Speaking and Listening
PP ELT (February 2013)
Task 2
Characteristics of speech
Many researchers have sought to establish criteria for distinguishing speech from
writing. You will have thought about this already in Term’s 1 Spoken English
module. It is worth reminding ourselves of the distinctive characteristics of
speech.
Write down what you think the most important characteristics might be, then
compare your list with the one below. If you are interested in finding out more
about the subject at this stage, Brown and Yule 1983 (Ch2&3) provide an easy
introduction to it.
Recommended Reading
Brown, G. 1993. Listening to Spoken English. London: Longman.
Brown G & Yule G. 1983. Teaching the Spoken Language. Chapter 3 (pp54-76).
Cambridge: CUP.
Buck, G. 2001. Assessing listening. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dirven R & Oakeshott-Taylor J. 1984/5. State of the art article: listening
comprehension. In Language Teaching 17(4) 326-343 & 18(1) 2-20.
Goh C. 1997. Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT
Journal 51(4) 361-369.
Hall G. & Cook G. Own-language use in ELT. Available at
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/C448%20Own
%20Language%20use%20in%20ELT_A4_FINAL_WEB%20ONLY_0.pdf
Nunan. 1991. Language Teaching Methodology. Chapter 2 pp17-38. London:
Prentice-Hall.
Rost M. 1990. Listening in Language Learning. pp150-174. London: Longman.
Richards J. 2008. Teaching Listening and Speaking; From Theory to Practice.
Cambridge: CUP.
Some characteristics of speech
1.
Usually involves interaction
- speaker monitors listener
- turn-taking
- floor-holding
- back-channelling
2.
Planning and production are simultaneous
- unfinished sentences
- fillers
- redundancy and repetition
3
Not visible (problem of short-term memory)
- syntactic “adaption” (cleft constructions etc)
- patterns are important
4.
Context important
- time reference (here/now)
- deixis
- non-verbal elements
Listening Processing levels
Schema (an underlying structure that links parts of the text)
Script (a sequence of events or discrete parts of the text)
Concept (a mental representation of the current segment of text)
turn (in interaction, at least)
Phrase/(lexical chunk , often 1 tone unit)
Word/(lexical item - marginal status?)
syllable tonic/stressed
phoneme
Adapted from Rost’s reading processing levels (1990: 9)
Identifying Different Types of Listening (Nunan 1991: 21)
aural texts
Monologue
Planned
Dialogue
Unplanned
Interpersonal
Unfamiliar
Transactional
Familiar
Task
1. Make a list of skills that are involved in successful listening. You should be able to
think of 6-10 at least.
2. Then compare you list with Richards’ taxonomy of listening skills below.
Consider  How useful does this list seem to you?
 Do you think the title is justified?
 Where, if anywhere, do you think the weaknesses in the list are?
TAXONOMY OF MICRO-SKILLS FOR CONVERSATIONAL
LISTENING (FROM J C RICHARDS: 1983)
1.
ability to retain chunks of language of different lengths for short periods
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
ability to discriminate among the distinctive sounds of the target language
ability to recognize the stress patterns of words
ability to recognize the rhythmic structure of English
ability to recognize the functions of stress and intonation to signal the
information structure of utterances
ability to identify words in stressed and unstressed positions
ability to recognise reduced forms of words
ability to distinguish word boundaries
ability to recognize typical word order patterns in the target language
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
ability to recognize vocabulary used in core conversational topics
ability to detect key words (i.e. those which identify topics and propositions)
ability to guess the meanings of words from the contexts in which they occur
ability to recognize grammatical word classes (parts of speech)
ability to recognize major syntactic patterns and devices
ability to recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse
ability to recognize elliptical forms of grammatical units and sentences
ability to detect sentence constituents
ability to distinguish between major and minor constituents
19. ability to detect meanings expressed in differing grammatical forms and
sentence types (i.e. that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
ways)
20. ability to recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to
situations, participants, goals
21. ability to reconstruct or infer situations, goals, participants, procedures
22. ability to use real world knowledge and experience to work out purposes,
goals, settings, procedures
23. ability to predict outcomes of events described
24. ability to infer links and connections between events
25. ability to deduce causes and effects from events
26. ability to distinguish between literal and implied meanings
27. ability to identify and reconstruct topics and coherent structure from ongoing
discourse involving two or more speaker
28 ability to recognize markers of coherence in discourse, and to detect such
relations as main idea, supporting idea, given information, new information,
generalization, exemplification
29. ability to process speech at different rates
30. ability to process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections
31. ability to make use of facial, paralinguistic, and other clues to work out
meanings
32. ability to adjust listening strategies to different kinds of listener purposes or
goals
33. ability to signal comprehension or lack of comprehension verbally or non-verbally
Some general principles to bear in mind
for work on listening comprehension
1.
