Teaching the Core Skills of Listening and Speaking

ASCD

Erik Palmer

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781416619024
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

With the Common Core State Standards emphasizing listening and speaking across the curriculum, these long-neglected language arts are regaining a place in schools. For teachers, this means reexamining practices and rethinking expectations. How much do we know about teaching listening and speaking as the complex communication skills they are? How do we teach students to discuss appropriately, integrate and understand the mountains of information they receive, and express themselves clearly and effectively?

In this lively and practical book, 20-year teaching veteran Erik Palmer presents an approach aligned to the six Common Core anchor standards for speaking and listening but focused on preparing students for 21st century communication inside and beyond the classroom. Here, you'll get concrete guidance for teaching and assessing

* Collaborative discussion
* Listening and media literacy
* Questioning and reasoning
* Speech presentation
* Effective multimedia use
* Adapting speech to different content and tasks

With due respect to reading and writing, we do most of our communicating—in the classroom and in life—through listening and speaking. Filled with examples and specific activities targeted to variety of subjects and grade levels, this book is an essential resource for all teachers interested in helping students acquire core skills that cross the content areas and support long-term success.

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Chapter 1

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The Most Fundamental Skills for Success

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The cliché is that if you asked a fish about water, the fish would reply, "What's water?" Completely surrounded it, the fish doesn't even recognize water as a separate entity and certainly doesn't realize water's importance.

This is how it is with listening and speaking. They are so deeply embedded in so many aspects of our lives that most of us don't think about them much. Like the fish with water, we take listening and speaking for granted. It's time to change that—to bring listening and speaking to the forefront of educators' minds and to purposefully teach the listening and speaking skills that are the foundation of so much of human interaction.

This is probably the right time to mention that, yes, I prefer the phrase "listening and speaking" to the "speaking and listening" that's more common in English language arts standards and discussions of those standards. And the reason I turn the phrase around is to emphasize that in life and in all learning, listening is the predominant language art.

Listening Comes First

How do infants learn? What is their first exposure to language? Listening. We all listened before we spoke and well before we read or wrote. Even our most visual and kinesthetic students have a learning history that began with listening. Appendix A to the Common Core ELA/Literacy standards examines the crucial connection between listening and learning. One of the references is to a study by Sticht and James, who "found evidence strongly suggesting that children's listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension until the middle school years" (Common Core State Standards Initiative [CCSSI], 2010b, p. 26). In other words, all of us were auditory learners once, and all of our young students will gain more from listening than from any other input.

Even after reading comprehension catches up and students are able to effectively get information from print, they still take in a tremendous amount of information from listening—to their teachers, of course, but also to one another and to speech delivered via various electronic media. The International Listening Association claims that 85 percent of a student's learning is derived from listening (Mackay, 2005). It would be a challenge to find a teacher who doesn't believe that we can improve student learning by teaching them to listen well.

Listening + Speech = Classroom Communication

If listening is the primary way that students take in information, it makes sense to pay close attention to what they're listening to. In the classroom, it's most likely to be spoken language—lectures, certainly, but also process explanations, project instructions, one-on-one conferences, presentations given by classmates, and discussions in groups. Education is fundamentally and unquestionably grounded in oral communication.

Studies reveal that students spend 50 to 75 percent of classroom time listening to teachers, other students, and audio media (Bass, 2005). Teachers lecture, explain, and cajole. We answer questions, present, and lead discussions. Most of our important directions, announcements, and explanations are oral. Given that so much teacher time is spent speaking, it would be wise to figure out how to do it well. And when the teacher is not talking, students still spend time listening—to other students as they present, to videos shown, to each other as they work together. You have heard many student discussion comments and probably hundreds of student presentations. How many were impressive? Would learning improve in your classrooms if those comments and presentations were well spoken?

Oral language dominates even outside of traditional instructional approaches. Some might point to the flipped classroom as an exception, but this model doesn't reduce the amount of listening students do; it just moves listening to the home. In fact, flipped instruction absolutely requires that the teacher command impressive oral communication skills. It is difficult to make a riveting presentation for a 10-inch screen. Requiring students to watch much of what teachers are currently putting out there amounts to cruel and unusual punishment (Palmer, 2012).

It's no different with online instruction. In my state, Colorado, a student in a rural high school who would otherwise not have access to AP Physics can now link up to an AP Physics classroom hundreds of miles away. But in order to do well in this environment, the online learner needs strong independent listening and media literacy skills, and she needs her faraway AP Physics teacher to have strong speaking and media presentation skills.

