Teaching Listening and Speaking for Young Learners - Notes
Teaching Listening and Speaking
Getting Started
This chapter explores the basic principles behind teaching listening and speaking to young learners.
It focuses on making listening input comprehensible and checking comprehension.
It also addresses vocabulary building and pronunciation, while developing students' communicative abilities.
The chapter provides specific techniques and activities suitable for primary classrooms.
These techniques includes activities such as Total Physical Response, songs, rhymes, chants, and games.
Think About It
Consider real-life listening examples a school-aged child might encounter inside the classroom, outside the classroom, and at home.
Consider real-life communication that children engage in on a day-to-day basis, including the types of conversations primary school-aged children are engaged in inside the classroom, outside the classroom, and at home.
Discovery Activity: Brainstorming Table
Brainstorm and note authentic or real-life listening and speaking activities young learners engage in daily.
Organize ideas in a table, differentiating activities for very young learners (VYLs) versus young learners (YLs).
Include examples for:
Listening (e.g., TV cartoons)
Speaking (e.g., Singing songs)
Both (e.g., Buying candy at the store)
Theory, Planning and Application: Considerations for Teaching Listening and Speaking
Incorporate authentic listening and speaking tasks into the classroom, relating activities to children's interests and real lives, including experiences from other classes.
Recognize that children listen in various contexts, such as watching cartoons, hearing teacher announcements, listening to songs, or overhearing conversations.
While some listening is one-way, children also engage in two-way conversations.
Teach students to communicate orally in real conversations, acknowledging that listening and speaking skills are intertwined in real communicative acts.
Use meaningful text types and emphasize building oral communication skills as the foundation for teaching listening and speaking in the EYL (English as a Young Language) classroom.
Considerations for Teaching Listening
Explore approaches to teaching listening, a skill that can be overlooked due to its seemingly passive nature.
Highlight that listening is an active process requiring various skills and strategies.
Emphasize the importance for EYL teachers not to neglect listening, even if it's not outwardly visible.
Morley (2001) notes listening is used more than any other language skill:
Listeners typically listen twice as much as they speak.
Four times more than they read.
Five times more than they write.
Ensure young learners can listen well and derive meaning from listening input.
Aspects of Listening
What is listening?
Bottom-up and top-down listening
Principles for teaching listening to YLs
What Is Listening?
Listening is an active process where the listener interacts with and interprets the message accurately to make sense of it.
Peterson (2001) describes listening as "a multilevel, interactive process of meaning creation" (p. 88).
Anderson (2009) defines listening comprehension in three stages:
Perceptual processing: recognizing sounds encoded with language.
Parsing: decoding the language and storing it in short-term memory.
Utilization: matching the language heard with ideas stored in long-term memory.
This process is challenging for second language learners, especially young learners with limited information or schemata in long-term memory.
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Listening
Interpreting language involves two psycholinguistic processes: bottom-up and top-down.
Bottom-up processing: Interpreting sounds linguistically and gaining meaning by decoding parts of the language.
Top-down processing: Interpreting the message through the context in which it is delivered.
Berlitz commercial example: A German Coast Guard radio dispatcher misunderstands a distress call due to faulty bottom-up listening skills.
Sailor: "Mayday mayday…. Hello, can you hear us? Over. We are sinking."
German Coast Guard: "Um…hello? Zis is zee German Coast Guard."
Sailor: "We are sinking! We are sinking!"
German Coast Guard: "What are you zinking about?"
In reality, top-down processing skills would prevent this confusion within the context of the Coast Guard.
Bottom-up processing uses linguistic knowledge to make sense of an utterance, starting with the smallest parts of language to construct meaning.
Listeners proceed from sounds to words to sentences to literal meaning.
Bottom-up techniques focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other discrete components of spoken language.
Examples of bottom-up processing activities for young learners:
Listening to word pairs and identifying if they are the same or different.
Matching heard words with pictures.
Distinguishing subjects from verbs in a series of sentences.
Filling in the blanks of a short dialog transcript.
Top-down processing starts with schemata or background knowledge based on the context of the communication.
Learners gain meaning from context and predict what will be said.
Context, like in the Berlitz commercial, clarifies the communication.
Teachers can use the following top-down techniques with young learners:
Before listening to an announcement, show students the context of an airport and have them predict what they might hear.
Have students listen to utterances and describe the emotional reaction they hear (happy, sad, etc.).
Have students listen to a conversation between a doctor and a patient and choose a picture showing the correct location of the dialog with the correct people having the conversation.
Teachers should use both bottom-up and top-down techniques when teaching listening, balancing focus on: isolated language structures - bottom-up processing skills that focus on isolated language structures to meaning - top-down process skills, to the context surrounding real language conversations.
Pinter (2006) explains that children have less developed schematic knowledge and more difficulty guessing and inferring meaning compared to adults (p. 46).
Teachers need to balance bottom-up and top-down processing to help young learners develop effective listening strategies.
Principles for Teaching Listening to YLS
Listening is the primary mode of communication for instruction between teacher and YL students in EYL classes.
