Week 8:Teaching Listening, Speaking and Facilitating Interaction

Teaching Listening, Speaking and Facilitating Interaction

Listening comprehension is essential to language learning, and teachers must take a lot into consideration when teaching listening. Before actually presenting information to their students teachers have to ask themselves some questions; what makes a good language learner? What are good listeners doing while listening? What are some listening techniques? By knowing the answers to these questions teachers are one step closer to teaching quality listening skills to their students. First we have to realize that there are different types of spoken language and our listening skills alter depending on what the speech is. Our listening changes dramatically from when we are listening to a monologue, interpersonal or transactional dialogue. We as speakers and listeners would react and listen differently to the three examples and this can be difficult for new language learners. Our language can be very difficult to learn because it can be difficult to understand. In the English language we have concepts like idioms, slang, redundancy, clustering, reduced forms, sentence fragments, performance variables, and the list goes on. It can be intimidating going into language learning so teachers have to guide their students and help them feel less overwhelmed. By including an integrated skills course into the curriculum students will receive special, separate instruction on all four skills which will help the student organize the language better. Teachers should also use authentic language and contexts to help their students recognize patterns in real world language to help with communication. Using intrinsic motivation can also help the students focus on the language they are learning.

It is interesting that the difficulties that were listed in listening are also difficulties in speaking. This raises a huge red flag for me; these are vastly important areas to be aware of as a teacher and to guide language learners through. Teaching speaking is a big job because there are so many contexts of speaking and depending on how you speak in these contexts it might not be appropriate. There are six types of classroom speaking performances, and that is just classroom speech. The relationship between listening and speaking go hand in hand and this is apparent in these two Brown chapters. I have learned that teaching intrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, giving appropriate feedback and using authentic language are key in teaching both listening and speaking.

 “One of the aspects of learning to talk in an L2 is talking to learn.” This is a great start to this chapter because dialogue provides a learner to practice speaking and learning listening, communicating and speaking skills. This is why input as well as output is essential to language learning. Also, learners have to participate in their own language development and be totally invested in it. Without investing in language