Teaching Listening and Speaking in Second and Foreign Language Contexts

Kathleen M. Bailey

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350093546
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Éducation
• Categoría: Enseignement des langues

This book guides language teachers in planning and teaching activities that promote the development of speaking and listening skills at all levels of target language proficiency, for teachers of any modern language. Kathleen M. Bailey draws on her extensive experience as a language teacher, teacher educator, and language learner to interweave practical activities with the research and theory that support their use. Activities include the use of pictures, songs, drama techniques, tasks, and projects to promote the development of speaking and listening skills. The author shares reflections of her own and encourages readers to reflect on their own experiences and become aware of their existing mental constructs through multiple reflection tasks and discussion questions. Each chapter provides focusing questions. The systematic chapter structure scaffolds the readers' understanding of the concepts explored, which include communication strategies, interactive and non-interactive listening, speaking anxiety, accentedness and intelligibility, and much more. Through its companion website this book provides access to resources that enable readers to continue their own professional development as teachers of listening and speaking in second and foreign language contexts.

Chapter 1

Teaching Speaking and Listening: An Introduction

1.1 Introduction

It is likely that people have been speaking and listening to one another since that mysterious era when human beings became human. Members of all known civilizations communicate using their productive and receptive skills. (In the Deaf community, those skills operate through signed languages, but I don’t have the expertise to discuss that important topic.) This book has been written for language teachers—particularly those who are embarking on their careers. I hope the volume also will be helpful to experienced language teachers, including those who are undergoing shifts in assignments or even major career changes. I also hope that teacher educators will find it useful. In this volume, I want to share some selected research findings and relevant theory in a way that teachers of any language will find both informative and interesting.

My own experience has been teaching English, so most of my examples will be in English. Nevertheless, I will try to discuss teaching techniques and research concepts that you can use, no matter what language you teach (or plan to teach). At the beginning of each chapter, I will contextualize the key issues with a brief introduction, and some “Guiding Questions.” These are academically oriented questions intended to raise key issues we will address in the next section: “What We Know.” In that part of each chapter, I will review some of the literature that I find to be the most compelling about the topic. Some of those resources will be from recent publications, while others will be from older work that has influenced our field in important ways. In some instances, I will summarize and paraphrase the literature, and, in other cases, I will share quotes from the original authors, particularly in defining key terms. In every chapter I will also share “Reflections”—retrospections about language learning and teaching situations I have observed or experienced personally that exemplify the issues addressed in the chapter.

In the “Practical Activities” sections, I will share teaching ideas based on what we do know. These ideas also include activities that have worked well for me as a teacher and a language learner. I share them not as “best practices” but rather as good practices that may be relevant to you and your learners in your own (future) contexts. It is only fair that I also acknowledge some of the challenges you face, or will face, as a language teacher. For this reason, every chapter will have a section called “Challenges.”

Each chapter will conclude with end-of-chapter activities. First there will be several “Discussion Questions.” Unlike the “Guiding Questions” that begin the chapters, these end-of-chapter questions are intended to stimulate thought and discussion by helping you to connect your personal experiences and professional goals to the issues covered in the chapter.

The next section of end-of-chapter materials consists of “Follow-up Tasks.” These are brief tasks or larger-scale projects that will help you to put into practice the ideas covered in the chapter. If you are currently teaching or in a teacher training program, I encourage you to work on these tasks with colleagues or classmates.

Every chapter includes suggestions for “Technological Tools” that should be useful. I am not suggesting products you can buy. Instead, these digital tools include websites that offer free materials and resources teachers and learners can use to promote target language development.

Finally, the “Suggested Readings” section is intended to help you pursue areas of interest to you. It is not possible to cover everything language teachers need to know about teaching speaking and listening in one book. For this reason, I hope to guide you to additional resources for your continued professional development.

It is important to add one more point here: I try to write as I teach. That is, whether my students are language learners, pre-service teachers, or in-service teachers, I want to present ideas and structure activities in ways that make sense to them. As an author, this stance means I write in the first person instead of using a more academic style. I also try to anticipate—and sometimes overtly raise—questions I think readers would like to ask and challenges they might face in understanding and applying the concepts presented here. I will also recycle material from time to time, in order to make connections across chapters.

Guiding Questions

1 What are foreign language and second language contexts for teaching and learning?

2 What are multilingualism and plurilingualism? How do they relate to language learning and teaching?

3 What are the components of spoken language?

4 What are declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge? How do they differ?

5 What are transactional language and interactional language? What is the ludic function of language?

6 What are the differences between written language and speech?

1.2 What We Know

In each “What We Know” section, I will address the “Guiding Questions” and provide information that contextualizes the rest of the chapter. In this chapter, we will review some key vocabulary related to the teaching of speaking and listening, so that you can delve into the rest of the book with confidence and ease. In addition, this chapter will illustrate the topics and structure of the subsequent chapters and the types of resources the book will provide. It is my fervent hope that in finishing this chapter you will feel empowered and excited about reading more.

