Universidad Latina de Panamá

Graduate Studies Department

Master’s program in TESOL

Theory and Practice of TESL

Prof. Aleojin Ríos

Speaking and Listening in the EFL Classrom

Aylin Herold

Eduardo Quintero

James Zambrano

February 10th, 2010

 Reflecting on my teaching career, I have definitely realized that each of the four

language skills has its own unique characteristics and can be clearly identified; however,

it is very interesting to see how they are undeniably interrelated at the same time. This is

especially true about the two following pairs of skills: listening-speaking, reading-

writing.

This time we have decided to use a speaking activity which involves considering

and exchanging opinions and impressions about ethical choices and moral dilemmas. In

our opinion, the activity we have picked constitutes a clear example of language learners

using the language to learn it rather than learning the language to use it (Wikipedia,

content-based instruction). That is, the activity is framed in the context of a thematic unit

whose content involves the ethical and moral elements mentioned before. From that point

of view, we could claim the activity is content-based and it deals with situations that we

might encounter at any given moment in our daily lives and could certainly happen to

anybody we know or even to ourselves.

It is important to point out that in preparing this activity, we were more concerned

about fluency than accuracy; however, we came to the conclusion that we could not turn

away from accuracy completely due to the fact that “…fluency and accuracy are both

important goals to pursue in CLT and/or TBLT.” (Brown, 2007, p.324). Therefore, we

decided to place as much importance on accuracy in order to get our learners to express

ideas that would be as comprehensible as possible. Therefore, we inform our learners

upfront that they are expected to use the correct structure for unreal conditionals.

Next, we proceed to open the activity by asking a question about a very specific

hypothetical situation regarding a blackberry found somewhere. They immediately

retrieve some elements from their knowledge of the target language in order to answer

the question, so schemata come into play (Brown, 2007) and through top-down

processing they are able to provide answers even though some may not be well

structured. Then, they are arranged into pairs and given a little “popsicle” with a very

specific situation involving some sort of ethical choice or moral dilemma. Right after,

they are instructed to actively discuss the situation they were given by turning the

situation into a question with would and coming up with as many alternatives as possible

to deal with the aforementioned situation. At this point, the learners engage in a great

deal of transactional kind of conversation (Brown, 207), in which they exchange

information and either agree or disagree on their proceeding.

Subsequently, all pairs are given five minutes to discuss their situations and

consider possible consequences or repercussions. Each pair reads their particular situation

out loud and expresses what they would in a similar one. Then, they ask members of

other pairs to express their opinion on that particular situation as well. At this point there

is a considerable degree of participatory approach, in which the teacher leads the learners

in discussing a problem but in the end the learners provide solutions to it (Celce-Murcia,

1991). Besides, the discussion becomes very relevant to the students because it is based

on situations they have found or might find themselves in.

Both the form and the functions of language are essential in conveying a coherent and

logical message in the oral exchanges required in our interaction. As a result, we could

say that all of the microskills and macroskills of speaking are present in our speaking

activity (Brown, 2007). Once every situation has been discussed, the teacher leads the

learners in discussing what they think most people (Panamanians) would do in each one
of them. Thus, they relate the content to real life events which become very conspicuous

in a culture like ours which has been continuously tarnished by the “juega vivo”

mentality which has reached such an extent that it has become even a way of life for

many Panamanians.

As an extension activity, the learners are given yet an additional situation which

they are instructed to prepare a comment about by interviewing people they know (family

members or friends) on what they would do in each situation.

Besides, in the following session, they will be asked to do another interactive speaking

task (Brown, 2007) by role-playing the situations they have used in their extension

interviews.

Most students will say and agree that develop listening is difficult, if not actually admit

that this is their weakest skill in any EFL or ESL language. The problem comes down to

two main points. The first stems from the fact that the pace, choice of vocabulary,

phrases, and grammar, and the inflection or intonation is completely determined by the

speaker. The listener has only one chance to catch the meaning of a word or phrase. For

instance; when the speaker is talking; the listener does not have the time to “rewind” and

stop or interrupt the speaker in order to catch the main idea of a message. Comparisons

can be made with reading, because the writer similarly determines the language. But

students can easily re-read passages, consult a dictionary, and generally work at their own

pace. There aren't any (or at least, many) re-dos when listening.

The second problem learners usually have is related with how teachers use

listening exercises. Most listening-focused activities involve a scripted monologue or

dialogue. The students begin with some prep-work. They listen once or twice to the tape
or cd player, then answer comprehension questions If it is a test the learners begin to feel

nervous, negativity and stress because of a grade. “In reading and listening activities,

students’ responses are implicitly evaluated” (Brown, 2007). As teachers, we interact

with the students, making question, interviews, small talk all the time; therefore, we

assess the students.

