Unit 3 The Teaching and Learning of EFL
Module 2 Listening and Reading
At the end of this module you will:-
a) be familiar with the four primary language skills
b) understand why learners have difficulty with listening
c) be able to identify a range of skills needed for successful listening and reading
d) know ways of training learners to develop those skills
e) be able to plan a receptive skills lesson
Introduction
There are 4 primary language skills, usually referred to as: speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is important to distinguish between them (though they are very much interlinked in many situations) as they demand different abilities. For example giving a speech requires a different skill from understanding what you hear when someone else gives a speech, or from presenting the information in the speech in written form or from reading what someone else has written on the subject. All these four skills must be included in a general English teaching syllabus.
There are courses in English for Specific Purposes, which need to be heavily weighted in one or two of the skills, eg courses for telephone operators teach more listening and speaking. However, even courses as specific as that need a certain amount of the other skills - a telephonist may need to read a memo, or leave a written message for someone, thus needing the skills of reading and writing.
There are further sound reasons for including all the four skills in the syllabus and often in a single lesson:
1. People get tired after a certain period of activity and they need a change of activity - the saying 'a change is as good as a rest' certainly
applies to the language classroom.
2. In any group there will be several different styles of learner. Some students need to write what they learn in oral practice because they get comfort from the written word, others will not need to see the written word. If you give the class the chance to hear and say and see and write a piece of language you will be catering for all styles of learner.
Skills and the Textbook
Some textbooks put emphasis on one or two skills and either omit or downgrade the others. Books which lay great importance on grammar often focus mainly on reading and writing, whereas audio-lingual course books concentrate on listening and speaking (they are however course books which have been written and need to be read). Before taking on a new class, look carefully at the textbook to see if it provides sufficient practice in all of the four skills. Plan ahead and be ready with supplementary material should the book be lacking in practice in any particular skill. Writing is the most commonly neglected! Authentic texts, readers, recordings of dialogues, extracts from DVD and contemporary news downloads or articles from the internet will be very useful for this purpose. Start making your collection now!
Although real life communication rarely consists of only one of the four skills, it is important to look at the skill areas separately to begin with in order to identify what learners need to be able to do, and how we, as teachers, can best help them acquire that ability.
Two types of skills
The 4 skills are traditionally divided into receptive and productive skills. As the names suggest, the receptive skills are those which enable the learner to understand language and to receive information via language. They are listening and reading. The productive skills are those which enable the learner to produce language. They are speaking and writing.
One misconception is that the receptive skills are passive and the productive skills are active. Because any act of listening or reading is supposed to have an aim – whether it be understanding the main idea of a text, identifying the characters in a play or deciding on your attitude to the speaker's opinion – the listener or reader is actively involved in the process.
In this module our focus will be on the two receptive skills: listening and reading.
LISTENING SKILLS
When teaching listening skills, we have to make sure a range of training techniques are employed and not rely on students to 'pick up' by themselves what the language sounds like. This rarely happens, and a failure to employ training techniques may lead to the situation where learners may be highly competent in written skills, or have an excellent knowledge of grammar, but be unable to comprehend the simplest of listening passages. It is essential that we recognise areas of potential difficulty and plan our listening activities and materials accordingly.
First, however, we need to consider problem areas in listening and then possible solutions to those difficulties.
SELF-CHECK 1
Listen to the sound file (Listening Task.mp3) and complete the table below:-
Problems learners have Ways we can help
1.
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Different kinds of listening (listening sub-skills)
Students should be encouraged to practise extensive listening, ie listen to the English language from various sources outside the classroom, listen for pleasure.
In this section we will focus on the listening activities that take place inside the classroom and are referred to as intensive listening, ie listening to relatively short dialogues or texts with a specific purpose. Such listening involves two main sub-skills: listening for gist and listening for detail.
Listening for gist
There are times when we listen to something in order to get a general idea of the content, or 'the gist', rather than specific details. Sometimes we need to recognise the function of the dialogue – for example, is the speaker making arrangements, expressing an opinion, making an enquiry; are the speakers discussing their opinions of a book they have both read or are they having a row? At higher levels – intermediate and above – students need practice in recognising attitude (by work on intonation patterns) and recognising changes in direction or topic when listening to speeches, long texts, or taking notes in university lectures.
A pre-listening gist question can prepare the students and encourage them not to worry about details but to concentrate on understanding the general idea. They will listen with the question in mind and then give their answer.
Post-listening questions such as 'How would you describe A's feelings?' allow them to interpret what they have understood without worrying about specifics.