Preparation. This is essential and should be thorough in order to
reflect the element of contextualisation inherent in all natural listening.
2.
Prediction. Since this is an important feature of native speaker
strategies, it should play a large part in L2 work.
3.
Perspective. How does the student relate to the passage? Is s/he an
“overhearer” and if so what extra adjustments are necessary?
4.
Purpose. Students must have a clear purpose in listening.
5.
Appropriacy. This will operate on a number of levels:
a) Is the passage appropriate to the context?
b) Is it relevant to student level/interest?
c) How does it relate to previous listening experience?
6.
Accuracy. The demand for 100% accuracy is unrealistic, so what are
we expecting and how do our questions reflect this?
7.
Approach. This must be geared to the particular difficulties of the
passage, e.g. a conversation may need to be listened to in very short
chunks which are repeated and discussed in fairly broad terms; a short
monologue giving directions will demand a different approach.
8.
Motivation. The approach must be success-oriented.
9.
Task integration. LC work should be based around a task; but the aim
is to develop listening skills, not to test, and certainly not to test
memory.
10. Contextualisation. LC work should ideally be integrated into a wider taskbased context. Similarly, the context for the listening itself should be clear.
Ideas for integrating into materials
1. One important issue is the degree we simplify or control listening input. In
terms of learners’ input, there are two very different concerns. The first is the
teacher’s delivery. The second is the rate and difficulty of chosen audio texts.
For both these forms of input the teacher has choices - various forms of
simplification (lexical, syntactic and rate) and the repetition choices as well as
breaking aural texts into chunks. Cervantes & Gainer (1992) provide a good
starting point for these issues. If you are particularly interested in investigating
speech rate and listening comprehension also look at Griffiths (1992) and Zhao
(1997).
Some textbooks now have a choice of listening texts (of different difficulty
level) for the same task. This is an interesting development and creates more
choice and control for the teacher. Collie & Slater (1995) is a good example of
this kind of textbook.
2. You might investigate procedures for contextualising the listening texts and
ways to provide extra ‘support’. Here you would be finding ways to increase
listener knowledge of speakers, place, time, context etc. As learners are not
usually the intended hearer, they have less chance to assess relevance in the
Gricean sense (for a discussion of Grice’s maxims, see Levinson (1983) or
Brown & Yule (1983:70-72). This kind of action research will take you further
down the road you started in Task3.
In this respect videos and radio soap-operas provide more situational context,
more understood character history with which learners can assess contextual
appropriacy. Chiang & Dunkel (1992) are particularly interested in prior
knowledge and its relationship to listening proficiency.
3. Perhaps you could develop the learner training approach used by Ellis &
Sinclair (1989). You might work with learners to develop more realistic
expectations regarding their ability to respond to listening. Learners often see
100% comprehension as an ideal, when even among native speakers it is rarely,
if ever, achieved. Similarly, there is a tendency to relate performance to
vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, rather than to the business of
listening itself. It may be that those learners used to lexico-grammatical
structures being presented through listening text are especially prone to this
pre-occupation.
4. You might begin a process of extensive listening with your students.
Films/videos (especially those with closed-caption subtitles) offer quasiauthentic listening experience material. In Unit 6, we mentioned Widdowson’s
authentic/genuine distinction and in these terms using a taped conversation
ceases to be authentic when your students are reduced to becoming
‘overhearers’. This lack of authenticity is less clear-cut when it comes to films,
TV programmes and radio news. Here the viewer or listener is meant to
‘overhear’.
There is an element of intrinsic interest in news and films that might well
increase motivation. Two interesting accounts of activities for using news
broadcasts for listening comprehension are provided by Morrison (1989) and
Zhu (1984).
5. Related to the previous point, providing opportunities for self-access
listening and asking learners to keep listening diaries in a similar way to Goh
(1997) could be an interesting focus. You could investigate whether a process of
diary writing or self-report (Wenden, 1991: 77) helps raise learners’
metacognitive awareness or helps the teacher to identify listening problems.