Teaching listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher.

This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice

and not overnight. It's frustrating for students because there are no rules as in grammar

teaching. “Second language learners need to pay special attention to such factors because

they strongly influence the processing of speech, and can even block comprehension if

they are not attended to.” (Brown 2007)

As a group we have decided to choose an activity from the course book “Top

Notch and the unit Ethics and values”, which has to do with returning someone else’s

property, discussing ethical choices, express personal values etc.

Our learners are at a low intermediate level of the program, in which they are

expected to have a good level of understanding.

On proceeding with our analysis we are already helping our learners to develop

their top-down processing skills, by encouraging them to use their knowledge of the topic

to help them understand the content. This is an essential skill given that, in a real-life

listening situation, even advanced learners are likely to come across some unknown

vocabulary. By using their knowledge of context and co-text, they should either be able

to guess the meaning of the unknown word.

 On the other hand, we consider that this activity has bottom-up processing,

because the learners used their linguistic knowledge such as sounds, words, clauses and

sentences in order to understand a message (Richards, 1995)

The importance of listening in language learning and teaching it is essential for

language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative

approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing

listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when

they use the language outside the classroom.

“A foreign language learners who says, ‘I can read the words but I don’t know

what they mean’ is not, therefore, reading, in this sense. He or she is merely decoding-

translating written symbols into corresponding sounds.” (Ur, 1991)

It’s obvious that a foreign learner needs to have a bit of knowledge of the basic

vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language; the next step is learning how to read by

using context clues, root words, and minimal referencing.

Students can become easily frustrated when they do not understand what they are

reading and as a result, they become demotivated. This situation tends to happen in

school years or college because the students are imposed to read something that they are

not appealed or willing to do it A teacher needs to design and teach different strategies in

order to help students close the gaps in their understanding. The ultimate challenge for

the teacher is know exactly which strategy is useful and most beneficial to teach, since

each student needs different strategies. Of course; this is difficult due to every learners is

obviously different, and has his or her own way to learn. Besides, it requires a lot of
energy, motivation, time and effort from the teacher to identify the best strategy that

works for his or her students.

“Teaching reading skill to nonnative speakers of English involves unique

problems and challenges at all conceivable levels of instruction.” (Celce- Murcia, 1991)

Teaching the English language to a non English speaking person can be exciting and

interesting, but at the same time can be an exhaustive, and depressing if you as teacher

does not know how to control groups, does not have knowledge competence or

pedagogical competence for teaching and reaching to the learners. This task can be

extremely frustrating for teachers, when they do not know how to use effective strategies

or techniques during the class session.

“For many learners, beginning to read the foreign language involves learning an

entire set of written symbols. And for the teacher, some preliminary decisions need to be

made about how to teach them”. (Ur 1991). Since our learners are low intermediate,

young adult and adult learners, they have previous knowledge of the English language,

therefore; our pupils have enough background using the language and can “recognize a

multiplicity of linguistic signals (letters, morphemes, syllables, words, phrases,

grammatical cues, discourse makers.” (Brown 2007). According to this short description,

we can tell this is a bottom up processing. Bottom-up processing happens when someone

tries to understand language by looking at individual meanings or grammatical

characteristics of the most basic units of the text, (e.g. sounds for a listening or words for

a reading), and moves from these to trying to understand the whole text. The reading

activity in which we asked learners to read aloud did encourage bottom-up processing

because they focus on word forms, not meaning. When you read in your native language,
you read for content. Your brain focuses on key words that convey the meaning of the

text. This way you are able to read faster. But this is the wrong thing to do when reading

in a foreign language such as English. You want to concentrate on the grammar, too. You

may want to analyze the sentences closely ,etc.

On the other hand, our reading activity has a bit of top down processing because

the learners used background information to predict the meaning of language they are

going to read. They developed expectations about what they will read, and confirm or

reject these as they read.

Reading and listening will help the learners develop language intuition. It's all

about putting lots of correct sentences in one’s head. Then the brain can imitate them,

producing similar sentences to express the meaning you want.

