University of Algiers 2/ Department of English/ Master1/ Didactics of Foreign Languages/ Groups: 01 and 02

2020-2021

Module: Teaching English to Non-Native Speakers (TENN)

Lecture prepared jointly by: Dr. Y. Boukhedimi and Mrs R. Yerboub
Lecture 04: Teaching the four language skills

Part one: Teaching receptive skills

Introduction to the teaching of the four skills

Teaching English to speakers of other languages involves, as mentioned previously, knowledge of

learners’ needs and a set of instructional objectives which can be reached gradually. In order for a
fair level of proficiency to be reached in the target language, it takes a number of syllabi, an amount
of lesson plans with a selection of appropriate instructional aims and designs. This implies that
adequate materials, equipment and assessment practices must be available. This is important
especially that the target skills differ in nature; this means that 1) to understand speech or print one
has to be familiar with the code (language); 2) to produce speech or print one has, too, to be familiar
with the code.

However, while the former involves recognizing, combining sounds and making sense of sound
sequences (a flow of speech), it also means being able to identify, recognize and become able to use
printed marks in order to read texts and understand their meaning. On the other hand, using a new
language requires an ability to use the code, grammar and vocabulary to produce meaningful
sequences of speech (as when answering a question or reacting to an auditory message) and written
texts.

The chapter on teaching the four skills will be divided into two parts: the first part will be concerned
with the teaching of receptive skills and the second part will deal with the teaching of productive
skills.

In turn, each of these two parts will be divided into two sections: the teaching of listening and the
teaching of reading (in Part one: Receptive skills teaching), and the teaching of speaking and writing
(in Part two: Productive skills teaching).

The present lecture is concerned with receptive skill instruction, and listening instruction in
particular.

Listening and reading do not only relate to decoding the written and spoken code but also to
“understanding” the meaning which is conveyed by instances of speech and print. In order to help
learners acquire these receptive skills and become able to read and listen to English, teachers have to
be aware of all the constraints linked to the attainment of these two types of abilities (or skills)
namely reading a text and listening to spoken English.

The aim then is to examine the nature of these two skills and their implications for teaching.

Prior focus in the present lecture will be on the teaching of the listening skill.

1. Teaching listening

Listening is more than an activity and not at all a “passive” one as it is often described. For many
language learners who are not native speakers of English, listening is more fundamental than reading
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in the initial stages of learning because they may not understand the written script, but they can at
least perceive the sounds, and priority then should be given to sounds. The other reason is that in real
life, native speakers of a language use this skill most of the time for communicative purposes:

A few illustrations follow:

i Greetings are responded to;

ii Questions are answered;
iii Requests (for services, etc…) are seen to through appropriate actions/gestures.

What these among many other illustrations reveal is that whenever language is used, it is heard,
understood and replied to. What goes on in between is not perceivable. We can only infer what any
reply is about because the understanding process is covert (hidden), mental and psychological.
Therefore, one has to be familiar with the language before any response can be made.

Teaching this skill, i.e. helping learners develop an ability to understand spoken English, puts a
number of constraints on teachers and learners.

Teachers have to be aware of what listening involves and how it can best be taught.

Learners have to be motivated enough to benefit from instructional activities and devices selected by
teachers towards this purpose.

Commonly defined as an auditory skill, listening involves both familiarity with the code (language)
and ability to respond and interact with speakers.

But at least two focal skills must be mentioned; accuracy of perception and clarity of auditory
memory. This means that what we hear (listening input) must be accurately perceived and clearly
remembered.

The literature on the theme reveals that listening has been understood differently across time.
Richards (2009, p. 2) offers us a brief chronological account of changes in views and beliefs on
listening. (The underlining is the present authors’)
Earlier views of listening saw 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 to the
role of prior knowledge and schema in comprehension. Listening came to be seen as an interpretive
process. At the same time, the field of discourse analysis and conversational analysis revealed a great
deal about the nature and organization of spoken discourse and led to a realization that written texts
read aloud could not provide a suitable basis for developing the abilities needed to process real-time
authentic discourse. Current views of listening hence 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.
What this account seems to highlight is that the shift in views on listening is related to theoretical
views on language:
According to earlier views, understanding speech requires a capacity to recognize specific linguistic
forms and identify the meaning of content words.

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Subsequent accounts of listening highlight the cognitive dimension of listening as they understood
listening to depend on a two-way process which is based on 1) our knowledge of the world and 2)
the amount of schemas which such knowledge had formed in our mind. This is known as the bottom-
up/ top-down process view and will be dealt with in more details below.
More recently, listening has been understood as very much dependent on the listener and how
quickly, how efficiently he/she reacts to someone’s speech. Response and reaction speed depend on
the strategies used by the listener. Metacognitive strategies are believed responsible for successful
listening.

