Teaching Listening and Speaking: From Theory to Practice

By Jack C. RichardsPresented 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.