Listening & Speaking
Learning to Listen
When learning to listen to English, children are actively engaged in constructing meaning and making sense of what they hear. To do this, they use not just the language, but their knowledge of the world and clues provided by the context, for example :
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Their expectations about the intentions of the speaker
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Predictions about what they will listen to
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The speaker’s use of voice, mime and gesture
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The reason and purpose for which they are listening
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Other features in the immediate environment which support their understanding, example flash cards, story or course book illustrations, posters, real objects, puppets, sound effects.
Essentially, young children need plenty of opportunities to listen to language embedded in engaging and meaningful context. Through listening, children become familiar with the sounds, rhythm and intonation of English. Listening also allows children to recognize, understand and respond to language non-verbally before they produce it themselves.
Classroom talk as for example, when you give instructions, organize and manage different classroom activities and give the children feedback, encouragement and praise is a major source of listening material for children. As far as possible, it is advisable to use English for this kind of classroom language. Through repetition and routines, you will build up an expanding repertoire of language that children understand and respond to as part of everyday communication in class.
In L2 as in L1, children develop listening skills before speaking skills. It is enriching to expose them to language that is ahead of their productive competence, as long as their understanding is guided and supported, for example through mime, illustrations/or activities they are asked to do. From the outset, it is important to use a variety of different spoken text types : instructions, rhymes, stories, songs, dialogues, conversations, descriptions. It is also important to build up confidence and show children that they can be successful listeners without necessarily understanding every word.
The use of longer text, such as stories, can also help develop children’s extensive listening skills, where listening is motivated by pleasure rather than information.
Why Listening Needs to Be Taught
There are number of reasons why Listening needs to be specifically taught :
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It is very important in daily life. According to Wilga Rivers (1981), we listen twice as much as we speak, four times as much as we read and five times as much as we write.
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It has unique aspects that make it different from other language skills.
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It is very important for developing speaking skills. As Nida (1957) rightly concludes, ‘Learning to speak a language is very largely a task of learning to hear it.’
Purposes of Listening
People listen to different things for different reasons :
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For maintaining good social relations
We often hear people say they spent a whole afternoon or whole weekend chatting with someone else but when they are asked what they talked about, they say things like, ‘Nothing much!’ or ‘I can’t really remember.’ In this kind of talk, the information content or message is not important. What is important is the goodwill maintained or established through the talk. The communication here is listener-oriented and not message-oriented. A great deal of conversation and casual talk is of this nature.
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For entertainment
People listen to jokes, stories, songs, plays, TV, radio broadcasts, mainly for entertainment. The outcome of such listening is not usually measured in terms of how useful it was but in terms of personal satisfaction.
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For obtaining information necessary for day to day living
People listen to news broadcasts, directions on how to get to different places, weather forecasts and travel information – airport, bus and train terminal announcements – because listening to these enables them to get the information necessary for day to day living, to know when to board the plane, whether it is ‘safe’ to plan a picnic etc.
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For academic purposes
People listen to lectures, seminars and talks as a way of extending their knowledge and skills. Listening is a central part of all learning. A pupils who cannot understand what the teacher is saying in a class is seriously hampered in his learning.
Processes Involved in Listening
No one really knows exactly what happens when we listen and comprehend. So in this section , we will only look at only those features of the listening process that are likely to help you with your teaching of a skill.
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Hearing VS listening
Our ears are constantly being barraged by sound. However, we do not pay attention to everything new hear. We only begin to listen when we pay attention to the sounds we hear and make an effort to interpret them.
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Top-down processing
When a listener hears something, this may reminds him of something in his previous knowledge, and this in turn, leads him to predict the kind of information he is likely to hear. When this happens, he is said to be using top-down processing. When a listener can relate what he is about to hear with that he already knows, this will help him understand what he hears better. This is why pre-listening activities are introduced to help students see how the listening text relates to what they already know.
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Bottom-up processing
If what he hears does not trigger anything in his previous knowledge, then the listener would have to resort to what is called bottom-up listening, the slow building up of meaning block by block through understanding all the linguistic data he hears. This kind of processing is much harder. The way to solve this problem, however, is not to focus the student’s attention on the building blocks, pronunciation, word knowledge etc. People do not listen for words and sounds. They listen for meaning. So you should reach your students to listen for meaning. To use whatever clues they can get from the context-who is speaking, on what topic, for what purpose, to whom, where, etc. – to make sense of what they hear . They should, for example, try to guess the meaning of unknown or partially heard words from context. They should be taught to have a whole-to-part focus in their listening. They should work at understanding the whole message and to use grammar, vocabulary and sounds only as aids in doing this and not as important in themselves.
