EEAL3153 Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Chapter 1 | Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Speaking & Listening Skills

SPEAKING AND LISTENING INVOLVES MORE THAN IT IS ABOUT ADAPTING LANGUAGE TO SUIT THE
ANALYSING LEARNERS' ABILITY TO TALK AND HEAR OTHER SITUATION AND LINKING THE LISTENING AND SPEAKING
PEOPLE. SKILLS TO BE ABLE TO RESPOND TO ANY ARGUMENT.

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Target Outcomes of Listening & Speaking Skills

How to use spoken How to use body

How to use voice Listening to others
language language

Exploring questions Context – real life talk

How to react to the
and responding to situations and target
language and tone of
problems by audiences beyond the
other people
developing ideas classroom

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Significance of Listening & Speaking for Learners

• Having productive conversations requires students to listen deeply, reflect
on what is said, express ideas clearly, sustain attention, ask insightful
questions, debate respectfully, and develop comprehension of information
taken in.
• These essential listening and speaking skills need to be taught and
practiced and will help students have successful conversations both inside
and outside of school.
• Taking the time to teach and practice academic conversation skills helps
prevent or minimize problems that can arise during collaborative work and
enables students to be more deeply invested in their interactions and
learning.

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

“By giving our students practice talking with others, we

give them frames for thinking on their own.”
Lev Vygotsky
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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

The Teaching of Listening & Speaking

• Approaches to the teaching of speaking in EFL/ESL have been more
strongly influenced by fads and fashions than the teaching of listening
• “Speaking” in traditional methodologies usually meant…
• repeating after the teacher
• memorizing a dialog
• responding to drills
• reflecting the sentence-based view of proficiency prevailing in the
audiolingual
• other drill-based or repetition (based methodologies of the 1970s)

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

The Teaching of Listening & Speaking

• Grammar-based syllabuses were replaced by communicative syllabuses
built around notion, functions, skills, tasks or other non-grammatical units
of organization
• Fluency became a goal for speaking courses and this could be developed
through the use of information-gap and other tasks that required learners
to attempt real communication despite limited proficiency in English
• Students would develop communication strategies and engage in
negotiation of meaning, both of which were considered essential to the
development of oral skills

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

The Teaching of Listening & Speaking – ESL & EFL Classroom

• Notion of English as an international language prompted a revision of the
notion of communicative competence to include the notion of intercultural
competence
• Shifts the focus to learning how to communicate in cross-cultural settings,
where native-speaker norms of communication may not be a priority
• Models for oral interaction in classroom materials should be informed by
the findings of conversational analysis and the analysis of real speech

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Source: Lewis, B. (2020)

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

Challenges for Teachers

• Help develop fluency, accuracy and appropriateness of language use
• Move from linguistic competence (mastery of linguistic system) to
communicative competence (how to apply listening and speaking skills
appropriately for a range of different purposes)

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 ETES4133 – Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Teaching Listening and Speaking Skills

References
Richards, J. C. (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking: From Theory to
Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newton, J. M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2020). Teaching ESL/EFL listening and

speaking. Routledge.

Palmer, E. (2014). Teaching the core skills of listening and speaking. ASCD.

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