Listening, speaking, reading and wrtiting (I)

These four are the Communicative Abilities that must be applied in our lessons.

1. INTRODUCTION

There is a long tradition about the writter language instead of the oral aspect, and a huge influence of the knowledge of the morphology and syntax rules. The dictionary and the book were absolutely necessary for the translation of exercises. 

Nevertheless, there has also been an important tradition of teaching oral lanuages nor only for classical, but also for modern languages. 

Immersion techniques and oral practice primarily with native FL speaking teachers, were other solutions proposed. Audiovisual methodologies re-discovered  the memorization of dialogues, giving a really functional value through the visualisation of meanings. The use of tapes, filmstrips, visuals, recorders and language labs were additional aids. 

2. ORAL COMMUNICATION: Listening / Speaking

When we speak we can make use of periphrasis, gestures, facial expressions,  When we listes, we do not have control over the speaker.

It it obvious that speaking often follows listening (...). Ofthen, but not necessarily, improvement in listening comprenhension will bring with it an improvement in speaking.

Most people learning a foreign language spend more time listening than speaking. The listening activity may range from:

  1. The face to face understanding of several utterances spoken by one or more other persons,
  2. Listening to a speech on the radio, TV, Internet,... when noise in the room may cause                           interference.

Oral communication is, as Byrne says, a two way process between speaker and listener and involves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive (not passive) skill of listening. Both speaker and listener have a positive function to perform.

The speaker has to encode the message he wishes to convey, while the listener has to decode the message.

3. LISTENING

Teachers should provide students with sufficient listening practice to enable them to understand with reasonable ease both native and non-native speakers of English when they speak at normal speed in unstructures situations. 

Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood-communication beaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated.

A student will learn a freat deal by listening to the teacher, who is the most important model on which the student will base his/her own behaviour. It is important, therefore, that you speak English at a speed consistent with normal stress and rhythm and intonation patterns.

It is sumply not sifficient to expose the learners to those samples of spoken language which are, for example, the presentation of the unit. There samples are simplified to provide the student with models for oral production.

A silent period is recommended for beginners. Together with a great deal of listening activities. The teacher provides comprehensible input. Use of CDs, video recordings, ICT and based resources. Beginners may feel paralyzed when they do not understand.

A single speaker with a clear voice is recommended is early listening tasks. When there are two or more speakers, their voices shoul be clearly distinguished. Children must begin by getting involved in the listening task. Following recorded directions with some descriptive clues is recommendable to improve listening skills.

If the task  is easy to perform and the comprehensible input understood, an exchange of role is the next step. The more advanced pupils  will adopt the leading role. Children will reproduce the TPR resource (toral physical response).

The visual,  context, gestures, drawing, body language

Reasons for listening

We, as non-native speakers of English, need to undestand more than we should be able to produce. The samples of spoken language in all course-books do not contain a sufficiently high propotion of the features of natural speech. The learners will need much more than this if they are going to be able to cope with the real-life language situations. 

Even though good listeners may be able to get every word that they hear, this is not their concern most of the time. Specify your listening objectives when you carry out a  listening activity.  

As long as you achieve your objectuves, you are good listener- whether you catch every word or not.

Listening Practice

If you feel that your command of English is inadequate to meet your academic needs, such as taking nothes in lectures, expressig yourself tutorials. 

If you are anxious that it might be a potential obstacle to your future professional purssuit. To be able to listen well gives you confidence in communication. You can only talk sensibly when you can understand what is said to you. 

DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! NOW BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Resources

Tv: Chooses your favourite programs and make regular appointments with them. 

Rdio-like Broadcast (Podcasts, stream radio, ...): You are free to do other things while listening- having breakfast, a shower, even jogging!

Watch news broadcasts (in English, of course) already watched on Spanish TV. 

English listening online

Listening activities have been traditionally divided into: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. 

MODELS

Model #1 Listening and repeating

            - Learner goals: to pattern-match; to listen and imitate; to memorize.
            - Instructional material: Features audio-lingua style exercises
            - Procedure: Asks students to listen to a word, phrase or sentence pattern or repeat it and                        memorize it.
            - Value: Enables students to do pattern drills, to repeat dialogues, and  to use memorized                           prefabricated patterns in conversation; enables them to imitate pronuciation patterns.
                                                   
Model #2 Listening and answering

• Comprehension questions 
• Learners goals: to process discrete-point information; to listen and answer comprehension questions.
• Instructional material: features a student response pattern based on a listening question-answering model with occasional innovate variation of theme. 
• Procedure: Ask students to listen to an oral text from sentence length to lecture lenght and answer factual quenstions. Uses familiar types of questions adapted traditional reading comprehension exercises
• Value. Enables students to manipulate discrete pieces of information, hopefully with increasing speed and accuracy of recall.
• If Can increase students' storck of vocabulary units and grammar constructions. Does not require students to make use of information for any real communicative purpose beyong answering the question , it is not interactive two-say communication.

Model #3 Task listening

• Learner Goals: To process spoken discourse for functional purposes, to listen and do something with the information, that is, carry our real tasks using the information received. 
• Instructional material: Features activities that require a student response patter based on a listenig-and-using (i.e., "Listen-and-Do ) model. 
• Student listen, them immediately do something with the information received; follow the directions fiven, complete a task, solve a problem, transmit the gist of the information orally or in writting, listen and take lecture notes, etc. 
• Procedure: Asks students to listen and process information and ise the orally transmitted language input inmmediately to complete a task which is mediated through language in a context in which success is judged in terms of wheter the task is performed. 
• Value: the focus is on instrucction that is task-oriented, not question oriented. 
• The purpose is to engage learners in using the ingormational content presented in the spoken discourse, not just in answering questions about it. Two types of tasks are language uses tasks, designed to give students practice in listening to get meaning from the input with the purpose of making functional use of it immediately and language analysis tasks, designed  to hel learners develop cognitive and metacognitive language learning strategies (i.e., to guide  them toward personal intellectual involvement in their own language). 

Model #4 Interactive Listening

• Learner Goals to develop:
• Aural/oral skills in semiformal interactive academic communication
• to develop critical listening
• critical thinking
• Intructional material: Features the real-time/real-life give-and-take of academic commnication. Provides a variety of student presentation and discussion sctivities, bith individual and small group panel reports, that include follow-up audience participation in question/answe sessions as an integral part of the work. It follows an interactive listening-thinking-speaking model with bidirectional listening/speaking. It includes attention to group bonding and classroom discourse rules (i.e., taking the floor, yielding the floor, turn taking, interrupting, cmprehension checks, topic shifting, agreeing, questioning, challegint, etc.)