In this paper, we have tried to explain how the four language skills merge together

(listening, speaking, reading and writing), one cannot go without the other and we are

going to expand a little more the writing skill. Many second language learners find it

difficult in some point, with one or more skills that they have to learn, it may be easy for

them to understand utterances or even read, but when it comes to produce verbally or in a

written form, they have a lot of difficulties putting their ideas into words. Frustration is

one of the most common feelings that emerge when communication is block, and imagine

if you are having a normal conversation with someone, and in some point you cannot

express your thoughts with common words, because they do not come to your mind at

that moment, you find yourself unable to speak or write and your anxiety and frustration

takes over you, and this happens to all second language learners in some point (Nation

2001b).
 According to Nation(1990),In order to produce in a conversation or writing, you

first need to recognize and understand the words in a conversation or a reading, the four

skills relate to each other, how are you able to maintain a conversation if you do not

listen?, or writing a piece of paper without reading? We as English learners and teachers,

often forget that we cannot isolate learning, one skill is always related to the other, and in

order for that learning to take place it has to be meaningful, as in our writing activity, we

first found a real life situation activity where the learners can find themselves related and

immerse to situations that can make them wonder about their own experiences, and share

about them. Writing should not be like a mechanic process, instead it should be natural,

taking into account the amount of effort a learner has to do when putting ideas together in

a piece of paper. Every person has their own way to write, some formal and others very

informal, and this process takes a lot of time, and is not as easy as people think. When we

are talking, words come to our mind in many ways and the more fluent we are with the

language, the easier the response no matter if we make mistakes we over correct them at

the moment, but on the contrary, when we write, words stay there and are subject of

different interpretations, so the writing process becomes more difficult than listening and

speaking.

It is important when we are giving activities to learners, to lower their anxiety by

letting them interact with others and at the same time permit peer sharing and editing

before a final product is handed in. A lot of interaction among students is the key for

meaningful learning; therefore, students will learn different experiences from others,

socialize, negotiate, share and apply their knowledge (Krashen 1981).

 Expectations about writing has changed over the years, before, teachers used to

say “ write whatever comes to your mind”, but without purpose, there is not learning.

Now, new trends lead us to a more communicative way to learn how to express ourselves

in the written form, called the ‘process approach’ adapted by (Shih, 1996) in which we

focus more on the process that leads to the final product, giving time to students to

develop their ideas, giving them feedback at all times, and most of all, to find real

meaning with a real topic that can catch the attention of the learner. Ewen Arnold(1993)

states that many tasks in task-based courses are purposeless because nothing is done

with the student’s output and it does not lead anywhere, instead, we should link tasks no

matter how artificial is, but close to real- life.

Writing should be flexible, even though it has a format or rules to follow, we

cannot forget that every culture is different and so the writing style, we should not stick

to one format only or one way to critique writing, without taking into consideration place

and time, according to the article of (Robert Kaplan, 1966). A lot of practice is necessary

to master this skill and this practice has to have a continuous connection and integration

with other activities from other skills. I can also add that there are different levels of

learning a skill and developing that skill takes a lot of time for some and little time for

other, in consequence, evaluation should be flexible and not strict with error corrections

all the time. Writing activities should not be discouraged going beyond of what is

required at the moment, students may write a summary or write their own comments,

allowing them to develop their own style and demonstrate their own level of expression;

each learner has their own capabilities and careful analysis of evaluation should be taken

into consideration. Let’s not forget that from our own mistakes is when we really learn.
 The idea of integrating the four skills is to make the learning process more

meaningful with a real purpose. We should expose students with real life situation

activities and not just follow a pattern by a book, recordings or isolated skills that at the

end are meaningless. Real communication takes place outside of the classroom and it is

so complex that students should be exposed to different skills and environment at all

times. Adaptation is the key when teaching and learning; also age, group, society,

interests and abilities among others. Learners should be able to grasp what is important to

them and apply it in their own environment (Krashen, 1983).

 References

Richards, J. C. (1995). The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge Language

Teaching Library. Cambridge University Press.

Brown, H. D. (2007). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to

Language Pedagogy. Pearson. Third Edition.

Brown, H. D. (1994). Principles in Language Learning and Teaching: Prentice

Hall. Third Edition. New Jersey.

Ur, Penny (1991). A course in language teaching: Practice & Theory.

Cambridge University Press. 1991

Celce-Murcia (1991). Teaching English as a second or foreign language.

Heinle & Heinle Publishers. Second edition. 1991

Krashen, S &Terell, T. (1983): The Natural Approach: language acquisition in the

classroom. San Francisco. Alemany Press.

Nation, P. (2001 b): Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kaplan, R. B. (1966): Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language

learning. 16: 1-20.

Arnold, E. (1993): Authenticity Revisited. How Real is Real? In English for Specific
Purposes, Vol. 12, 237-246.

Content-Based Approaches to Teaching Academic Writing, by May Shih © 1986

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL).