine how close it is to achieving short-term or
long‑term goals.
J Check and see if the same mistakes are still being made.
Specific
listening task
J Check understanding during listening.
J Check the appropriateness and the accuracy of what is
understood and compare it with new information.
J Identify the source of difficulty.
Evaluating This is a strategy for determining the success of the outcome
of an attempt to learn or complete a learning task.
General
listening
development
J Assess listening progress against a set of predetermined criteria.
J Assess the effectiveness of learning and practice strategies.
J Assess the appropriateness of learning goals and objectives set.
Specific
listening task
J Check the appropriateness and the accuracy of what has
been understood.
J Determine the effectiveness of strategies used in the task.
J Assess overall comprehension of the text.
The Teaching of Listening 13
Goh and Yusnita (2006) describe the effectiveness of strategy instruction among
a group of 11- and 12-year old ESL learners in Singapore:
Eight listening lessons which combined guided reflection
and teacher-led process-based discussions were conducted.
At the end of the period of metacognitive instruction,
the children reported in their written diaries a deeper
understanding of the nature and the demands of
listening, increased confidence in completing listening
tasks, and better strategic knowledge for coping with
comprehension difficulties. There was also an increase in
the scores in the listening examinations of the majority of
the students, particularly the weaker listeners, suggesting
that metacognitive instruction also had a direct impact on
listening performance.
Another approach to incorporating listening strategies in a listening lesson
involves a cycle of activities, as seen below.
Steps in guided metacognitive sequence in a listening lesson
from Goh and Yusnita (2006)
Step 1 Pre-listening activity
In pairs, students predict the possible words and phrases that they
might hear. They write down their predictions. They may write some
words in their first language.
Step 2 First listen
As they are listening to the text, students underline or circle those
words or phrases (including first-language equivalents) that they
have predicted correctly. They also write down new information
they hear.
Step 3 Pair process-based discussion
In pairs, students compare what they have understood so far and
explain how they arrived at the understanding. They identify the
parts that caused confusion and disagreement and make a note
of the parts of the text that will require special attention in the
second listen.
14 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Step 4 Second listen
Students listen to those parts that have caused confusion or disagreement
areas and make notes of any new information they hear.
Step 5 Whole-class process-based discussion
The teacher leads a discussion to confirm comprehension before
discussing with students the strategies that they reported using.
Listening as Acquisition
Our discussion so far has dealt with one perspective on listening, namely, listening
as comprehension. Everything we have discussed has been based on the
assumption that the role of listening in a language program is to help develop
learners’ abilities to understand things they listen to.
This approach to teaching of listening is based on the following
assumptions:
J Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
J To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up
and top-down processes to understand messages.
J The language of utterances – the precise words, syntax, and
expressions – used by speakers are temporary carriers of meaning.
Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to attend to
the form of messages unless problems in understanding occurred.
J Teaching listening strategies can help make learners more effective
listeners.
Tasks employed in classroom materials enable listeners to recognize and act
on the general, specific, or implied meaning of utterances. These tasks include
sequencing, true-false comprehension, picture identification, summarizing, and
dicto comp,1 as well as activities designed to develop effective listening strategies.
Although what is sometimes called “discriminative listening” (Wolvin and
Coakely, 1996) is sometimes employed (i.e., listening to distinguish auditory
stimuli), it is generally taught as an initial stage in the listening process, the ultimate
goal of which is comprehension. Activities not typically employed when
comprehension is the focus of listening are those that require accurate recognition
and recall of words, syntax, and expressions that occurred in the input.
Such activities include dictation, cloze exercises, and identifying differences
between a spoken and written text. Activities such as these are often discour-
1 dicto comp: A technique for practicing composition, in which the teacher reads a passage, and
then students must write out what they understand and remember from the passage, keeping as
closely as possible to the original but using their own words where necessary.
The Teaching of Listening 15
aged because they focus on listening for words (bottom-up listening) rather
than listening for meaning (top-down listening).
Few would question the approach to the teaching of listening just
described when the focus is listening as comprehension. But another crucial
role has been proposed for listening in a language program, namely, its role in
facilitating second language acquisition. Schmidt (1990) has drawn attention
to the role of consciousness in language learning, and in particular to the role
of noticing in learning. His argument is that we won’t learn anything from
input we hear and understand unless we notice something about the input.
Consciousness of features of the input can trigger the first stage in the process
of incorporating new linguistic features into one’s language competence. As
Slobin (1985:1164) remarked of L1 learning:
The only linguistic materials that can figure in languagemaking
are stretches of speech that attract the child’s
attention to a sufficient degree to be noticed and held in
memory.
Schmidt (1990:139) further clarifies this point in distinguishing between input
(what the learner hears) and intake (that part of the input that the learner
notices). Only intake can serve as the basis for language development. In his
own study of his acquisition of Portuguese (Schmidt and Frota 1986), Schmidt
found that there was a close connection between his noticing features of the
input and their later emergence in his own speech.
However, for language development to take place, more is required
than simply noticing features of the input. The learner has to try to incorporate
new linguistic items into his or her language repertoire, that is, to use them in
oral production. This involves processes that have been variously referred to as
restructuring, complexification, and producing stretched output. VanPatten
(1993: 436) suggests that restructuring refers to:
. . . those [processes] that mediate the incorporation of
intake into the developing system. Since the internalization
of intake is not mere accumulation of discrete bits of
data, data have to “fit in” in some way and sometimes the
accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in
the rest of the system.
