Teaching Listening & Speaking

1. Teaching Listening & Speaking

2. Introduction: When we learn any language, there arefour skills that we need for complete communication. These are called the four "language skills": • Skill #1: Listening • Skill #2: Speaking • Skill #3: Reading • Skill #4: Writing

3. When we learn our native language, we usually learn to listen first, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. • As you can see, listening is the first language skill. It is perhaps the most important skill of all, the basis for the other three.

4. The four language skills are related to each other in two ways: • the direction of communication (in or out) • the method of communication (spoken or written) Input is sometimes called "reception“, and output is sometimes called "production".

5. Input Output Reception Production Listening Speaking Written Spoken Reading Writing

6. Teaching Listening

7. Children in an English language class will listen to a great variety of texts but above all to their teacher: talking , singing , chanting , telling stories. • Teachers often talk a lot in the target language because they provide the language input. This helps children to get used to the intonation patterns and the sounds of the language. Teachers talk and comment on what is going on as they point to pictures in the book or on the classroom wall , or as they mime something.

8. By employing a variety of creative exercises, teachers can help students develop strong listening skills that will aid them throughout their academic careers. • It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another.

9. Listening-aspects of difficulty Listening is an active skill and there are many factors that contribute to its difficulty: • The type and length of the text the children listen to. • The familiarity of the person who they are listening to.

10. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them. • Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener).

11. Listening strategies Listening strategies = are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input.

12. Top-down strategies They are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text. Top-down strategies include: • listening for the main idea: students listen to identify the overall ideas expressed in the whole recording.

13. Predicting: get your students to predict the content of a listening activity beforehand,they’lltry to guess key information contained in the recording before they listen. • Summarizing. • Identifying emotion : students listen to identify the mood of certain speakers. • Listening for opinions.

14. Bottom-up strategies They are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include • listening for specific details: students listen for groups of words and phrases at sentence level. • Listening for specific information: students listen for particular information at word level. • recognizing word-order patterns

15. Activity “As children listen to their teacher , some try to work out what is going on while others choose to remain silent.” • 1.Why do you think some children choose to remain silent when listening to their teacher? • 2.Why do not some other children want to listen to what is being said to them?

16. Instructions in how to teach listening step 1 • Interactional modifications of language: During interactions between people in any language, there are communication breakdowns (misunderstanding)

17. However, if the misunderstanding is serious, the partner will decide to repair and rephrase by modifying the original language use and this is often what is called “ language modification”. • Examples of language modification : • Using repetitions. • Comprehension checks, e.g. Do you understand what I am trying to say? • Clarification requests ,e.g. What did you say?

18. Step2 Ask students to demonstrate listening by predicting the end of a story. Step3 Encourage students to listen for unfamiliar words and raise their hands to ask for definitions to increase their comprehension.

19. Step 4 Play a record or tape recording of a student’s song. Then, quiz the students on the song after playing it for the class. Step 7 Play listening games like "Simon Says" or "Hokey Pokey," varying your instructions so that students have to listen closely to succeed.

20. Teaching Speaking

21. What are the characteristics of spoken language • Speaking is a skill, just like swimming, driving, or playing. • In the traditional classroom, the learning of English has been limited to knowledge of vocabulary and grammar rules, with little or no attention paid to practicing language skill.

22. Speaking activities with younger groups • Teachers and children construct utterances together: children do not have to be able to produce complete sentences or questions to initiate an utterance. After children have been exposed to English through listening, they soon want and are able to participate in interactions with the teacher and each other.

23. It is important for teachers to select the tasks that are motivating and not too difficult. Creating a positive learning environment can certainly help . Children will speak up and contribute to the lesson if they feel happy and secure. It is also crucial that children understand that they can speak up even when they are not sure about their contributions or have only fragmented answer or idea to offer.

24. Examples of Speaking activities with younger groups • Describing pictures • Mime and guess • Information gap activity: children work in pairs . Each partner has a copy of the same picture, but with different parts missing. They describe their pictures to each other and draw in the missing parts. • Favorite food , sports, subjects…..etc

25. Examples of Speaking activities for older learners • Simple dialogues. • Role-play. • Story telling.

26. Next Time: Teaching Reading and Writing