1.2.1 Second and Foreign Language Teaching Contexts

This book focuses on the teaching of speaking and listening to people who are learning a new language or are improving their abilities in one that is not their native language. The language people aspire to learn is often called the target language (TL). The context might be one of learning the TL where it is widely spoken. That situation is typically referred to as a second language (SL) context (e.g., people learning English in Australia, or learning Spanish in Argentina). In contrast, studying a language in a context where it is not widely used is called foreign language (FL) learning (e.g., learning Japanese in Guatemala, or Mandarin in Canada).

Both FL and SL contexts are referred to with the abbreviation L2; however, the SL-FL contrast is not as clear-cut as it may seem. For example, Hong Kong is widely perceived as a bilingual speech context, where Cantonese and English have been used side by side for many years. But parts of Hong Kong are largely monolingual, both in terms of speech and written texts. In different neighborhoods, for instance, you can see road signs and advertisements that are written entirely in Chinese, partly in English, or largely in English. This example is related to multilingual contexts and plurilingual speakers.

1.2.2 Multilingualism and Plurilingualism

Multilingualism is defined as “the presence in a geographical area, large or small, of more than one ‘variety of language,’ i.e., the mode of speaking of a social group whether it is formally recognised as a language or not” (King, 2017, p. 6). We should also note that “in such an area, individuals may be monolingual, speaking only their own variety” (p. 6). Thus, the Hong Kong situation described above can be characterized as a multilingual context. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken, as are British, Australian, Indian, and North American varieties of English, among others.

In contrast, plurilingualism is “the repertoire of varieties of language which many individuals use, and is therefore the opposite of monolingualism; it includes the language variety referred to as ‘mother tongue’ or ‘first language’ and any number of other languages or varieties” (p. 6). But we should acknowledge that “in some multilingual areas, some individuals are monolingual and some are plurilingual” (p. 6).

The language learners you teach will bring many linguistic resources to your classroom. Some of those learners will be monolingual and some will be plurilingual. It is important to recognize that the language abilities our students have are assets to build upon, not problems to overcome. We turn now to the various components of spoken language, which learners must be able to interpret while listening and produce while speaking.

1.2.3 Components of Spoken Language

Language teachers often talk about teaching lessons on one or more of the four skills. Speaking and writing are called the productive skills, because the students are producing language. Listening and reading are called the receptive skills, because the students are receiving the language when they listen and read. Some courses focus on one or two of these skills, while others take an integrated approach, in which all four skills are taught and practiced.

When we speak and listen, whether in our native language or in an additional language, many different linguistic subsystems are involved. Becoming proficient in a new language entails developing all of these elements and being able to use them appropriately and accurately at will. The subsystems are usually referred to as the components of language. At this point, we will briefly consider the vocabulary associated with the language components involved in teaching L2 speaking and listening, starting with the smallest units. This traditional approach is appropriate as a starting point because, for much of the history of language teaching, lessons have focused on the components of the TL. Lessons often started with presentations and explanations about one of those components, followed by opportunities to practice using it. This procedure has changed considerably in recent years, but, in this chapter, we will review the building blocks of languages as a way of learning the technical terms used in the profession.

1.2.3.1 The Sound System

The individual meaning-bearing sounds of a language are called phonemes. The consonants and vowels of a language are referred to as the segmental phonemes, because they can be divided and recombined. My great-grandmother taught me to read using the recombinatory properties of the segmental phonemes by introducing me to the “AT family”: “A” was the mother and “T” was the father. Their children were words like bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, and so on. Changing the initial consonants to form different words illustrates this segmental characteristic of phonemes.

A tricky part of learning to read in a new language and to pronounce written words is understanding how the sounds of speech are related to the written symbols (the graphemes) that represent them. Some languages, such as Korean and Spanish, have a high phoneme-grapheme correspondence. That is, the written symbols closely match the sound system as it is spoken. Other languages, like English, have a low phoneme-grapheme correspondence: The sounds of the language are spelled with many different symbols and various symbols can represent many different sounds.

Another very important way to convey meaning is through the use of suprasegmental phonemes. The prefix supra- means “above,” and indeed these elements of the sound system function “above” the segmental phonemes. That is, they are overlaid upon the words we utter, and they convey various meanings that become attached to those words. The suprasegmentals include pitch, stress, and intonation. Here is an example that shows how suprasegmental phonemes convey meaning using the same lexical items in the same word order, but with different emphases. How would you pronounce this sentence to convey three different attitudes?

1 He’s a doctor. (statement of fact)

2 He’s a doctor? (surprise at new information)

3 He’s a doctor!? (absolute incredulity at the idea that such a fool would be a doctor)

In these three utterances, it is the suprasegmental phonemes that create the meaning differences, rather than the words or the word order.

The study of “the distinctive sound units of a language and their relationship to one another” is called phonology (Richards, Platt, & Weber, 1985, p. 216). A related concept, phonetics, focuses on three main areas: articulatory phonetics (the study of speech production), acoustic phonetics (the characteristics of sound waves), and auditory phonetics (the study of how listeners perceive sounds of speech) (Richards et al., 1985). We will explore these issues in depth in Chapter 10, when we focus on pronunciation.

1.2.3.2 Words and Word Order Rules

The phonemes of a language combine to form morphemes—the building blocks of words. Free morphemes are individual words, such as truth, dance, and happy. There are also bound morphemes—parts of words that don’t stand alone. They include both prefixes and suffixes (and some languages have infixes). Examples in English include un- and -ness and ...