With so much of learning based on listening, we have to make sure that both the listeners and the speakers being listened to are competent. Let me be clear: I don't want my emphasis on listening and speaking as the core skills of language arts to devalue the work of reading teachers or discourage the teaching of writing. We and our students certainly read and write to learn, and we must make our students competent readers and writers. But think about how we teach reading and writing. Think about how much listening and speaking is involved. The water is everywhere, and everything depends upon it.

Now let's get more specific and look at the crucial roles listening and speaking play across content areas.

Listening and Speaking in Classroom Discussion

Every class has discussions. I think it's because, intuitively, we are aware that discussions enhance understanding. As students verbalize and listen to others, they can gain insights and learn more about the subject under discussion, whether it's a poem, a function in calculus, a tectonic plate in geography, or an amendment to the Constitution.

There is an established connection between discussions and academic achievement. In one study, inserting a 10-minute discussion of a story during a 90-minute language arts class had a significant impact on students' performance, improving their grasp of the story's basic facts, of the characters' feelings and motives, and of the story's overall meaning (Fall, Webb, & Chudowsky, 1997). When students discuss, they are more likely to retain the information and be able to retrieve it later (Hammond & Nessel, 2011). Discussions also improve intellectual agility and help develop skills of synthesis and integration (Brookfield & Preskill, 1999). All the benefits of discussion are enhanced when the discussion participants are skilled speakers and listeners.

Listening and Speaking in Reading Instruction

When I started teaching, my teammates told me that they all required one traditional, stand-up-and-speak book report every quarter. I was quite sure they meant that I should be doing the same, so that's what I did. It was only after many, many boring student book report talks that I started to wonder what the point of this assignment was. Was it to see if my students understood the books they read? If that's what I really wanted to find out, I could just ask them to tell me about the book in writing or in a personal conference. Was the goal to "scare" students into reading? "You'd better read, because otherwise you will look foolish when you have to give a talk in front of the whole class." No, that wasn't it. (And if it had been, I would've needed to rethink my ideas about student motivation.) Was I hoping these talks would inspire other students to read the books their classmates described? That was closer to what I had in mind. But apparently I needed to teach my students to speak about these books in a way that could inspire, because I wasn't seeing anybody sprinting to the library at the end of class. Actually, if the assignment really was about oral presentation, shouldn't I be giving my students instruction on how to present well? Why was I just assuming they all knew what to do?

Why do teachers assign oral book reports? I am surprised at how often I get quizzical looks when I ask this question. First, yes, we want to encourage reading. Students get better at something when they have more opportunities to practice it, and requiring one book report a quarter provides regular reading practice. Book reports also prompt readers to think critically about what they are reading in order to present the main character's traits and how she changed during the book, to describe the plot points and climax, to discuss the themes, and so on. But students could demonstrate this kind of critical thinking in other ways. Implicit in assigning book reports, then, is that we want to involve both the presenter and the listeners in this critical thinking. We want to encourage both the presenter and the listeners to read this book and other books. That means the speaker has to have strong presentation skills. And that means we need to teach those skills.

Oral book reports were not the only listening and speaking practices incorporated into my reading instruction. I read aloud to students, another familiar and seldom-questioned feature of many classrooms. The rationale for this one is easier to convey. We read aloud to demonstrate the enjoyment of reading but also to expose our students to language and to ways of using language that they would not otherwise encounter. Well-chosen stories are a way to introduce new words and their proper pronunciation in an engaging, memorable context. Himmele and Himmele (2012) put it this way:

In addition to getting kids hooked on books, narrative read-alouds are an effortless way to help students acquire the academic language they will need to comprehend informational texts… research has shown a strong positive correlation between read-aloud experiences and vocabulary development. (¶4–5)

Certainly another benefit of reading aloud is that it shows students how words on a page (or screen) can come to life and become something meaningful and valuable. When a teacher models good reading, complete with inflection, expression, gestures, and explanations, individual words combine to form a big picture and become a way to learn about other people and places—a doorway to adventure and understanding. In this data-driven era, we don't measure the value of instilling a love of literature in children, but the value is still there. Many struggling readers have been inspired to continue the struggle because some oral presentation made a story come alive. This only happens if the material is read well and if the students are listening well.

Why do we have students read aloud? The usual answer that we want to help them improve their reading fluency. Beginning readers are "word bound," focused on making sense of letters and letter combinations. At some point, they achieve fluency, meaning that the struggle to sound out words transitions to making sense of word combinations and getting meaning from print. Advanced readers move beyond fluency and begin to understand prosody, the rhythm and inflection in the writing. Orthographic clues such as italics, exclamation points, and bold print give readers suggestions about what the passage is supposed to sound like. But fluency and prosody in reading make no sense to children if there is no fluency or inflection in their speaking. How can students make their reading come alive if they have never been taught how to make their voice come alive? Until we teach oral language, we risk embarrassing student readers and boring student listeners.