Complexification and stretching of output occurs in contexts
. . . where the learner needs to produce output which
the current interlanguage system cannot handle . . . [and
so] . . . pushes the limits of the interlanguage system to
handle that output. (Tarone and Liu 1995: 120–121)
16 Teaching Listening and Speaking
In other words, learners need to take part in activities that require them to try
out and experiment in using newly noticed language forms in order for new
learning items to become incorporated into their linguistic repertoire.
What are the implications of this view of the role of listening in
language learning to the teaching of listening? I would suggest that we first
distinguish between situations where comprehension only is an appropriate
instructional goal and those where comprehension plus acquisition is a relevant
focus. Examples of the former are situations where listening to extract
information is the primary focus of listening, such as listening to lectures,
announcements, sales presentations, etc., and situations where listening serves
primarily as a transactional function, such as in service encounters. In other
cases, however, a listening course may be part of a general English course or
linked to a speaking course, and in those situations both listening as comprehension
and listening as acquisition should be the focus. Listening texts and
materials can then be exploited, first as the basis for comprehension and second
as the basis for acquisition.
What classroom strategies are appropriate for the listening-as-acquisition
phase? I would propose a two-part cycle of teaching activities:
1. Noticing activities
2. Restructuring activities
Noticing activities involve returning to the listening texts that served as the
basis for comprehension activities and using them as the basis for language
awareness. For example, students can listen again to a recording in order to:
J Identify differences between what they hear and a printed version
of the text
J Complete a cloze version of the text
J Complete sentences stems taken from the text
J Check off entries from a list of expressions that occurred in
the text
Restructuring activities are oral or written tasks that involve productive use of
selected items from the listening text. Such activities could include:
J Paired reading of the tape scripts in the case of conversational texts
J Written sentence-completion tasks requiring use of expressions and
other linguistic items that occurred in the texts
J Dialog practice that incorporates items from the text
J Role plays in which students are required to use key language from
the texts
The Teaching of Listening 17
As an example, here is the listening text from an activity in Interchange, Third
Edition, Level 2.
Mike has just returned from Brazil. Listen to him talk about
Carnival. What did he enjoy most about it?
Mike: Isn’t that music fantastic? It’s from a samba CD that
I got when I was in Rio for Carnival. Wow! Carnival in
Rio is really something! It’s a party that lasts for four
whole days. It’s held late in February or early March,
but you need to book a hotel room way in advance
because hotels fill up really quickly. Carnival is celebrated
all over Brazil, but the most famous party is in Rio.
The whole city is decorated with colored lights and
streamers. It’s really very beautiful. Everyone is very
friendly – especially to visitors from other countries. The
best part about Carnival is the big parade. The costumes
are unbelievable – people work on them for months.
It’s really fantastic to watch. Everyone dances the samba
in the streets. I’d really recommend you go to Rio for
Carnival if you ever have the chance.
The listening activities that accompany this text focus on listening for comprehension
and on understanding details from the passage. However, the text
could also be used as the basis for a follow-up acquisition activity. For example,
students could be given the preceding text with some key lexical and grammatical
items deleted and the passage used as a cloze listening. Then the students
could be asked to work in pairs and rewrite the monolog as a question-andanswer
exchange between Mike and a friend. Once this was done, the dialog
could be used for pair practice. In this way, students would have the chance to
acquire for active use some of the vocabulary and grammar used in the text.
I am therefore advocating that in contexts where comprehension and
acquisition are the goals of a listening course, a two-part strategy is appropriate
in classroom teaching and instructional materials, namely:
Phase 1: Listening as comprehension
Use of the materials as discussed in the preceding section.
Phase 2: Listening as acquisition
The listening texts used are now used as the basis for
speaking activities, making use of noticing activities and
restructuring activities.
18 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Linking listening tasks to speaking tasks in the way described above, provides
opportunities for students to notice how language is used in different communicative
contexts. They can then practice using some of the language that
occurred in the listening texts.
The Teaching of Speaking 19
2
The Teaching of Speaking
The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second-language
or foreign-language learners. Consequently, learners often evaluate their success
in language learning as well as the effectiveness of their English course on the
basis of how much they feel they have improved in their spoken language proficiency.
Oral skills have hardly been neglected in EFL/ESL courses (witness the
huge number of conversation and other speaking course books in the market),
though how best to approach the teaching of oral skills has long been the focus
of methodological debate. Teachers and textbooks make use of a variety of
approaches, ranging from direct approaches focusing on specific features of oral
interaction (e.g., turn-taking, topic management, and questioning strategies) to
indirect approaches that create conditions for oral interaction through group
work, task work, and other strategies (Richards, 1990).
Advances in discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and corpus
analysis in recent years have revealed a great deal about the nature of spoken
discourse and how it differs from written discourse (McCarthy and Carter,
1997). These differences reflect the different purposes for which spoken and
written language are used. Jones (1996:12) comments:
In speaking and listening we tend to be getting something
done, exploring ideas, working out some aspect of the
world, or simply being together. In writing, we may be
creating a record, committing events or moments to paper.
