Topic 7

LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA ORAL. LA COMPLEJIDAD DE LA

COMPRENSION DEL SENTIDO GLOBAL EN LA INTERACCIÓN
ORAL: DE LA AUDICIÓN A LA ESCUCHA ACTIVA Y
SELECTIVA. LA TOMA DE PALABRA: DE LA REPRODUCCIÓN
IMITATIVA A LA PRODUCCIÓN AUTÓNOMA.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0. Introduction
1. Spoken Language
2. Listening Comprehension: from hearing to active understanding
o General Principles in Teaching/Learning Listening Comprehension
o Intensive and Extensive Listening
o Strategies for Developing Listening Skills
o Goals for Teaching Listening
o Using Authentic Materials and Situations
o Developing Listening Activities
o Assessing Listening Proficiency
3. Speaking: from imitation to autonomous production
o Goals and Techniques for Teaching Speaking
o Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills
o Developing speaking Activities
4. Conclusion
Introduction
Using a foreign language effectively requires having a
number of different abilities. Linguists have identified
four major abilites, which they call linguistic skills.
The major skills are: listening, reading, speaking and
writing.
They may be classified in two ways:
in relation to the medium
In relation to the activity of the speaker.
SKILL MEDIUM AURAL/SPEECH VISUAL/WRITTEN

RECEPTIVE listening reading

PRODUCTIVE speaking writing
1. Spoken language
A general overview of the importance of speech and the abilities that
are required to produce it.

Spoken language is the most obvious aspect of language and can be

defined as the universal material of human language.
For many hundreds of thousands of years human language was
transmitted and developed entirely as spoken means of
communication.
 At a very basic level, spoken language demands the
physiological abilities to be able to use our speech
and auditory organs properly (speech mechanisms +
ear).
On top of this physiological level we have the
psychological level, where our linguistic skills are
situated (brain).
Psychological skills of speaking communicative
abilities for talk and listen

Physiological abilities required for speech hearing and speaking

/speech production + perception/

/Widdowson/
From hearing to active listening
From imitative speaking to autonomous talking
2. Listening comprehension: from hearing to
active understanding
In order to analyse the oral skills, we will first deal with listening
skills.

Listening is the language modality that is used most

frequently. Adults spend almost half of their
communication time listening. Students may receive as
much as 90% of their in-school time through listening.
Let us begin by discussing the general principles to be followed when
teaching listening comprehension.

2.1. General principles in teaching listening skills

The following principles must be borne in mind when
designing a listening class:
Definite goals, carefully stated.
Step by step planning: from simple hearing-based
activities to more complex understanding based.
Active students’ participation: immediate feedback on
pupils’ performance.
Stress conscious memory work.
Teach, not test.
If we want our pupils to be efficient listeners we must give them enough
practice in both intensive and extensive listening.

2.2. Intensive and Extensive Listening

Extensive Listening
 The language level is within students’ capacity and
they listen for pleasure and interest.
 Can be long or short.
 Do not require direct control of the teacher.

Intensive Listening:
 The most widely used.
 Students listen with the aim of collecting and
organizing the information.
 Contains more concrete information and often not
so easy to understand.
 Short passages, played several times.
 Let us now discuss the strategies that must be developed when working
on listening comprehension.

 2.3. Strategies for Developing Listening Skills

 Top-down strategies
o Are listener-based activities, focuses on micro-features of discourse
o Comprehension: activating the listener´s background information and schemata for
a global understanding.
o Top –down strategies include: listening for the main idea, predicting, summarizing,
etc.
 Bottom-up strategies
o Are text based, focuses on individual components of oral discourse
o Comprehension: decoding messages processing from sounds to words, from
grammatical relationships to lexical meanings.
o Bottom-up strategies include: listening for details, recognizing cognates,
recognizing word-order patterns.
 Metacognitive strategies
o Deciding which listening strategies will serve best.
o Monitor the selected strategies.
o Evaluate if they have achieved their listening comprehension goals.
Top-down strategies
Bottom-up strategies
Let us now concentrate on the goals instructors must have when teaching
listening.

2.4. Goals of Teaching Listening

The main goal:

Produce students who can use listening strategies to
maximise their comprehension of aural input, identify
relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than
word-by-word comprehension.

To accomplish this goal, instructors focus on the process of

listening rather on its product.
2.5. Using Authentic Materials and Situations

Authentic Materials and Situations prepare students for

the types of listening they will need to do when using
the language outside the classroom.
Let us now examine steps to be followed when preparing listening
activities.

2.6. Developing Listening Activities

 Complete recall of all the information in an aural text is an
unrealistic.
 MAKE YOUR LISTENING TASKS SUCCESS-ORIENTED TO
BUILD-UP STUDENTS’ CONFIDENCE.