Let's look at one more common feature of reading instruction: reader's theater. Why do we use it? Erika, an 8th grade language arts teacher in Denver, offers this explanation in a video she made for the online book Digitally Speaking:

It helps the students see that literature can come alive. Using your voice to portray the actors and the characters helps the students see that it's not just boring words on a page. It's exciting information that can relate to what they are doing today. Practicing speaking skills is really important so that when we do reader's theater, the student can really get into the part of the character.… It's about using your voice and using life in your voice to bring the characters to life and to further understand why the characters think what they think or do what they do or say what they say. (Palmer, 2012)

It is much easier to comprehend text when we practice it and speak it; it is easier to comprehend character motivation when we "become" the character and interact with other characters. What Erika points out is that successful reader's theater depends on successful speaking skills.

Listening and Speaking in Writing Instruction

Sharon teaches 5th grade language arts. Like many English teachers, she frequently gives her students prompts that they respond to, in writing, in their journals. Afterward, she draws from the deck of student name-cards and asks individual students to share something they have written. They can share any piece of the writing they choose, and they can choose the selection for any reason. Other students are encouraged to chime in with comments. Step inside the classroom, and this is what you might hear:

Jamal: I like how I described something my sister said, because it's funny: "If you wasn't faster, he'd a done some damage."

Sharon (the teacher): I like the way you captured the way people really speak sometimes, Jamal. You have a good ear. What did others think?

Kim: Don't you have to write it better? That's bad English, isn't it?

Sharon: Well, it's not formal English, but sometimes we don't speak formal English. If you are quoting someone, you should record exactly what they say. How would you make it formal English if you wanted to?

Andre: I'd say, "If you weren't faster, he would of done some damage."

Sharon: "He would of done some damage?"

Melissa: Have! He would have done some damage!

Sharon has students listen to their classmates' writing as an opening to instruction, and she uses shared writing as a way to inspire students to improve, like so:

Herschel: I want to share this one part—"The cat was curled up and cozy just catching a few Zs." I wrote it like that because you told us to try alliteration.

Sharon: "Curled up and cozy!" That really works, doesn't it? Who has cats? Can't you just picture that? Very nice.

Herschel gets validated as a writer, and other students see an effective application of a concept presented in class. Sharon encourages students to "steal from one another and use others' good ideas." (The plagiarism lecture comes later—right now she wants students to copy good models.)

This is one way that teachers use listening and speaking in writing instruction. Peer conferences are another. As a student speaks his written words, he can often discover a mistake: a left-out word, an awkward phrase, a wrong-sounding verb tense, and so on. As the peer listens, she can notice those places where the writing is unclear or lacks detail. If she gives good comments, the writer gains information that can support better self-assessment and better writing in the future.

There is an obvious connection between writing and oral presentation. Skills overlap. A person writing an essay and a person writing a speech both need to identify the audience and craft a message for that audience. They both need to define a purpose, add interesting and relevant content, organize that content, use transitions, and craft a powerful conclusion. Oral assignments give us opportunities to reinforce what we teach in written assignments.

There is a side benefit as well: speaking assignments can encourage students to write. We have all heard that one of the most prevalent fears people have is a fear of public speaking. What we usually miss is that there are some people who love speaking. Some of your students hate writing, but when given an opportunity to talk, they will enthusiastically write to prepare for the activity they feel comfortable doing (Palmer, 2012). For these students, oral assignments become a way to get written language assignments without a battle. When the writing will lead to a podcast posted on the class wiki page rather than just another paper to hand to the teacher, their engagement increases exponentially.

Listening and Speaking in Presentations

In math class, a student goes to the board to explain a solution to a problem. In science, lab partners explain their lab results to the entire class. In social studies, students do a newscast on a current political campaign. In health class, a team reports on smoking and its health effects. In French class, a student talks about the customary foods of France. In every subject, at some point we call upon students to convey information orally.

My experience is that those presentations are tolerated by classmates, and the general mediocrity of these presentations is tolerated by teachers. Although learning to tolerate mediocrity may be a life skill we (unfortunately) need to develop, this is not likely the goal teachers have in mind for these assignments. What they want is for these presentations to impart useful information, to further understanding, and to engage the whole class. If students possess effective listening and speaking skills, these aims are well within reach.

Early in my teaching career, my father gave me a copy of Writing to Learn by William Zinsser. I have always used writing as way to learn: if I write something down, the act of writing seems to help me remember. Zinsser makes a bigger claim, though—that information th...