Research has also thrown considerable light on the complexity of spoken interaction
in either a first or second language. For example, Luoma (2004) cites
some of the following features of spoken discourse:
J Composed of idea units (conjoined short phrases and clauses)
J May be planned (e.g., a lecture) or unplanned (e.g., a
conversation)
J Employs more vague or generic words than written language
J Employs fixed phrases, fillers, and hesitation markers
J Contains slips and errors reflecting online processing
J Involves reciprocity (i.e., interactions are jointly constructed)
J Shows variation (e.g., between formal and casual speech),
reflecting speaker roles, speaking purpose, and the context
20 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Conversational routines
A marked feature of conversational discourse is the use of fixed expressions,
or “routines,” that often have specific functions in conversation and give conversational
discourse the quality of naturalness. Wardhaugh (1985:74, cited in
Richards 1990) observes:
There are routines to help people establish themselves
in certain positions: routines for taking off and hanging
up coats; arrangements concerning where one is to sit or
stand at a party or in a meeting; offers of hospitality; and
so on. There are routines for beginnings and endings of
conversations, for leading into topics, and for moving
away from one topic to another. And there are routines
for breaking up conversations, for leaving a party, and for
dissolving a gathering. . . . It is difficult to imagine how life
could be lived without some routines.
Consider the following routines. Where might they occur? What might their
function be within these situations?
J This one’s on me.
J I don’t believe a word of it.
J I don’t get the point.
J You look great today.
J As I was saying, . . .
J Nearly time. Got everything.
J I’ll be making a move then.
J I see what you mean.
J Let me think about it.
J Just looking, thanks.
J I’ll be with you in a minute.
J It doesn’t matter.
Pawley and Syder (1983) suggest that native speakers have a repertoire of
thousands of routines like these, that their use in appropriate situations creates
conversational discourse that sounds natural and native-like, and that they have
to be learned and used as fixed expressions.
In designing speaking activities or instructional materials for secondlanguage
or foreign-language teaching, it is also necessary to recognize the very
different functions speaking performs in daily communication and the different
purposes for which our students need speaking skills.
The Teaching of Speaking 21
Styles of speaking
An important dimension of conversation is using a style of speaking that is
appropriate to the particular circumstances. Different styles of speaking reflect
the roles, age, sex, and status of participants in interactions and also reflect the
expression of politeness. Consider the various ways in which it is possible to ask
someone the time, and the different social meanings that are communicated by
these differences.
J Got the time?
J I guess it must be quite late now?
J What’s the time?
J Do you have the time?
J Can I bother you for the time?
J You wouldn’t have the time, would you?
Lexical, phonological, and grammatical changes may be involved in producing a
suitable style of speaking, as the following alternatives illustrate:
J Have you seen the boss? / Have you seen the manager? (lexical)
J Whachadoin? / What are you doing? (phonological)
J Seen Joe lately? / Have you seen Joe lately?
Different speech styles reflect perceptions of the social roles of the participants
in a speech event. If the speaker and hearer are judged to be of more or less
equal status, a casual speech style that stresses affiliation and solidarity is appropriate.
If the participants are perceived as being of uneven power or status, a
more formal speech style is appropriate, one that marks the dominance of one
speaker over the other. Successful management of speech styles creates the
sense of politeness that is essential for harmonious social relations (Brown and
Levinson, 1978).
Functions of speaking
Numerous attempts have been made to classify the functions of speaking in
human interaction. Brown and Yule (1983) made a useful distinction between
the interactional functions of speaking, in which it serves to establish and
maintain social relations, and the transactional functions, which focus on the
exchange of information. In workshops with teachers and in designing my own
materials, I use an expanded three-part version of Brown and Yule’s framework
(after Jones, 1996, and Burns, 1998): talk as interaction; talk as transaction;
talk as performance. Each of these speech activities is quite distinct in terms of
form and function and requires different teaching approaches.
22 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Talk as interaction
Talk as interaction refers to what we normally mean by “conversation” and
describes interaction that serves a primarily social function. When people meet,
they exchange greetings, engage in small talk, recount recent experiences, and
so, on because they wish to be friendly and to establish a comfortable zone of
interaction with others. The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to
present themselves to each other than on the message. Such exchanges may be
either casual or more formal, depending on the circumstances, and their nature
has been well described by Brown and Yule (1983). The main features of talk as
interaction can be summarized as follows:
J Has a primarily social function
J Reflects role relationships
J Reflects speaker’s identity
J May be formal or casual
J Uses conversational conventions
J Reflects degrees of politeness
J Employs many generic words
J Uses conversational register
J Is jointly constructed
We can see some of these features illustrated in the following authentic example
of a segment of conversational discourse (from Thornbury and Slade 2006:
132–133). Two women are asking a third woman about her husband and how
they first met.
Jessie: Right. Right, and so when did you – actually meet
him?
Brenda: So we didn’t actually meet until that night.
Judy: Oh, hysterical. [laughs]
Brenda: Well, I met him that night. We were all, we
all went out to dinner. So I had champagne and
strawberries at the airport.
Jessie: And what was it like when you first saw him? Were
you really – nervous?
Brenda: – Well, I was hanging out of a window watching
him in his car, and I thought “oh God what about this!”
[laughs]
Brenda: And he’d combed his hair and shaved his
eyebrows – and
Jessie: Had you seen a photo of him?
The Teaching of Speaking 23
Brenda: Oh, yeah, I had photos of him, photos . . . and I’d
spoken to him on the phone.
Jessie: Did you get on well straight away?
Brenda: Uh, well sort of. I’m a sort of nervy person when I
first meet people, so it was sort of . . . you know . . . just
nice to him.
Jessie: – [laughs]
The conversation is highly interactive and is in a collaborative conversational
style. The listeners give constant feedback, including laughter, to prompt the
speaker to continue, and we see the examples of casual conversational register
with “nervy” and “hanging out of the window.”