We can expect all these views to be important; however, focus in this lecture will lie on the two
recent views above mentioned because they sound in line with conclusions reached by many
researchers on the theme (Goh, 2000, Vandergrieft, 1997).

An account of listening comprehension which views it within “a cognitive framework” suggests that
understanding speech occurs through three main stages: Perception, parsing, and utilization. These
are explained by Anderson (1995, cited in Goh, 2000):

Perceptual processing is the encoding of the acoustic or written message. In listening, this involves
segmenting phonemes from the continuous speech stream (Anderson, 1995, p. 37). During this phase
in listening, an individual attends closely to input and the sounds are retained in echoic memory.
During parsing, words are transformed into a mental representation of the combined meaning of these
words. This occurs when an utterance is segmented according to syntactic structures or cues to
meaning. These segments are then recombined to generate a meaningful representation of the original
sequence. This mental representation is related to existing knowledge and stored in long-term memory
as propositions or schemata during the third phase, utilisation. At this stage, the listener may draw
different types of inferences to complete the interpretation and make it more personally meaningful, or
use the mental representation to respond to the speaker. Perception, parsing and utilization represent
different levels of processing, with perception being the lowest. All three phases are interrelated and
recursive, and can happen concurrently during a single listening event. They are “by necessity partially
ordered in time; however, they also partly overlap. Listeners can be making inferences from the first
part of a sentence while they are already perceiving a later part”.' (Anderson, 1995, p. 379)

As clearly stated by the author, during the comprehension process, listeners are exposed to
meaningful sound sequences (input). When retained in memory, the sound sequences are segmented
and turned into their semantic equivalent, which, when combined, are related to background
knowledge and transferred to long-term memory for storage and retention. During the utilization
phase inferences are made to stored knowledge/representations, and messages can be interpreted to
serve as responses.

Worth highlighting, too, is that the three stages are intimately related, simultaneous and reiterated
during listening.

As mentioned earlier, there are two major cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of
spoken language (also shared with the reading skill): bottom-up processing and top-down
processing. Richards (1990, cited in Nunan, 2015, p. 39) draws the distinction between them:

Bottom-up processing refers to the use of incoming data as a source of information about the meaning
of a message. From this perspective, the process of comprehension begins with the message received,
which is analyzed at successive levels of organization– sounds, words, clauses and sentences– until the
intended meaning is arrived at. Comprehension is thus viewed as a process of decoding.
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 Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding
the meaning of a message. Background knowledge may take several forms. It may be previous
knowledge about the topic of discourse, it may be situational or contextual knowledge, or it may be
knowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of “schemata” or “scripts” – plans about the
overall structure of events and the relationship between them

Nunan and other scholars explain schemata as those images we store in memory about animate and
inanimate objects of the real world, images or representations of situations, events and facts and they
come into play when we read or listen to speech. According to Nunan (op.cit.), they are called to
when parts of discourse must be understood or interpreted. They identify as “The set of expectations
for a particular kind of discourse generated from the situation, from knowledge of a world populated
by adults and children, and typical interactions between them.” (p. 39)

In the above quote, the author draws a distinction between two different ways in which we process
spoken language. The important thing to understand is that there are two different processes going
on: deciphering the ‘bits’ of language– individual sounds and words– on the one hand, and, on the
other, using what we already know about the context of the message– the subject matter, the
relationship between speakers, and so on– to make sense of what we are listening to.

Such an account of listening led scholars and instructional designers to emphasize classroom
listening with a purpose; therefore common focus was sometimes put on the four aspects highlighted
by Nunan (op.cit.)

1. scanning the input to identify familiar lexical items;

2. segmenting the stream of speech into grammatical constituents;
3. using phonological cues to identify the information focus in an utterance;
4. using grammatical cues to organize the input into constituents.

When such focus is of great use in developing comprehension at novice stages, it; nevertheless has
led to what Richards (1990, cited in Vandergrieft, op.cit.) has referred to as “transactional listening”
which he depicts as follows:

Listening comprehension in L2 classrooms tends to focus on transactional listening (Richards, 1990):

Students listen to oral texts in order to obtain information and complete a comprehension task, without
intervening or interacting for purposes of clarification or feedback.

Given that listening is crucial to any communicative event, emphasis should equally be given to what
the above mentioned authors call “interactive listening” which they explain as an activity that “…
requires the listener to take a more active role by interacting with an interlocutor, requesting
clarification or providing feedback in order to ensure successful communication.”

