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TOPIC 7: THE ORAL LANGUAGE. THE COMPLEXITY OF ORAL LISTENING COMPREHENSION…
TOPIC 7: THE ORAL LANGUAGE. THE COMPLEXITY OF ORAL LISTENING COMPREHENSION: FROM HEARING TO ACTIVE, SELECTIVE UNDERSTANDING. MOVING INTO SPEECH: FROM IMITATIVE REPRODUCTION TO FREE PRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Productive skills
Speaking
Writing
Oral skills
Listening
Speaking
Receptive skills
Listening
Reading
Written skills
Reading
Writing
Communicating in a language is a complex activity that implies mastering several skills.
Speaking
Reading
Listening
Writing
Oral communication is a two way process between speaker and the listener. The speaker has to encode a message and the listener has to decode it.
Oral ability is of prime importance in Primary Education. The Council of Europe recommend that Oral comprehension and production must take priority in the First Cycle and in subsequent cycles.
ORAL LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS, PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND INTERDEPENDENCE OF ORAL SKILLS
Characteristics of Oral Language:
Use of pauses, repetitions, rephrasing or hesitation.
Errors: speech is often characterized by ungrammatical sentences.
Simple constructions.
The messages often contain a good deal of information that is redundant.
Use of gestures and body language.
Expressive possibilities: when speaking, can vary the tone, the accent and speed of he words.
Pedagogical implications
The spontaneity of oral language leads to errors being considered as normal.
The information is usially accompanied by repetitios, pauses and paraphrasing.
Contextual support should be used in FLT: facial expressions, intonation.
The grammatical structure of oral language is simpler
Oral language is usually acquired before writing
You can ask for repetition in a conversation
Oral communication is a two-way process between the speaker and the listener, who are constantly changing roles.
The skills must be integrated through situations that encourage genuine communication.
THE COMPLEXITY OF GLOBAL LISTENING COMPREHENSION: FROM HEARING TO ACTIVE, SELECTIVE LISTENING
When we listen in our mother tongue, understanding is normally easy for several reasons:
Our experience of the spoken language is enormous.
We are able to predict what is likely to come next.
Learners in the classroom have considerable difficulties to face because theis experience of language is very limited.
Listening is not a passive hearing of sounds.
We can best teaching by replicating the mother tongue situatio as closely as possible in the early stages. This is called the Natural Approach.
There are three main objections to this approach:
The classroom is a totally different language environment than of the first language acquisition.
The samples of spoken language in the course book don´t usually contain a sufficiently high proportion of the features of natural speech.
In class, we can´t replicate the long period of listening that young children have when they learn their mother tongue.
These are the main teaching principles we must take into account:
Students must have a reason to listen
Learners must be exposed to a wide range of spoken language.
Listening shoudl come before speaking
LISTENING SKILLS (MICRO SKILLS)
The process of listening is not simply a passive hearing of sounds: it is a complex active process. We should train our pupils in:
Extracting specific information (intensive listening)
Understanding in detail
identifying the main idea of what he/she is listening (extensive reading)
Predicting what he/she is going to listen to.
Recognizing sounds: ear-training skills
Storing information in our memory and knowing how to retrieve it later.
The mental processes that follow a listening activity are: hearing the sounds, recognizing the meaning of sounds, relating the input to previous knowledge and storing the information in our memory.
LISTENING MATERIAL
If our purpose is communicative, the material we use in class, should be varied: conversations, annuoncements, instructions, conferences, stories, news, songs, radio, etc...
Besides variety, listening should be broadly comprehensible. People acquire a language better when its level of understanding is a little more advanced than their competence level.
Traditionally, a great deal of importance was given to speaking rather than understanding a language.
The input hypothesis claims that, in order for the students to move to the following stage of acquisition of the target language, he/she should understand the linguistic input contained in a structure of the following stage.
Auditory material should be varied, comprehensible, graduated in difficulty and within a context.
Stories, instructions, recipes, descriptiones, conversations, discussions, songs, poems, rhymes, videotapes and films adapted to children´s level.
FROM HEARING TO ACTIVE SELECTIVE UNDERSTANDING
Listening comprehension is a hard task in L2 learning, so it should be taught systematically. When planning a lesson, we have to bear in mind the following points:
Tasks must be success-oriented.
The auditory material should be varied, graduated in difficulty and within a context.
Tasks must progress from simpler hearing-based activities to more complex understanding-based ones.
Activities should have a communicative purpose
A listening lesson follows these stages:
While-listening stage:
Extensive listening: matching pictures, sequencing a story, answering questions, following instructions...
Intensive listening also require a specific search of sounds, words or facts within a context: ear-training activities, finding differences, labeling, game-like activities, extracting information, dictation, completion-type activitites, identifying...
Post-listening stage: the students perform task connecting what they´ve listened to with their experience. These are not listening exercises as such (follow-up work): inventing a dialigue, role-play practicing pronunciation, making a summery, deducing opinion and attitudes, deducing meaning from context, dictations of part of the text, practicing vocabulary and structures form the text...
Pre-listening stage: predicting context form a list, commenting on pictures or photographs, giving students´opinion on the topic, pre-viewing language items.
DEALING WITH LISTENING DIFFICULTIES
Problems
Difficulty in understanding the listening the first time it´s played
Lack of motivation to listen
Students´ tenden to wish they understood every word
Difficult and unfamiliar sounds
Solutions
Pre-teach key words
Set the listening task
Raise the students´expectations
Explaining in detail what they have to do
Set the situation
Design sucess-based activities
Explain difficulties
Use contextual support
Re-play listening
MOVING INTO SPEECH: FROM IMITATION TO FREE PRODUCTION
There are often periods of silence which cannot be interpreted as learning abscence. The ability to speak with fluency emerges after the acquirer has buitl up linguistic competence by understanding input. Errors will also be normal.
How can learners achieve linguistic fluency and correction? Depending on their learning stage. In the first levels, fluency is not as important because students lack linguistic competence. At advanced levels, fluency is what matters
The main aim of oral production is to speak fluently. In order to achieve this objective the student should go from the initial stage of imitation to the final stage of free production.
SPEAKING MICRO SKILLS
Speaking is an active process which is usually difficult to dissociate from listening. This communicative view in FLT implies the learning of several speaking skills or subcompetences.
Expressing grammatical forms coherently
Using the language in an appropriate way
Expressing elementary grammatical structures logically and clearly
Using extralinguistic strategies to help transmitt the message
Producing sounds
MATERIALS FOR SPEAKING
The topics students will speak about will depend on the type of material they´re exposed to. It must be varied and focus on the learners´interests.
Not much spontaneous speech can be expected from pupils in the early stages. Children will learn formulaic language: numbers, colours, greetings and social conventions, routines, instructions, asking fit permission, communicative strategies...
When two people are engaged in talking it´s because they have some communicative purpose. To achieve these speaking purposes we need to teach a range of appropriate expressions.
As the students competence develops, the expression to be learnt get more complicated: asking for directions, giving instructions, inviting, offering, expressing likes and dislikes, askinf the price, congratulating...
FROM IMITATION TO FREE PRODUCTION
Practice
The teacher organizes the students in pairs to practice the verbal form which has already been presented. The objective is the correct learning of the structure. The teacher can correct errors in pronunciation, intonation and grammar structure.
The essential factor of the production stage is that learners should be able to talk to another directly. A transition stage is then needed, where learners get guidance but at the same time are given the chance to talk without constant supervision or correction.
Pair work is a very good method to practice in a lively way.
Advantages
Improves personal relationships
It has similarities with real life
Provides more practice
Increases self-confidence
Disadvantages
Time-consuming organization
Impossibility of correcting all couples
More noise
Risk of them using their mother tongue
Imitation: The imitation of a model
Choral work: provides a clear model
Individual repetition: the teacher has more opportunity to play attention to individual pronunciation problems, intonation patterns and structural errors.
Drills: They derive from behaviourist learning theories. The use of drills in the imitation stage is very useful, since the learner needs to build up confidence.
Substitution drills
Transformation drills
Mechanical drills
Meaningful drills
Free Production
The teacher must provide them with opportunities to use the language by themselves
They can communicate easily and freely, with minimum direction from the teacher. The solution is forming groups
The risk of making mistakes is greater, but this shouldn´t worry the teachers because the student is developing discursive competence, coherence and fluency.
The activities that enable students to develop fluency must raise the necessity of communicating and be interactive and appropriate for the students´ level.
It is the most genuine communicative stage
Some examples are:
Following instructions
Describing personal experiences
Problem solving
Communicative games
Role-play
Reaching consensus activities
Information gap activities
DEALING WITH SPEAKING DIFFICULTIES
Linguistic difficulties
During the initial stages, grammatical, lexical and phonetic mistakes must be corrected systematically
When students are involved in communicative activities, the main objective is for them to develop fluency.
Psychological difficulties
Shy students or students who are afraid of being ridiculed will be more limited than extroverts.
The teacher msut therefore create a friendly and confident atmosphere to reduce these limitations.