Examples of these kinds of talk are:
J Chatting to an adjacent passenger during a plane flight (polite
conversation that does not seek to develop the basis for future social
contact)
J Chatting to a school friend over coffee (casual conversation that
serves to mark an ongoing friendship)
J A student chatting to his or her professor while waiting for an
elevator (polite conversation that reflects unequal power between the
two participants)
J Telling a friend about an amusing weekend experience, and
hearing him or her recount a similar experience he or she once had
(sharing personal recounts)
Some of the skills involved in using talk as interaction involve knowing how to
do the following things:
J Opening and closing conversations
J Choosing topics
J Making small-talk
J Joking
J Recounting personal incidents and experiences
J Turn-taking
J Using adjacency pairs2
J Interrupting
J Reacting to others
J Using an appropriate style of speaking
2 Adjacency pairs: A sequence of two related utterances by two different speakers. The second
utterance is always a response to the first. For example, complain – apologize, compliment –
accept, invite – decline.
24 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Mastering the art of talk as interaction is difficult and may not be a priority for
all learners. However, students who do need such skills and find them lacking
report that they sometimes feel awkward and at a loss for words when they find
themselves in situations that require talk for interaction. They feel difficulty in
presenting a good image of themselves and sometimes avoid situations that call
for this kind of talk. This can be a disadvantage for some learners where the
ability to use talk for conversation can be important. Hatch (1978) emphasizes
that second language learners need a wide range of topics at their disposal in
order to manage talk as interaction. Initially, learners may depend on familiar
topics to get by. However, they also need practice in introducing new topics
into conversation to move beyond this stage.
They should practice nominating topics about which they
are prepared to speak. They should do lots of listening
comprehension for topic nominations of native speakers.
They should practice predicting questions for a large
number of topics. . . . They should be taught elicitation
devices . . . to get topic clarification. That is, they should
practice saying “huh,” “pardon me,” “excuse me, I didn’t
understand,” etc., and echoing parts of sentences they do
not understand in order to get it recycled again. Nothing
stops the opportunity to carry on a conversation quicker
than silence or the use of “yes” and head nodding when the
learner does not understand. (Hatch 1978:434)
Talk as transaction
Talk as transaction refers to situations where the focus is on what is said or
done. The message and making oneself understood clearly and accurately is the
central focus, rather than the participants and how they interact socially with
each other. In such transactions,
. . . talk is associated with other activities. For example,
students may be engaged in hands-on activities (e.g., in a
science lesson) to explore concepts associated with floating
and sinking. In this type of spoken language students and
teachers usually focus on meaning or on talking their way to
understanding. (Jones 1996:14)
The following example from a literature lesson illustrates this kind of talk in a
classroom setting (T = Teacher, S = Student):
The Teaching of Speaking 25
T: The other day we were talking about figures of speech.
And we have already in the past talked about three kinds
of figures of speech. Does anybody remember those
three types? Mary?
S: Personification, simile, and metaphor.
T: Good. Let me write those on the board. – Now can
anybody tell me what personification is all about again?
Juan?
S: Making a nonliving thing act like a person.
T: Yes. OK. Good enough. Now what about simile? . . .
OK. – Cecelia?
S: Comparing two things by making use of the words
“like” or “as.”
T: OK. Good. I’ll write that on the board. The other one –
metaphor. Paul?
S: It’s when we make a comparison between two things,
but we compare them without using the words “like” or
“as.”
T: All right. Good. So it’s more direct than simile. Now we
had a poem a few weeks ago about personification. Do
you remember? Can you recall one line from that poem
where a nonliving thing acts like a human person?
S: “The moon walks the night.”
T: Good. “The moon walks the night.” Does the moon
have feet to walk?
S: No.
T: No. So this is a figure of speech. All right. Now our
lesson today has something to do with metaphor. Now
we’re going to see what they have in common . . .
(Richards and Lockhart 1994: 116–117)
Examples of talk as transaction are:
J Classroom group discussions and problem-solving activities
J A class activity during which students design a poster
J Discussing needed computer repairs with a technician
J Discussing sightseeing plans with a hotel clerk or tour guide
J Making a telephone call to obtain flight information
J Asking someone for directions on the street
J Buying something in a shop
J Ordering food from a menu in a restaurant
26 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Burns (1998) distinguishes between two different types of talk as transaction.
The first type involves situations where the focus is on giving and receiving information
and where the participants focus primarily on what is said or achieved
(e.g., asking someone for directions). Accuracy may not be a priority, as long as
information is successfully communicated or understood.
The second type is transactions that focus on obtaining goods or
services, such as checking into a hotel or ordering food in a restaurant. For
example, the following exchange was observed in a café:
Server: Hi, what’ll it be today?
Client: Just a cappuccino, please. Low-fat decaf if you
have it.
Server: Sure. Nothing to eat today?
Client: No, thanks.
Server: Not a problem.
The main features of talk as transaction are:
J It has a primarily information focus.
J The main focus is on the message and not the participants.
J Participants employ communication strategies to make themselves
understood.
J There may be frequent questions, repetitions, and comprehension
checks, as in the example from the preceding classroom lesson.
J There may be negotiation and digression.
J Linguistic accuracy is not always important.