The point here is that beyond novice stage, classroom listening practice should also address non-
native speakers’ ability to both receive and respond to messages; these are known as “reception
strategies “so useful in interactive listening. Vandergrieft (1997, p.2) highlights this aspect as
follows:

Given the importance of interactive listening in ordinary social discourse, it could also play a more
important role in L2 classrooms. Regular classroom practice that equips students with useful reception
strategies would facilitate the development of interactive listening skills and further enhance L2.

The above brief account of the nature of the listening skill has a number of implications for teaching.
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This is what we turn to next.

To begin with, it seems worth referring to a number of key principles:

Key principles in teaching listening

The teaching of listening involves the selection of input sources (which may be live, or be recorded
on audio or video), the chunking of input into segments for presentation, and an activity cycle for
learners to engage in.

*Effective teaching of listening involves:

1. Exposing learners to different ways of processing information: both top-down and bottom-up
processing.

2. Exposing students to different types of listening texts: by carefully selecting input sources that
are appropriately authentic, interesting, varied, challenging, and that cater for learners’ level).

3. Teaching a variety of tasks: by offering a creative design of tasks (well-structured, with

opportunities for learners to activate their own knowledge and experience and to monitor (check)
what they are doing).

4. Teaching listening strategies: by helping learners enact effective listening strategies

(metacognitive, cognitive, and social).

5. Integrating listening with other learning purposes: with appropriate links to speaking, reading
and writing.

6. Planning a listening session (in a lesson) within the following three phases: pre-listening, while-
listening and post-listening. As listening and reading share these three phases, they will be dealt
with in more details in the next lecture.

Teaching illustrations

Beyond novice stage, helping learners/students develop listening skills involves knowing that the
bottom-up process requires a large lexical repertoire and understanding speech, at least at sentence
level. In this connection, Richards (op.cit.) suggests a number of tasks whose particularity is that they
may help develop bottom-up processing skills when learners are asked to do the following:

Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance;

Recognize the time reference of an utterance;
Distinguish between positive and negative statements;
Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance;
Identify sequence markers;
Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text;
Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text.

Richards’ illustrations follow:

a) Students listen to positive and negative statements and choose an appropriate form of
agreement.

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Students hear Students choose the 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

b) 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 italics are stressed)

Students hear Students check 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

c) 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.

These tasks and many others you can think of seem appropriate as long as they appeal to learners’
knowledge of the language. However, one must not limit instruction to these aspects only (the
identification, selection or recognition of specific linguistic items). What is further required is to
help learners use their pre-existing knowledge to be able to interpret meaning and react whenever
appropriate.

Teaching top-down processing

Exercises that require top-down processing develop the learner’s ability to do the following:

Use key words to construct the schema of a discourse;

Infer the setting for a text;
Infer the role of the participants and their goals;
Infer causes or effects;
Infer unstated details of a situation;
Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation.

The following activities develop top-down listening skills:

- Students generate a set of questions they expect to hear about a topic and listen to see if they
are answered.
- 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.
- Students read one speaker’s part in a conversation, predict the other speaker’s part, then
listen and compare.
- Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then listen to see which ones were
mentioned.
- Students listen to part of a story, complete the rest of it, then listen and compare endings.

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 - Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the news items and
compare.

Obviously, the two approaches (bottom-up and top-down) must be combined in language classrooms
where higher levels of listening proficiency are targeted.

In addition to a selection or design of tasks aimed at enabling learners/students understand and

interpret spoken discourse in English, teachers are also expected to identify a number of useful
strategies for effective listening.

Reference is made to the two following articles for a more exhaustive account of cognitive,
metacognitive and social strategies:

1. Goh, C. (1997). Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT Journal, Vol.
51(4), Oxford University Press, UK, pp. 361-369.
2. Goh, C. (2005). Second language listening expertise. In Johnson, K. (Ed.), Expertise in
second language learning and teaching. (pp. 64-84). Palgrave Macmillan, UK.

Mandatory and on individual basis:

Read each article, and then provide a concise account of the strategies that you believe crucial for
inclusion in a listening comprehension component for non-native speakers of English. Add
justifications.

Useful references

Goh, C. (2000). A Cognitive perspective of learners’ listening comprehension problems. System,

28(1), 55-75.
Nunan, D. (2015). Teaching English to non-native speakers: An introduction. New York: Routledge.
Richards J.C. (2009). Teaching listening and speaking: From theory to practice. The University of
Sydney.
Vandergrieft, L. (1997). The Cinderella of communication strategies: Reception strategies in
interactive listening. Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. 145Jean-Jacques Lussier
Ottawa, ON Canada.