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 M
LISTENING & SPEAKING any teachers use
classroom activities that
combine the oral skills of
listening and speaking,
and we tend to justify them in terms of
‘they work well’ and ‘the students enjoy
them’. This article outlines four
research-based principles for a
more effective producers of the
language when the communicative roles
are reversed.
The same seems to be true for EFL
learners. In a follow up experiment
Yule found that EFL speaking
performances on a similar information
gap task were improved more by
listening experience than by speaking
experience. The receptive difficulties of

listening-
such tasks can make learners more
sensitive and effective producers of the

The foreign language.

speaking
Traditionally, listening is
treated as a passive skill
and speaking as an active
skill but, Tony Lynch
argues, there is every
reason to teach them
together ...
connection
listening-speaking connection which we
can add to our practical reasons for
believing that the two skills should be
taught in tandem.
Principle 1:
Listeners make better
speakers
A research team working with English-
speaking secondary school pupils
(Brown, Anderson, Shillock and Yule)
studied the effects of different forms of
classroom experience on the pupils’
performance of information gap tasks
carried out in pairs. Specifically, they
compared the effects of experience as
speaker with those of being a listener.
Their findings may come as a surprise
to teachers of English: what most
helped the pupils to perform more
effectively as speakers was not previous
practice in speaking, but previous
experience of being the listener in a
pair. One might have expected that
people get better at speaking by
speaking, so how can listening help?
The researchers’ explanation was that
seeing things from the listener’s
perspective helps learners to appreciate
the problems resulting from unclear
directions from the speaker, and that
this listening experience makes them
Principle 2:
Listeners affect what
speakers say
We need feedback from our listeners in
order to judge how well they are able to
follow us. Successful speaking involves
adjusting to the listener’s level, not just
their knowledge of language, but their
general knowledge too. Again, this is
also the case in first language
acquisition; parents adjust the content
and form of what they say when talking
to their children (and may adapt
differently to different children).
Similarly, language learners’ level
influences the speech of their teachers.
The examples below show a Scottish
EFL teacher modifying vocabulary, and
particularly idiom, in telling the same
story to four different listeners.
To a native listener
‘the penny dropped’
To an advanced learner
‘it dawned on him’
To an intermediate learner
‘and then he realised’
To an elementary learner
‘he thought and he realised it
was easy’
Communication in the
Language Classroom, Lynch

10 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional •

 In the English language classroom
the fact that both partners in a paired
task are language learners makes
speaker-to-listener adjustments
especially important for communicative
success.This is most clearly
demonstrated when the speakers have
different L1s . The extract below comes
from a conversation between three
learners of English: S is from Seville, J
is a Japanese student who has recently
visited the city, and M is a Malaysian
who has never been to Spain. S makes
two sorts of listener-friendly
adjustment (underlined in the text).
S: yesterday I had a letter from
my dad and he told me that ...
he said that he didn’t have
classes because his school
was completely flooded
J: flood? flooded?
S: full of water
J: ah full of water?
S: yeah
J: ah
M: but in your place? in Seville?
S: (looking at M) in Seville yeah ...
but it doesn’t have a rainy
season
J: it was a serious problem
S: yes so . . .
First, S changes the form of her
message when J has a problem with
‘flooded’. When M then queries the
location, S provides him with additional
content, so he is not excluded by his lack
of knowledge of Spain. She points out
that this amount of rain is unusual.
Notice that she chooses an expression
(‘rainy season’) that she assumes a
Malaysian will be familiar with. This
little episode underlines for me that for
listening-speaking activities to work well,
students need to have something to talk
about and a receptive audience to talk to.
Principle 3:
Conversation involves
listening and speaking
Although teachers talk of ‘the four
skills’, it has been suggested that in real
life there are three language activities:
comprehension (reading and listening),
composition (writing and reading) and
conversation (listening and speaking in
combination). In conversation the roles
constantly switch back and forth: the
(current) listener has to take in what is
being said but also provides feedback
to the (current) speaker as to what is
comprehensible. In the second extract it
is easy to overlook the fact that learner S
In real life there
are three language
activities
was only able to modify sensitively
because her listeners J and M had, co-
operatively, signalled a comprehension
problem (J’s ‘flooded?’ and M’s ‘in your
place? in Seville?’). So listening and
speaking are closely allied in
conversation: listeners have a vital
speaking role; and speakers have to be
alert listeners.
Principle 4:
Pre-task speaking makes
listening easier
The last of my four principles is based
on comprehensive research (e.g. Long
1990) and also on classroom
experience. Learners’ understanding of
foreign language text may be more
influenced by their existing knowledge
of the topic than what they know about
the language. One way to bring that
topical knowledge into play in class is
through pre-listening discussion, which
encourages the learners who do know
about the topic to gather the relevant
information and helps those who know
less about the subject to pick up both
content and vocabulary from those who
know more. (For a simple teaching
procedure showing the value of pre-
listening speaking, see Anderson and
Lynch Listening pages 128-29).
Summary
The four principles I have outlined can
be boiled down to two types of
justification for linking speaking and
listening skills. Firstly, work in one oral
skill can improve performance in the
other (Principles 1 and 4). Secondly, the
two skills are intimately connected in
real life (Principles 2 and 3) so it makes
good sense to integrate them in the
English teaching classroom. E T p
Anderson A, and Lynch T. 1988.
Listening: Oxford University Press.
Brown G, Anderson A, Shillock R, and
Yule G. 1984. Teaching Talk: Cambridge
University Press.
Long D, 1990. ‘What you don’t know
can’t help you: an exploratory study of
background knowledge and second
language listening comprehension’.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
12/1: 65-80.
Lynch T, 1996. Communication in the
Language Classroom: Oxford University
Press.
Yule G, 1991. ‘Developing
communicative effectiveness through
the negotiated resolution of referential
conflicts’. Linguistics and Education
3:31-45.
Tony Lynch is a lecturer at
the Institute for Applied
Language Studies at the
University of Edinburgh,
Scotland. His particular
interests are classroom
interaction, materials
development and the
teaching of listening skills.
He recently published his
fourth book Communication
in the Language Classroom
(OUP).
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