VYLs, in particular, rely on listening due to minimal reading skills in both their native and foreign language.
Curtain and Dahlberg (2010) consider listening the cornerstone of language development and the main channel for initial contact with the target language and culture (p. 71).
The main source of listening input is the teacher giving instructions and demonstrations.
Teachers of YLs must be conscious of their approach to providing listening input.
Seven principles for designing listening activities for young learners:
Prepare teacher talk carefully.
Use listening activities that reflect real-life listening.
Use listening activities that are developmentally appropriate.
Use a variety of techniques to make listening input comprehensible.
Check comprehension using a variety of response types.
Keep listening active—always give learners a listening task.
Equip your students with intelligent guesswork strategies.
1. Prepare Teacher Talk Carefully
Children listen to the teacher giving instructions, modeling language, singing songs, doing chants, dramatizing dialogs, and telling stories (Brewster, Ellis, & Girard, 2004; Pinter, 2006).
Teachers need to carefully plan their language use in the classroom.
Brewster, Ellis, and Girard (2004) suggest teachers decide how much general classroom language (instructions, questions, praise) will be in the pupils' L1 and how much in English (p. 98).
The decision to use L1 for complicated instructions or classroom management should be deliberate to maximize YLs' exposure to appropriate-level English.
Think about the level and amount of English when preparing teacher talk, as long stretches of explanations can be overwhelming for students with low proficiency.
YLs have short attention spans, so incomprehensible input can cause them to lose focus.
Teachers can start by teaching YLs to understand and respond to basic classroom language such as:
Come in.
Sit down.
Be quiet.
Listen carefully.
Let's begin!
Look here.
This is…
That is…
Are you ready?
Great!
Come to the board.
Open your books.
Turn to page…
What is the answer?
What is …?
Where is…?
Who is …?
When is… ?
Prepare short segments of comprehensible listening input when giving instructions, demonstrating, or explaining language.
2. Use Listening Activities That Reflect Real-Life Listening
Activities should involve authentic language and real-world contexts to make learning meaningful, motivating, and useful.
Use real-life text types to help YLs use English to mirror and contextualize language instruction.
Examples of text types that reflect real-life listening:
Songs (traditional, children's, pop)
Chants and raps
Stories
Plays
TV shows (game shows, comedy shows, soap operas)
TV commercials
Radio ads
News reports
Weather reports
Announcements (school, airport, train station)
Cartoons
Movies
Documentaries
Jokes and riddles
Tongue twisters
Dialogs (conversations)
3. Use Listening Activities That Are Developmentally Appropriate
Developmentally appropriate activities (see Chapter 2) are more intrinsically motivating and comprehensible.
Consider learners' age, background knowledge, and interests.
For VYLS, use children's songs like "Itsy Bitsy Spider" or nursery rhymes like "Hickory Dickory Dock."
For older YLs in grades 4-6, use pop songs or rap instead of traditional songs and chants.
Discover what cartoons, TV shows, and movies interest children at different ages and incorporate them into instruction.
Common Sense Media (www.commonsensemedia.org) provides trustworthy information about media for families to make good decisions.
It suggests good cartoons, TV shows, movies, books, and so on for children by age.
4. Use a Variety of Techniques to Make Listening Input Comprehensible
Preparation for a Listening Activity
Tap into students' background knowledge and build schemata that may not be there in order to understand the listening context in an activity.
Prepare students with necessary vocabulary, context clues like pictures, and realia.
Marley and Szabo (2010) found that physical manipulation of objects enhanced listening comprehension and recall more than using pictures.
Interactional Modifications
Make interactional modifications during the activity, such as repetition, comprehension checks, and gestures.
Cabrera & Martínez, 2001; Peñate & Bazo, 1998: These modifications promote comprehension of listening input.
Peñate and Bazo found repetition, comprehension checks, and gestures were the main interactional modifications used by primary EFL teachers.
Cabrera and Martínez found that teachers who used these three interactions in a primary level EFL class increased young learners' understanding of oral discourse, specifically storytelling.
5. Check Comprehension Using a Variety of Response Types
Avoid simply asking "Do you understand?" as the response is often just "Yes, Teacher!"
Use a variety of verbal and nonverbal response types to check comprehension.
For young learners with beginning proficiency, producing language can be stressful.
Lund (1990, p. 259) provided a comprehensive list of ways to check students' comprehension:
Doing: Listener responds physically (i.e., TPR, making a recipe).
Choosing: Listener selects from alternatives such as pictures, objects, texts, or actions (i.e., matching, placing pictures in right order, picking up objects according to description).
Transferring: Listener transfers information into another form (i.e., drawing, tracing a route on a map, constructing a table or chart).
Answering: Listener answers questions about the message.
Condensing: Listener reduces the message (i.e., outlines, notetaking, oral or written summaries).
Extending: Listener provides text that goes beyond what is given (i.e., giving the end of a story, solving a problem, filling in missing lines).
Duplicating: Listener repeats exact message (i.e., dictation, translation, oral repetition).
Modeling: Listener uses text as a model for imitation (i.e., ordering a meal after listening to a model).
Conversing: Listener is active in face-to-face conversations.
Sources express the activities using a “Listen and.. " format (Brewster, Ellis, & Girard, 2004; Cameron, 2001; Scott & Ytreberg, 1990; Slatterly & Willis, 2001).
Incorporate “Listen and..” activities commonly used in EYL classrooms, classified by difficulty:
Nonverbal demonstration of comprehension (listen and do, point, move, mime, choose).
Nonverbal demonstration of comprehension requiring some reading (listen and choose, transfer, sequence, match, classify).
Demonstration of comprehension with production, either oral or written (listen and transfer, answer, condense, extend, duplicate, model, converse).
6. Keep Listening Active – Always Give Learners a Listening Task
Provide a purpose for listening and a task to complete.
Avoid simply saying "Listen to this" without a task or reason.
YLs have short attention spans and need a focus.
Use "Listen and…" followed by an appropriate task.
Example: "Listen and point to the correct picture" to focus attention and make the listening process more active.
7. Equip Your Students with Intelligent Guesswork Strategies
Incorporate listening strategies to improve students' ability to listen effectively.
Peterson (2001) wrote, "When things are going well, the listener is not conscious of using skills at all. At the point when the comprehension breaks down for some reason, the listener becomes aware of the need for repair and seeks an appropriate strategy for comprehension” (p. 90).
Equip YLs with a range of strategies to improve their listening comprehension beyond the classroom.
Use prediction strategies to help learners make intelligent guesses and check their predictions.
Even if students don't know all the vocabulary or language structures, they can still make sense of the listening text using these strategies and guess meaning based on the context.
Connect strategies with real-life listening for better application outside the classroom.
Brewster, Ellis and Girard (2004) wrote that developing "intelligent guesswork" is a very important skill for young learners (p. 99).
Suggest the following strategies: predicting, working out the meaning from context, and recognizing discourse patterns and markers (p. 100).
Helpful strategies for YLs:
Predict what a listening text will be about: Real-life listening is embedded in a context. If students are presented with a context, they can probably predict what they will hear. Example: in a candy store, the clerk may ask if you need help finding something, if you are ready to pay, and tell you how much the candy costs.
Predict what will happen next (or the ending): In most contexts, it may be possible to predict what someone will say next. In a conversation between a student and a school nurse, after a series of questions from the nurse, students can probably predict the nurse will make a prognosis or give some advice.
Use discourse markers or signal words to guess what happens next: Real discourse makes use of signal words such as first, then, finally, but, so, etc. to guide the listener. Example: when students are given instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, they can follow along each step, which may be introduced by a marker.
Use background knowledge of the context: Students' own background knowledge of the context can help them make sense of the story. Example: in a story like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the students can understand the meaning of the new words, but the teacher has to build the background knowledge before the story or through the story.
Listen for the main idea: It is helpful to listen for the main idea of a listening text to help gain comprehension. Example: if you’re telling your YLs the story The Tortoise and the Hare, even if students do not understand all the vocabulary, they can still understand the gist of the story. Help build comprehension of the language starting with students' understanding of the main idea.
Listen for specific details: If the activity is to listen to a description of a person and figure out in a picture who is being described, then students can listen for specific descriptions that match, i.e., gender, height, hair color, clothes, etc.
Listen for key words: In real-life listening, we can pick out key words that we understand which can help us comprehend the message. If the listening text is a weather report, then you can get your YLs to listen for certain key words, like sunny, rainy, cold, warm, hot, etc.
Look for nonverbal cues to gain meaning: In real life, there are usually nonverbal cues from the speaker, such as facial expressions, hand gestures, and body language, that can help interpret meaning of the language input. For example, when people learn simple greetings, students can understand from body language cues, like shaking hands or waving hello.
Guess the meaning of unknown words: Using a variety of strategies in combination, YLs can guess the meaning of unknown words. If YLs are listening to a commercial for a department store, which might be a familiar context, they can catch the gist of the commercial. From these different strategies working together, they may be able to guess the meaning of difficult unknown words used repeatedly, like sale or clearance.
Help young learners develop these strategies through listening tasks.
If learners can develop the use of these strategies independent of the teacher, then they will be improving their ability to listen effectively on their own.
Considerations for Teaching Speaking
Explore approaches to teaching speaking as an integral skill working in tandem with listening for oral communication.
Activities will include oral presentation skills.
What Is Speaking?
Speaking is often considered a very difficult language skill to learn. As Pinter (2006) points out, "This is because to be able to speak fluently, we have to speak and think at the same time. As we speak, we have to monitor our output and correct any mistakes, as well as planning for what we are going to say next” (p. 55).
Factors Affecting Speaking
Affective factors: Feelings that can create anxiety in students that will prevent them from speaking out.
Cultural norms: Speaking out in class is not customary or valued in some cultures.
Speaking as Communication
*Quotation: “A mouse saved her young from a ferocious cat by barking \