Listening for detail
When we listen for detail, our attention is focused and we are searching for specific information in the listening passage. For example, we could be listening for details of the weather in our region, a train departure time or the football results of our favourite team. As we listen carefully, we select the information we require and ignore the rest. Because we know beforehand what we want to hear, it becomes easier to concentrate and focus our attention to listen selectively. There are several ways of training our students to develop the sub-skill of listening for detail.
a) Prediction
By asking students to predict what they are going to hear, based on a topic word or sentence, you are preparing your learners for what to expect. Guided questions help them decide what to listen for, and keep them focused on the main points. This technique can be repeated towards the end of a listening passage by asking students to predict the ending. This can be done in pairs or groups and it keeps students actively involved in the listening process.
b) Comprehension questions
Different types of exercises will ensure that listening skills are being developed. Exercises can be set midway as well as at the end of a listening passage, and can be in the form of true/false questions, 'wh' questions (who, what, where), sentence completion, gap-filling, error correction, table filling, form-filling, etc.
c) Listening for language items
An exercise may require that you listen and identify specific lexical or grammatical items in a text, eg note all the past participle forms of verbs or all the superlative adjectives.
Listening for gist and listening for detail should be carried out separately from each other. It is difficult for students to do both at the same time. Check tasks to make sure that you do not have them trying to do too many things at once. When a new listening passage, a monologue or a dialogue, is introduced, students will naturally want to know what it is generally about first and discover details later. So it's logical to begin with gist exercises for the first listening and give detailed exercises for the second listening.
Students often find listening exercises to be one of the most stressful parts of any lesson. The most stress is aroused when students are asked to listen ‘cold’ (ie they are not prepared) and then perform an exercise. Therefore, it is important to activate schemata before they listen. That means discuss the general topic of the text and make students aware of what they already know about it, so that the new information they hear will be laid on some sort of a foundation. That, in turn, will improve understanding.
SELF-CHECK 2
Identify the type of listening in the following activities:
a) listening to a group discussing the Royal Family and deciding whether
the general feeling is pro- or anti- Royalists
b) listening to the travel news for motorway hold-up information
READING SKILLS
It does not necessarily follow that because a student can read, he/she is an efficient reader. Training in the skills involved in reading must be given as reading is not an inbuilt skill. Reading is not a passive process, either. It is an active process in which practice in all the sub-skills is vital as no improvement can be effected without guided practice.
Different kinds of reading (reading sub-skills)
A student needs to master different ways of reading a text. The purpose for which the student requires the language determines the particular sub-skills of reading which will be needed.
Think back to the listening section. As with listening, students need to be encouraged to read extensively, ie read a variety of texts on their own, such as fiction, magazine articles, or Wikipedia. When they encounter the same structures and vocabulary multiple times, their ability to understand written English improves and they are able to deal with more and more difficult texts.
The two common types, or sub-skills, of intensive reading in the classroom, are skimming (or 'reading for gist') and scanning (or 'reading for detail').
Skimming involves running your eyes over a piece of text in order to understand its overall idea. For example, you may want to ascertain if it is relevant to your needs and whether it's worth being read more carefully. You may want to establish if any exciting events are described in the text or it is just an opinion piece. You may need to find out whether the text is negative or positive in tone. Or, if the author comments on a conflict, you may want to find out which side he/she is on or whether he/she tries to remain neutral.
Scanning involves looking for specific information in the text. For example, you want to find out the score of a game between Real Madrid and Barcelona and you want to know whether Christiano Ronaldo has scored. You will then read through the match report looking for numbers and identifying which of them refer to the final score and you will also look for any mention of Christiano's name in the text and, when you locate it, you'll read around that to find out whether he scored a goal.
Scanning may also be in the form of looking for specific language items or structures, eg “find all instances of the present perfect” or “find all descriptive adjectives in the text”.
In another classification there are four sub-skills of reading.
The first sub-skill involves 'superficial understanding' and is used in reading a newspaper or detective story, for example, in order to pick out the main points of the story, look for clues etc. The main concerns here could be 'what is going on?' ‘why are they doing what they are doing?’ or 'how will it all end?' This is quite similar to what happens during extensive reading, where you read large amounts of text for pleasure.
The following techniques are more intensive.
The second sub-skill is described as 'imaginative understanding' and is used in the study of literature. A task requiring imaginative understanding could be, for example:
Where Seamus Heaney says: ‘I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing’ - what is he trying to tell us about his attitude to poetry?
The third sub-skill is referred to as 'precise understanding' and it involves thorough comprehension of a text or parts of a text with focus on the exact meaning of every word and sentence. (Unfortunately, sometimes this turns out to be the only sub-skill practised by students in some classes).
The final sub-skill involves 'practical understanding', and this is when we read in order to act upon what we read. This is something we do with packets and instructions - which button to press to make the TV work or how many pills to take and how often.
Before setting reading tasks for your students, you need to decide what your aim is. For instance:
Do you want to train your students to answer questions precisely?
Do you want to increase vocabulary?
Do you want your students to decide if the text is relevant to their needs?
Are you looking at the grammar of certain types of texts?
Do you want the students to act on the information?
SELF-CHECK 3
Here are two texts and some examples of exercises which have been written to improve students' reading skills. Study them carefully - which sub-skills are being taught? Who are they suitable for?