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Teaching listening and speaking
1. Teaching Listening and Speaking:
From Theory to Practice
By Jack C. Richards
Presented by Alyssa Savitski
ESL 501
2. Introduction
• Teaching listening and speaking skills has become
vital to learning a second language.
• Listening was thought of as a mastery of skills,
such as identifying key words and recognizing
reduced words.
• It then became bottom-up and top-down,
followed by prior knowledge and schema.
• The current view is that a listener is an active
participant that uses facilitation, monitoring, and
evaluating strategies.
3. Speaking was…
• Memorizing, repeating, and drill-based
• Communicative language changed grammar-
based syllabi to communication syllabi.
• Fluency became popular.
4. The Teaching of Listening
• 2 views: listening as comprehension and
listening as acquisition.
• Listening as comprehension is based on the
main function of listening in second language
learning is to facilitate understanding of
spoken discourse.
• Spoken discourse is instantaneous,
unplanned, uses hesitations, reduced forms,
fillers and repeats, and a linear structure (p.
3).
5. Bottom-Up Processing
• Using the incoming input as the basis for
understanding the message. Comprehension is the
process of decoding.
• Teaching Bottom-Up:
– Retain input while it is being processed
– Recognizing word and clause divisions
– Recognize key words
– Recognize key transitions in a discourse
– Recognize grammatical relations between key elements in
sentences
– Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence
function (Richards, 5).
6. Task Examples of Bottom-Up
Processing
• Identify sequence markers
• Identify key words
• Distinguish between positive and negative
statements.
7. Top-down Processing
• Use of background knowledge in understanding the
meaning of a message. It could be previous knowledge
of a topic, situational/contextual, or schema.
• Teaching Top-down:
– Use key words to construct schema
– Infer the setting of the text
– Infer the role of the participants and their goals
– Infer cause and effect
– Infer unstated details of a situation
– Anticipate questions related to the topic or situation
(Richards, 9).
8. Task Examples of Top-Down
Processing
• KWL charts
• Predict another speaker’s part of the
conversation
• Read news headlines, guess what happened,
then listen to the news and compare
9. Strategies for Listening
• Cognitive: comprehension, storing/memory
process, retrieval
• Metacognitive: assessing, monitoring, self-
evaluating and self-testing
10. Listening as Acquisition
• Listeners extract meaning from the message.
• Use both bottom-up and top-down
processing.
• Language of utterances is temporary.
• Teaching listening strategies can make more
effective listeners.
• Some tasks to improve acquisition are true-
false, picture identification, and sequencing
tasks.
11. Input vs. Intake
• Schmidt (1990) argued “that we won’t learn
anything from input we hear and understand
unless we notice something about the input”
(Richards, 13).
• Input- what a learner hears
• Intake- the part that the learner notices
• Only intake can serve as the basis for language
development (Richards, 14).
12. Noticing and Restructuring
• Noticing Activities: using the listening texts for
comprehension activities and use them for
language awareness.
• Restructuring Activities: oral or written tasks
that involve productive use of selected items
from the listening text.
13. The Teaching of Speaking
• Employs more vague or generic words than
written language.
• Show variation between formal and informal
speech.
• May be planned or unplanned.
14. Conversational Routines
• Use of fixed expressions • Styles of Speaking
– “It doesn’t matter.” – What is appropriate for
– “I see what you mean.” the context?
– “Just looking, thanks.” – “Whacha up to?/What
are you up to?
– Differences between
formal and informal
speech.
15. Functions of Speaking
• 3 functions of speaking
– Talk as Interaction: primarily a social function.
Focus is on the speaker, not the message.
– Talk as Transaction: focus on what is said or done.
The message is #1! (Problem-solving activities,
asking for directions).
– Talk as Performance: public speaking, form of
monolog, mimics written language.
16. Implications for Teaching
• What kinds of speaking skills does the course
focus on?
• Identifying teaching strategies for each kind of
talk
– Talk as Interaction: “small talk”, personal
experiences
– Talk as Transaction: role play, small group
activities
– Talk as Performance: examples of speeches
17. Challenges for Teachers
• Help develop fluency, accuracy, and
appropriateness of language use.
• Move from linguistic competence (mastery of
linguistic system) to communicative
competence (know how to use English
appropriately for a range of different
purposes).