Some of the skills involved in using talk for transactions are:
J Explaining a need or intention
J Describing something
J Asking questions
J Asking for clarification
J Confirming information
J Justifying an opinion
J Making suggestions
J Clarifying understanding
J Making comparisons
J Agreeing and disagreeing
The Teaching of Speaking 27
Talk as performance
The third type of talk that can usefully be distinguished has been called talk as
performance. This refers to public talk, that is, talk that transmits information
before an audience, such as classroom presentations, public announcements,
and speeches. For example, here is the opening of a fall welcome speech given
by a university president:
“Good morning. It’s not my intention to deliver the
customary state of the university address. There’s good
reason for that. It would seem to me to be presumptuous
for someone who has been here not quite seven weeks
to tell you what he thinks the state of the university is.
You would all be better prepared for that kind of address
than I am. However, I would like to offer you, based on
my experience – which has been pretty intensive these
almost seven weeks – some impressions that I have of this
institution, strengths, or some of them, and the challenges
and opportunities that we face here. . . . I also want to talk
about how I see my role during the short time that I will be
with you . . .”
(www.sjsu.edu/president/docs/speeches/2003_welcome.
pdf. Accessed June 9, 2007)
Spoken texts of this kind, according to Jones (1996:14),
. . . often have identifiable generic structures and the
language used is more predictable. . . . Because of less
contextual support, the speaker must include all necessary
information in the text – hence the importance of topic
as well as textual knowledge. And while meaning is still
important, there will be more emphasis on form and
accuracy.
Talk as performance tends to be in the form of monolog rather than dialog,
often follows a recognizable format (e.g., a speech of welcome), and is closer
to written language than conversational language. Similarly, it is often evaluated
according to its effectiveness or impact on the listener, something that is
unlikely to happen with talk as interaction or transaction. Examples of talk as
performance are:
J Giving a class report about a school trip
J Conducting a class debate
J Giving a speech of welcome
J Making a sales presentation
J Giving a lecture
28 Teaching Listening and Speaking
The main features of talk as performance are:
J A focus on both message and audience
J Predictable organization and sequencing
J Importance of both form and accuracy
J Language is more like written language
J Often monologic
Some of the skills involved in using talk as performance are:
J Using an appropriate format
J Presenting information in an appropriate sequence
J Maintaining audience engagement
J Using correct pronunciation and grammar
J Creating an effect on the audience
J Using appropriate vocabulary
J Using an appropriate opening and closing
Teachers sometimes describe interesting differences between how learners manage
these three different kinds of talk, as the following anecdotes illustrate.
I sometimes find with my students at a university in
Hong Kong that they are good at talk as transaction and
performance but not with talk as interaction. For example, the
other day one of my students did an excellent class presentation
in a course for computer science majors, and described very
effectively a new piece of computer software. However, a few
days later when I met the same student going home on the
subway and tried to engage her in social chat, she was at a
complete loss for words.
Another teacher describes a second language user with just the opposite difficulties.
He is more comfortable with talk as interaction than with talk as
performance.
One of my colleagues in my university in China is quite
comfortable using talk socially. If we have lunch together
with other native speakers, he is quite comfortable joking and
chatting in English. However, recently we did a presentation
together at a conference and his performance was very
different. His pronunciation became much more “Chinese”
and he made quite a few grammatical and other errors that I
hadn’t heard him make before.
The Teaching of Speaking 29
Implications for teaching
Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an
English class. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the class
will focus on. Is it all three of the genres described in the preceding section, or
will some receive greater attention than others? Informal needs analysis is the
starting point here. Procedures for determining needs include observation of
learners carrying out different kinds of communicative tasks, questionnaires,
interviews, and diagnostic testing (e.g., Tsang and Wong 2002). The second
issue is to identifying teaching strategies to “teach” (i.e., provide opportunities
for learners to acquire) each kind of talk.
Teaching talk as interaction
Talk as interaction is perhaps the most difficult skill to teach since interactional
talk is a very complex and subtle phenomenon that takes place under the control
of unspoken rules. In my experience, these are best taught by providing
examples embedded in naturalistic dialogs that model features such as opening
and closing conversations, making small talk, recounting personal incidents and
experiences, and reacting to what others say. One rule for making small talk is
to initiate interactions with a comment concerning something in the immediate
vicinity or that both participants have knowledge of. The comment should elicit
agreement, since agreement is face-preserving and non-threatening. Hence,
safe topics, such as the weather, traffic, and so on, must be chosen. Students can
initially be given models such as the following to practice:
A: Nice weather today.
B: Yes, it is.
A: I hope the weather is nice for the weekend.
B: Me, too.
A: The buses to school are always so crowded.
B: Yes, they are.
Later, students can be given situations in which small talk might be appropriate
(e.g., meeting someone at a movie, running into a friend in the cafeteria, or
waiting at a bus stop). They can then be asked to think of small talk topic comments
and responses.
Giving feedback (or back channeling) is another important aspect
of talk as interaction. It involves responding to a conversational partner with
expressions that indicate interest and a wish for the speaker to continue, such
as “That’s interesting,” “yeah,” “really,” and so on. To practice using back
channeling in this way, students can examine dialogs from which feedback
expressions have been omitted. They can consider suitable ways of providing
30 Teaching Listening and Speaking
them and then practice using them. For example, they can come up with different
responses to use in the following dialog:
A: I’m going to Hawaii for my next vacation.
B: .
A: Yeah, my parents are taking me there as a graduation
present.
B: . And what do you plan to do there?
A: Well I guess I’ll spend a lot of time on the beach.
B: .
A: But I also want to do some snorkeling.
B: .
Another technique to practice the use of conversation starters and narratives
about personal experiences involves giving conversation starters that students
respond to by asking one or two follow-up questions. For example: “I didn’t
sleep very well last night.” “Look what I bought on Sunday. How do you like
it?” “Did that thunderstorm last night wake you?”
Two simple activities I use to practice topic management are “in the
hot seat” and “question time.” In the first activity, a student sits on a chair in
front of the class and makes a statement about something he or she did recently
(e.g., “I saw a good movie on Sunday”). The other members of the class ask
three or more questions about the topic, which the student has to answer
quickly. The “question time” activity, introduces students to a lesson on a new
theme. I prepare up to 15 questions related to the theme and put them on a
handout. For example, if the next unit covers sports, the students’ handout
would include questions such as “What sports do you play?” “How often do
you play sports?” “What sports are popular in your country?” “What sport have
you never tried?” I first ask students around the class to answer the questions
quickly. Then students practice asking and answering the questions in pairs.
Teaching talk as transaction
Talk as transaction is more easily planned since current communicative materials
are a rich resource of group activities, information-gap activities, and role
plays that can provide a source for practicing how to use talk for sharing and
obtaining information, as well as for carrying out real-world transactions. These
activities include ranking, values clarification, brainstorming, and simulations.
Group discussion activities can be initiated by having students work in groups to
prepare a short list of controversial statements for others to think about. Groups
exchange statements and discuss them, for example: “Schools should do away
with exams.” “Vegetarianism is the only healthy lifestyle.” “The Olympic games
The Teaching of Speaking 31
are a waste of money.” Role-play activities are another familiar technique for
practicing real-world transactions and typically involve the following steps:
J Preparing: Reviewing vocabulary, real-world knowledge related to
the content, and context of the role play (e.g., returning a faulty
item to a store).
J Modeling and eliciting: Demonstrating the stages that are typically
involved in the transaction, eliciting suggestions for how each stage
can be carried out, and teaching the functional language needed
for each stage.
J Practicing and reviewing: Assigning students roles and practicing
a role play using cue cards or realia to provide language and other
support.
An issue that arises in practicing talk as transaction using different kinds of communicative
tasks is the level of linguistic accuracy that students achieve when
carrying out these tasks. One assumption is that form will largely look after
itself with incidental support from the teacher. Grammar has a mediating role,
rather than serving as an end in itself (Thornbury 1998:112). “The teacher and
the learner have a remarkable degree of flexibility, for they are presented with a
set of general learning objectives and problem-solving tasks” (Kumaravadivelu
1991:99). As students carry out communicative tasks, the assumption is that
they engage in the process of negotiation of meaning, employing strategies such
as comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests. These
are believed to lead to a gradual modification of learners’ language output,
which over time takes on more and more target-like forms.
Despite these optimistic claims, others have reported that communication
tasks often develop fluency at the expense of accuracy. For example, Higgs
and Clifford (1982:78) reporting experience with foreign language teaching
programs in the United States, observed the following:
In programs that have as curricular goals an early emphasis
on unstructured communication activities – minimizing, or
excluding entirely, considerations of grammatical accuracy –
it is possible in a fairly short time . . . to provide students
with a relatively large vocabulary and a high degree of
fluency . . . These same data suggest that the premature
immersion of a student into an unstructured or “free”
conversational setting before certain linguistic structures
are more or less in place is not done without cost. There
appears to be a real danger of leading students too rapidly
into the creative aspects of language use, in that if successful
communication is encouraged and rewarded for its own
sake, the effect seems to be one of rewarding at the same
32 Teaching Listening and Speaking
time the incorrect strategies seized upon in attempting to
deal with the communication strategies presented.
Similar findings have been reported in more recent studies of task work (see
Foster, 1998; Musumeci, 1996).
The following example of the quality of language that is sometimes
produced as students practice transactional functions of language. This example
was observed during a role-play task in a Spanish secondary school English
lesson. One student is playing the role of a doctor and the other a patient, and
they are discussing a health problem.
S1: You how old?
S2: I’m thirty-four . . . thirty-five.
S1: Thirty . . . five?
S2: Five.
S1: Problem?
S2: I have . . . a pain in my throat.
S1: [In Spanish] What do you have?
S2: A pain.
S1: [In Spanish] What’s that?
S2: [In Spanish] A pain. A pain.
S1: Ah, pain.
S2: Yes, and it makes problem to me when I . . . swallow.
S1: When do you have . . . ?
S1: Since yesterday morning.
S1: [In Spanish] No, I mean, where do you have the pain?
It has a pain in . . . ?
S2: In my throat.
S1: Ah. Let it . . . getting, er . . . worse. It can be, er . . .
very serious problem and you are, you will go to New
York to operate, so . . . operation . . . the 7th, the 27th,
er May. And treatment, you can’t eat, er, big meal.
S2: Big meal. I er . . . I don’t know? Fish?
S1: Fish, you have to eat, er, fish, for example.
This example shows how low-level students, when carrying out communication
tasks, often rely on a lexicalized system of communication that depends heavily
on vocabulary and memorized chunks of language, as well as both verbal and
nonverbal communication strategies, to get meaning across. Several methods
can be used to address the issue of language accuracy when students are practicing
transactional use of language:
The Teaching of Speaking 33
1. By pre-teaching certain linguistic forms that can be used while
completing a task.
2. By reducing the complexity of the task (e.g., by familiarizing
students with the demands of the activity by showing them a
similar activity on video or as a dialog).
3. By giving adequate time to plan the task.
4. By repeated performance of the task.
Willis (1966) suggests using a cycle of activities with task work using a sequence
of activities in a lesson. These activities create interaction mediated by a task and
then build language awareness and language development around task performance.
She proposes the following sequence of activities:
Pre-task activities
Introduction to topic and task
J T helps Ss to understand the theme and objectives of the task,
for example, brainstorming ideas with the class, using pictures,
mime, or personal experience to introduce the topic.
J Ss may do a pre-task, for example, topic-based odd-word-out
games. T may highlight useful words and phrases, but would not
pre-teach new structures.
J Ss can be given preparation time to think about how to do the
task.
J Ss can hear a recording of a parallel task being done (so long as
this does not give away the solution to the problem).
J If the task is based on a text, Ss read a part of it.
The task cycle
Task
J The task is done by Ss (in pairs or groups) and gives Ss a chance
to use whatever language they already have to express themselves
and say whatever they want to say. This may be in response to
reading a text or hearing a recording.
J T walks around and monitors, encouraging everyone’s attempt
at communication in the target language.
J T helps Ss to formulate what they want to say, but will not
intervene to correct errors of form.
34 Teaching Listening and Speaking
J The emphasis is on spontaneous, exploratory talk and
confidence building, within the privacy of the small group.
J Success in achieving the goals of the tasks helps Ss’ motivation.
Planning
J Planning prepares Ss for the next stage, where they are asked to
briefly report to the whole class how they did the task and what
the outcome was.
J Ss draft and rehearse what they want to say or write.
J T goes around to advise students on language, suggesting
phrases and helping Ss to polish and correct their language.
J If the reports are in writing, T can encourage peer editing and
use of dictionaries.
J The emphasis is on clarity, organization, and accuracy, as
appropriate for a public presentation.
J Individual students often take this chance to ask questions about
specific language items.
Report
J T asks some pairs to report briefly to the whole class so everyone
can compare findings, or begin a survey. There must be a
purpose for others to listen. Sometimes only one or two groups
report in full; others comment and add extra points. The class
may take notes.
J T chairs, comments on the content of group reports, rephrases
perhaps, but gives no overt public correction.
The language focus
Analysis
J T sets some language-focused tasks, based on the texts student
read or on the transcripts of the recordings they heard. Examples
include the following:
J Find words and phrases related to the topic or text.
J Read the transcript, find words ending in “s” and say
what the “s” means.
J Find all the words in the simple past form. Say which
refer to past time and which do not.
J Underline and classify the questions in the transcript.
J T starts Ss off, then students continue, often in pairs.
The Teaching of Speaking 35
J T goes around to help. Ss can ask individual questions.
J In plenary, T then reviews the analysis, possibly listing relevant
language on the board. Ss may take notes.
Practice
J T conducts practice activities as needed, based on the language
analysis work already on the board, or using examples from the
text or transcript. Practice activities can include:
J Choral repetition of the phrases identified and classified
J Memory challenge games based on partially erased
examples or using lists already on blackboard for
progressive deletion
J Sentence completion (base sentence set by one team for
another)
J Matching the past-tense verbs (jumbled) with the
subject or objects they had in the text
J Dictionary reference with words from text or transcript
Teaching talk as performance
Teaching talk as performance requires a different teaching strategy. Jones
(1996:17) comments:
Initially, talk as performance needs to be prepared for and
scaffolded in much the same way as written text, and many
of the teaching strategies used to make understandings of
written text accessible can be applied to the formal uses of
spoken language.
This approach involves providing examples or models of speeches, oral presentations,
stories, etc., through video or audio recordings or written examples.
These are then analyzed, or “deconstructed,” to understand how such texts
work and what their linguistic and other organizational features are. Questions
such as the following guide this process:
J What is the speaker’s purpose?
J Who is the audience?
J What kind of information does the audience expect?
J How does the talk begin, develop, and end? What moves or stages
are involved?
J Is any special language used?
36 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Students then work jointly on planning their own texts, which are then presented
to the class.
Feez and Joyce’s approach to text-based instruction provides a good
model for teaching talk as performance (1998:v). This approach involves:
J Teaching explicitly about the structures and grammatical features
of spoken and written texts
J Linking spoken and written texts to the cultural context of their
use
J Designing units of work that focus on developing skills in relation
to whole texts
J Providing students with guided practice as they develop language
skills for meaningful communication through whole texts
Feez and Joyce (1998: 28–31) give the following description of how a textbased
lesson proceeds:
Phase 1 Building the context
In this stage, students:
J Are introduced to the social context of an authentic model of
the text-type being studied
J Explore features of the general cultural context in which the
text-type is used and the social purposes the text-type achieves
J Explore the immediate context of situation by investigating
the register of a model text that has been selected on the basis
of the course objectives and learner need
An exploration of register involves:
J Building knowledge of the topic of the model text and
knowledge of the social activity in which the text is used, e.g.,
job seeking
J Understanding the roles and relationships of the people
using the text and how these are established and maintained,
e.g., the relationship between a job seeker and a prospective
employer
J Understanding the channel of communication being used,
e.g., using the telephone, or speaking face-to-face with
members of an interview panel
The Teaching of Speaking 37
Context building activities include:
J Presenting the context through pictures, audiovisual materials,
realia, excursions, field-trips, guest speakers, etc.
