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INTEGRATING LISTENING AND SPEAKING SKILLS - Coggle Diagram
INTEGRATING LISTENING AND SPEAKING SKILLS
INTRODUCTION
The process of integrating language skills
involves linking them together
so that what has been learned and practiced through the exercise of one skill is reinforced and perhaps extended through further language tasks that bring different skills into use.
The use of any skill may quite naturally lead to the use of others.
If these two skills are taught individually, there will be less communication that will take place in the classroom.
To avoid this, the skills should be taught in integration to guide learners to develop their oral
communicative competencies.
Communicative competence:
a term in linguistics that refers to a language user’s grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately.
The teaching of the skills in integration should be given more importance in order to encourage the individuals to become communicatively competent.
IMPLEMENTATING INFORMATION-GAP TASK IN CLASSROOM
Developed tasks for the students that involve the interaction of listening and speaking skills.
Later, these tasks were ordered so that students could move from sentence-level to paragraph level.
Preparing the tasks in this order is to make students familiar with the skills before asking them to do more complicated ones.
To activate participation in the classroom, it was ensured that students were provided friendly, informal, and learning-supportive environments.
This was obtained by teachers’ friendly, helpful and cooperative behavior while the students were dealing with a task.
To reinforce students, the tasks provide reasonable commitments for successful language learning.
When the teachers said that the lesson would be about listening or speaking, most students did not want to be involved as they believed at first that it would be difficult.
So, the first tasks were just a small warmer to motivate the students before going on with the more challenging ones.
By the end of the first tasks, the students seemed more willing to participate in the other ones and became more familiar with the skills. There was an information gap between the students, so they were communicative tasks.
All through these tasks, the students had the opportunity to work together and were very active, which supported the authentic atmosphere of learning.
The tasks were ordered from the controlled to the free ones in order to guide students, but later on, they became more autonomous. The tasks not only considered these two skills but also covered practicing the sub-skills such as listening for the main idea, listening for the detailed information, predicting, and comprehending.
Generally, the tasks took 20 or 30 minutes to complete in the actual classroom setting.
CHALLENGES FACED BY TEACHERS
One of the challenges teachers meet in the classroom is motivating the students to speak in the target language.
Active and confident students always participate, but the others who are less confident are not willing to speak.
Learners are exposed to language only in the classroom, where they spend less time in contact with the language, covering a smaller discourse type.
The limited exposure to the target language and lack of opportunities to practice speaking do not let the communicative abilities of learners fully develop and result in embarrassment and stress for them.
INTEGRATING LISTENING AND SPEAKING IN CLASSROOM
TECHNIQUE USED
An
information-gap task
is a task where learners lack the needed information to complete a task, and they are required to listen and speak to each other to complete the task as in real life.
BENEFIT OF INFORMATION-GAP TASK
Enhance the opportunity of speaking practice and highlight the real communication; therefore, the student’s motivation is high.
The English lessons become more interesting and motivating students to continue to cognize and learn the language.
Students become more active, confident, and communicable.
Students have different opportunities to develop their communicative abilities in a target foreign language constantly.
It gives to try to increase teachers teaching competency and make the lesson more effective than before.
Listening and speaking tasks in integration through information-gap tasks make students more successful than when the skills are taught separately.
Students did not feel anxious anymore about forming sentences while speaking or listening when carrying out information-gap tasks.