How to do it:
 Construct the listening activity around a contextualised task.
 Define the activity’s instructional goal and type of response.
 Check the level of difficulty of the listening text.
 Use pre-listening activities.
 Match while-listening activities to the instructional goal, the
listening purpose, and students’ proficiency level.
3. Speaking: from imitation to autonomous
production
According to Stovall (1988), many language learners regard speaking ability as
the measure of knowing the language. They regard speaking as the most
important skills.

Speaking involves THREE AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE:

Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary)
Using the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation.

Functions (transaction and interaction)

Knowing when clarity off message is essential (transaction/information exchange)
and when precise understanding is not required (interaction/relationship building).

Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, length of pauses between
speakers, relative roles of participants)
Understanding how to take into account who is speaking to whom, in what
circumstances, about what, and for what reason.
Let us now examine the techniques and goals for teaching speaking.

3. 1. Goals and Techniques for Teaching Speaking

 Use of a BALANCED ACTIVITIES APPROACH that combines language input,
structures output, and communicative output (Hadley, 2001).
 LANGUAGE INPUT
 In form of teacher talk, listening activities, reading texts, language heard and
read outside the class, etc.
 May be content oriented or form oriented.
 STRUCTURED OUTPUT
 Focuses on the correct form.
 Students may have options, but all of them require the use of specific language
items.
 COMMUNICATIVE OUTPUT
 The learner’s main purpose is to complete a communicative task.
 The criterion of success is whether the learner gets the message across.
 Accuracy is not a consideration unless the lack of it interferes with the message.
Let us now examine the most important strategies instructors can use to
help their students develop listening skills.

3.2. STRATEGIES for Developing Speaking Skills

 USING MINIMAL RESPONSES
 Minimal responses: predictable, often idiomatic phrases that
conversation participants use to indicate understanding,
agreement, doubt, etc.
 Help students to focus on what the other participant is saying.
 RECOGNIZING SCRIPTS
 Some communication situations are associated with a predictable
set of spoken exchanges / SCRIPTS.
 Students can predict what they will hear and what they will need
to say in response.
 USING LANGUAGE TO TALK ABOUT LANGUAGE
 Encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when
misunderstanding can help them to gain confidence.
Finally we will examine the procedures to be followed when preparing
activities devoted to practising speaking

3.3. Developing Speaking Abilities

Instructors need to combine structures output activities with
communicative output activities.

Structured Output Activities + Communicative Output

Activities

Error correction and Opportunity to

increase of accuracy practice language use
more freely

INFORMATION GAP ROLE PLAYS

SIMULATIONS
DISCUSSIONS
 Structured Output Activities:
Information gap
An information gap activity is an activity where learners are
missing the information they need to complete a task and need
to talk to each other to find it.
Example 
Learner A has a biography of a famous person with all the
place names missing, whilst Learner B has the same text with
all the dates missing. Together they can complete the text by
asking each other questions.

Information gap activities are useful for various reasons. They

provide an opportunity for extended speaking practice, they
represent real communication, motivation can be high, and they
require sub-skills such as clarifying meaning and re-phrasing.
Typical types of information gap activities you might find
include; describe and draw, spot the difference, etc.
Famous Artists: This information gap
covers some famous artists and the passive
voice.
Shapes: This information gap covers 10 basic shapes plus
prepositions.
Newspaper
Headlines:
Students ask each
other if they've
heard the news and
then relay the
headlines to their
partners.
Communicative Output Activities

Allow students to practise using all of the language they

know in situations that resemble real settings. In these
activities, students must work together to develop a plan,
resolve a problem, or complete a task.

The most common types are: role-plays and

discussions.
 Role plays
In role-plays students are assigned roles and put into
situations that they may eventually encounter outside the
classroom.
Student A
You are booking into a hotel.
Elements
Book in to the hotel - you have a
reservation.
Complications
You are on your own. Student B
You want a shower. You are a hotel receptionist.
You want breakfast in the morning. Elements
You have an early meeting and must not Welcome the guest.
be late. Find them a room.
Complications
You can't find their reservation.
You only have a double room with bath
available.
Discussions
To succeed with discussions:
 Prepare the students: give them input
 Offer choices: let students suggest the topic for discussion.
 Set a goal or outcome: a group product (a letter to the editor) or
individual reports.
 Use small groups instead of whole/class discussions.
 Keep in short: give students a defined period of time (not more than
8-10 minutes)
 Allow students to participate in their own way.
 Do topical follow-up: have students report to the class on the results
of their discussion.
 Do linguistic follow up: give feedback on linguistic aspects.