J Establishing the social purpose through discussions or surveys,
etc.
J Cross-cultural activities, such as comparing differences in the
use of the text in two cultures
J Comparing the model text with other texts of the same or
contrasting type, e.g., comparing a job interview with a
complex spoken exchange involving close friends, a work
colleague, or a stranger in a service encounter
Phase 2 Modeling and deconstructing the text
In this stage, students:
J Investigate the structural pattern and language features of the
model
J Compare the model with other examples of the same text-type
Feez and Joyce (1998:29) comment that “modeling and deconstruction are
undertaken at both the whole text, clause, and expression levels. It is at this stage
that many traditional ESL language teaching activities come into their own.”
Phase 3 Joint construction of the text
In this stage:
J Students begin to contribute to the construction of whole
examples of the text-type
J The teacher gradually reduces the contribution to text
construction, as the students move closer to being able to
control text-type independently
Joint construction activities include:
J Teacher questioning, discussing and editing whole class
construction, then scribing onto board or overhead
transparencies
J Skeleton texts
J Jigsaw and information-gap activities
J Small group construction of tests
J Self-assessment and peer assessment activities
38 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Phase 4 Independent construction of the text
In this stage:
J Students work independently with the text
J Learner performances are used for achievement assessment
Independent construction activities include:
J Listening tasks, e.g., comprehension activities in response
to live or recorded material such as performing a task,
sequencing pictures, numbering, ticking or underlining
material on a worksheet, and answering questions
J Listening and speaking tasks, e.g., role plays, and simulated or
authentic dialogs
J Speaking tasks, e.g., spoken presentation to class, a
community organization, or a workplace
J Reading tasks, e.g., comprehension activities in response
to written material such as performing a task, sequencing
pictures, numbering, ticking or underlining material on a
worksheet, and answering questions
J Writing tasks which demand that students draft and present
whole texts
Phase 5 Linking to related texts
In this stage, students investigate how what they have learned in this teaching/
learning cycle can be related to:
J Other texts in the same or similar context
J Future or past cycles of teaching and learning
Activities that link the text-type to related texts include:
J Comparing the use of the text-type across different fields
J Researching other text-types used in the same field
J Role-playing what happens if the same text-type is used by
people with different roles and relationships
J Comparing spoken and written modes of the same text-type
J Researching how a key language feature used in this text-type
is used in other text-types
The Teaching of Speaking 39
Evaluating performance on speaking activities
The third issue involved in planning speaking activities is determining the
expected level of performance on a speaking task and the criteria that will be
used to assess student performance. For any activity we use in class, whether it
be one that seeks to develop proficiency in using talk as interaction, transaction,
or performance, we need to consider what successful completion of the activity
involves. Is accuracy of pronunciation and grammar important? Is each participant
expected to speak for about the same amount of time? Is it acceptable if a
speaker uses many long pauses and repetitions? If a speaker’s contribution to a
discussion is off topic, does it matter?
As the above questions illustrate, the types of criteria we use to assess
a speaker’s oral performance during a classroom activity will depend on which
kind of talk we are talking about and the kind of classroom activity we are
using. In a report on teaching discussion skills, Green, Christopher, and Lam
(2002:228) recommend assigning one student to serve as an observer during a
discussion activity, using the following observation form:
Number of contributions
by students
A B C D E F
1. Total number of contributions
made
2. Responding supportively
3. Responding aggressively
4. Introducing a new (relevant)
point
5. Digressing from the topic
A speaking activity that requires talk as performance (e.g., a mini-lecture) would
require very different assessment criteria. These might include:
J Clarity of presentation: i.e., the extent to which the speaker
organizes information in an easily comprehensible order
J Use of discourse markers, repetition, and stress to emphasize
important points and to make the lecture structure more salient to
the listeners
Different speaking activities such as conversations, group discussions, and
speeches make different types of demands on learners. They require different
kinds and levels of preparation and support, and different criteria must be used
to assess how well students carry them out.
40 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Conclusion
I will conclude with a set of questions I use to guide myself when preparing
speaking activities for the classroom or for textbooks. I also use these questions
with teachers in workshops that focus on developing and reviewing classroom
materials.
J What will be the focus of the activity – talk as interaction,
transaction, or performance?
J How will the activity be modeled?
J What stages will the activity be divided into?
J What language support will be needed?
J What resources will be needed?
J What learning arrangements will be needed?
J What level of performance is expected?
J How and when will feedback be given?
References and Further Reading 41
References and Further Reading
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Brown, P., and S. Levinson (1978). Politeness: Some Universals in Language
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Buck, G. (2001). Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buck, G. (1995). How to become a good listening teacher. In D. Mendelsohn
and J. Rubin (eds.), A Guide for the Teaching of Second Language
Listening. San Diego, CA: Dominie Press, pp. 113–128.
Burns, Anne (1998). Teaching speaking. Annual Review of Applied
Linguistics 18:102–123.
Clark, H. M., and E. V. Clark (1977). Psychology and Language: An
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Feez, S., and H. Joyce 1998. Text-Based Syllabus Design. Sydney: Macquarie
University.
Field, John (2003). Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in second
language listening. ELT Journal 57:325–334.
Field, John (1998). The changing face of listening. English teaching
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Foster, P. (1998). A classroom perspective on the negotiation of meaning.
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42 Teaching Listening and Speaking
Green, F., E. Christopher, and J. Lam (2002). Developing discussion skills
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References and Further Reading 43
Slobin,