Post # 7: Teaching Speaking and Listening

            Brown chapter 18 is about teaching listening and chapter 19 is about teaching speaking. These two aspects of language are closely intertwined. It is known to all students who have gone through the process of learning a second language that there seems to be more emphasis put on listening than speaking. This is one of the reasons why some learners are better at understanding the language than actually speaking it. When speaking is focused on in the classroom, it’s usually a short, structured partner conversation that is unnatural and consists of a few sentence exchanges. A section of chapter 18 talks about eight characteristics that need to be taken into consideration when teaching listening. One of these characteristics is colloquial language. This explains how language students are typically exposed to the standard “textbook” English, and for this reason, students sometimes have difficulties understanding colloquialisms. Vocabulary overall seems to be an issue, since for all languages, different words can be used in different countries but still have the same meaning. In a way this goes back to our discussion about which standard of English do you teach. The vocabulary of a language is included in one of those standards. Or do you teach more than one word for the same meaning? A point that this chapter stresses is that when assessing listening skills it’s important to pinpoint exactly what you want to assess. Many of the listening sections on tests that I’ve taken don’t clearly identify the overall concept that is being assessed. Most are just a conversation involving vocabulary and some grammar.

            Brown chapter 19 talks about how to teach speaking. One of the issues with teaching speaking that’s identified in the chapter is the distinction between accuracy and fluency. In last week’s readings we kind of discussed this topic. Both factors are obviously important but I think that accuracy in the TL comes first, and then fluency comes later. But, when you gain some fluency you may lose some accuracy when speaking. But the mistakes being made are more due to the situation that the speaker is in when they are talking, they’re nervous, for example. I don’t ever remember any of my Spanish classes focusing a lot of fluency, the majority of it was being able to accurately produce the grammar concepts in sentences.

            Kumar chapter 5 discusses ways to facilitate negotiated interaction. He summarizes the chapter by saying how both the teacher and students have responsibility since willingness and active cooperation are needed. Without both, it would be impossible to create the environment needed to promote negotiated interaction. Participants must have “flexibility and freedom to contribute to talk.” It’s important for students to want to learn or else no meaningful interaction will be accomplished.

            In enjoyed the article by Cary since the majority of it was a story. I liked hearing about the information through a story instead of just reading it in the normal research style format. Dolores has her first grade students, who in all speak a total of eight different languages, take turns being language teachers. The students teach small phrases and words to their classmates, such as “hello,” “thank you,” “please,” etc. These phrases and words are used informally throughout the week, whenever students want to use them, but some stick with the students even after that. This is a great idea for incorporating students’ native languages in the classroom. It shows students that their native language and culture are accepted in the classroom and also gives students the chance to learn words in new languages. It definitely would work well with younger grades but most likely not with older grades. I feel like younger students would be more willing to share their native language and culture with others than older students would be.