Listening as a Language Skill

  • Most used language skill!

Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence Report

Empirical lit on oral language development In ELLs Is small - oral language In shadows of research

National Literacy Panel Report

Close relationship exists between English oral proficiency and reading

ELLs need some English proficiency before Interaction w/ native speakers Is helpful

Takes time for ELLs to develop oral English proficiency; several years and slows down due to lack of attention on oral lang development

  • Yet, overshadowed by reading and writing In terms of Instruction

Use of English outside of school enhances ELLs' oral development; use of home language from beginning ELLs contributes to development

Testing: oral language proficiency tests fails to capture full oral language proficiency of bilingual students

National Academies Report

Consistent with findings of CREDE and NLP reports

Oral language skills more Important for reading larger chunks of text for comprehension than for reading at the word level

Oral language skills In English strongly associated with English reading comprehension- vocab knowledge; listening comp; syntactive skils; metalinguistic aspects

Oral language skills In English associated w/ better English writing

English oral language proficiency Is not strongly related to English spelling skills!

ELLs need consistent ESL Instruction

Home language literary skills plus good English oral language skills strongly associated with English reading comp skills

Many schools are not providing adequate Instruction to ELLs In acquiring English proficiency

Four Instructional practices for developing oral English proficiency

provide specialized Instruction focused on components of oral language

provide opportunities for Interaction with speakers proficient In the learner's second language

engage In Interactional feedback

dedicate time for Instruction focused on oral English proficiency

Theory

Silent Period and Wait time: ELLs go through silent period; teacher should not assume that students who don't talk are not learning; wait time to allow students to formulate thoughts

Productive talk moves: revoicing; repeating; reasoning; adding on; waiting

Teacher talk: teacher should talk less; scaffold student talk

Correcting student speech errors: teacher should correct only errors that students are read to learn how to correct; provide corrective feedback to avoid embarrassment-recast

Vocab development: the more words ELLs know, the more they can speak/write/understand

Promoting Oral Lang Development In Classroom

Total physical response: teacher provides commands and students respond with action

Listening comprehension tasks

Listening centers