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Listening is an active process
When a proficient listener listens, he doesn’t passively receive what the speaker says. He actively constructs meaning. He identifies main points and supporting details; he distinguishes facts from opinions; he guesses the meaning of unfamiliar words, etc. these are cognitive aspects of learning. There are also affective or emotional dimensions to listening. The listener agrees or disagrees with a speaker. He likes or dislikes the speaker’s tone of voice or choice of words. He may find the speaker’s choice of topic morally objectionable or absolutely boring. He may be disappointed with/surprised by/worried about/satisfied with the speaker’s treatment of the topic and so on. Listener’s attitudes, values and interests all affect the way they interpret and respond to talk.
Listening in a Foreign or Second language
Many people believe that at the beginning stages of language learning, before pupils meet language in its written form, they develop knowledge of words and structures through repeatedly hearing these words in the environment. People argue that this is how little children learn their own mother tongue. However, it is unwise to accept this belief before investigating it in the Malaysian situation.
In Malaysia, we have two very distinct situations : the situation in large towns like Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Ipoh and Kuching and the situation in rural areas. In the urban areas, English is often heard. In the rural areas, there is very little English spoken or heard. No one uses English to get anything done in the rural areas. Of course, the same media serves urban and rural people but the amount of exposure to English through the media varies. Even though there are several television and radio broadcasts in English, most rural people do not have an interest in such programs and therefore do not turn on to the channels that broadcasts these shows.
This has implications for teaching and learning. We may be able to assume that a child who comes from the urban area may have some latent knowledge of English. But this cannot be assumed of rural child.
Learning to Speak.
Speaking is a complex skill and the difficulty for children learning a foreign language should not be underestimated. Although children are good at imitating and may acquire better pronunciation than older learners, they are still developing language and discourse skills in their L1. Their age and level of social, cognitive and emotional development need to be taken into account when planning speaking activities in English.
Spoken Interaction and spoken production
Speaking skills can be broadly divided into two areas : spoken interaction and spoken production. Spoken interaction refers to the ability to ask and answer questions and handle exchanges with others, whereas spoken production refers to the ability to produce language, for example, in a rhyme, a description or an account, such as retelling a story. It is important to develop children’s competence in both these areas in order to build up confidence and lay the foundations for future learning.
Initially children will benefit from activities which requires lots of repetition and which help them to memorize vocabulary and chunks of language and acquire pronunciation in a natural way. Much of the language children produce in the early stages of learning will be single words or short formulaic utterances, eg I’m fine. Rather than explicitly correcting language mistakes, its is best to respond to children’s meaning and what they are trying to communicate. As you do this, you can remodel or recast what they say, eg Yes. You are right.
Very young children may be reluctant to speak at first, and it is important to give them time to listen and absorb the sounds of English before participating actively. Insisting on participation is likely to be counter-productive. The best strategy is usually to provide lots of opportunities for speaking activities in a very secure and non-threatening way, eg through coral repetition of action rhymes and choral counting games, and allow children to join in when they are ready.
In order for children with only minimal linguistic competence to start learning to communicate in English, it is important to establish simple classroom routines from the outset. These include for example, greetings and goodbyes at the beginning and the end of the lessons, asking for permission, eg to go to the toilet, sharpen pencils, get crayons, etc and classroom language eg I don’t understand, can you repeat that please? Even young children can be taught following the three phrases formulaically: I think…, Maybe… I don’t know and then be encouraged to use these regularly in class.
Framework for speaking activities
Whatever the children’s age, it is important to provide framework for speaking activities which encourage them to use English for real purposes which they can relate to, rather than simply practice language for its own sake. As children become increasingly capable of interacting with each other in pairs and groups, it is also important to ensure that speaking activities are design to foster active listening, turn-taking and respect other’s people opinions. None of these can be taken for granted because children are still developing these skills and attitudes as part of their general education and personal development. Speaking activities which are personalized and offer choice tend to increase children’s willingness to participate. Such activities give them ‘ownership’ of language, thus helping to make learning more memorable. Whenever possible, it is beneficial to establish frameworks where children are motivated to speak and feel that they have something they want to say.
In order for a speaking activity to be successful, it is important to set clear goals and establish what the outcome(s) of the activity will be. It is also important to ensure that the language demands are within the children’s current level of competence and to prepare for, model, rehearse and demonstrate the language children will need to use before they begin.
Pronunciation
Through exposure to English in the form of classroom language, instructions, games, stories, dialogues, conversations, rhymes, chants and songs, children develop familiarity with the sounds, rhythm and intonation patterns of English and imitate these features in a natural way. It is important to provide lots of models and to build up children’s confidence through the acceptance of approximate pronunciation. This gives them time to acquire good habits in an unforced way. Insistence on correct pronunciation with very young children is likely to prove counter-productive.With older children, in addition to an implicit, global approach to pronunciation, it is often appropriate to do activities designed to raise awareness for particular features of pronunciation that may be different from the children’s own language.