Particularly if you work in an EAP context, you could consider the different
spoken genres your students’ need (or will need) to process. Flowerdew (1995:
11-12) outlines differences between ‘academic listening’ and ‘conversational
listening’. Ferris & Tagg (1996:313) stress the importance of preparing EAP
students in listening and speaking strategies for a range of situations, from
traditional chalk and talk’ lectures to more interactive and ‘high risk’ situations.
Both these articles provide good starting points.
Internet resources for Listening
This is an excellent resource for looking at a range of issues (including both
speaking and listening if you scroll down)
http://llt.msu.edu/archives/by_topic.html#Listening
Listening Links
http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Listening/
Listening and Pronunciation
http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/june2003subpr.htm
Hints and tips (Annie MacDonald)
http://hancockmcdonald.com/talks/hints-and-tips-developing-listeningskills-using-authentic-materials-tesol-france
Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (although some listening texts are less than
authentic)
http://www.esl-lab.com/
Speaking and Listening
PP ELT (February 2013)
Speaking Reference
McCarthy M & Carter R. 1995. Spoken grammar: what is it and how can we
teach it? ELT Journal 49(3)207-218.
Prodromou L. 1996a. Correspondence. ELT Journal 50(1)88-89.
McCarthy M & Carter R. 1995. From Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy .
ELT Journal 50(4) 369-371.
Prodromou L. 1996b. From Luke Prodromou. ELT Journal 50(4)371-373.
Hughes, R. 2002. Teaching and researching speaking. New York: Longman.
Other Speaking Reference
McCarthy, M. 1999. Spoken language and applied linguistics. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Brown G & Yule G. 1983. Teaching the Spoken Language Cambridge: CUP.
(Esp. pp1-53)
Hughes, R. 2002. Teaching and researching speaking. New York: Longman
McCarthy M. 1991 Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers London: Longman
(esp. pp12-25)
McCarthy, M. 1999. Spoken language and applied linguistics. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
McDonough S. 1995. Strategy and Skill in Learning a Foreign Language. London:
Edward Arnold. (Chapter 2).
Murphy J. 1991. Oral communication in TESOL: integrating speaking, listening
and pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly 25(1) 51-74.
In the example below we can see the relationship between (exchange structure)
and the functional labels attached to moves.
move
exchange structure
T: What’s this one?
eliciting
I
S: A watermelon
informing
R
T: Good
acknowledging/evaluating
F
Ideas to integrate into materials (dimensions)
1. Consider how to integrate task-based learning and groupwork into your
materials. Consider if different types of tasks produce different sorts of
interaction. You would be answering the question that Nunan (1991: 62)
proposes; ‘is it in fact the case with my learners that different task types
stimulate different patterns of interaction, or are the patterns essentially the
same?’
Other issues that are relevant to speaking are;
 pre-task preparation time - effect on fluency or accuracy levels (Read Foster
(1996) and look again at B5 Page3 -Task5).
 task repetition and the effect on speaking (Bygate, 1996)
 learner's using their own mother tongue in a speaking activities (codeswitching - see Hancock (1997) and Eldridge (1996). For recent discussion of
this see Hall and Cook (2013: ‘Own-language use in ELT’).
2. Investigate your students’ awareness of their speaking skills and strategies.
Look first at McDonough (1995: 16-33). He summarises useful research and
details a number of strategies used in talk.
3. Partly due to lack of classtime, learners often have limited opportunities to
talk. You might ask some of your students to keep tape diaries. An analysis of
one learner’s development over a few months might prove useful. Cullen
(1998) asked his students to record comments, views and questions onto tape as
homework and recorded a response. This works much like an exercise book for
writing which is collected in each week and responded to.
4. You might research your (or another teacher’s) contributions in class. How
do you (or s/he) set up speaking tasks and activities? What is the balance
between, instructions, interaction, display and referential questions and
feedback. (See Willis 1992).
5. You might work with spoken genres in some of the ways suggested in this
unit, particularly if you work in an ESP or EAP environment.
6. You might work on procedures for integrating speaking, listening and
intonation (units 4, 7 & 8). (See Murphy 1991).
7. One interesting comparison to make is between distinct ‘types’ of activity or
task. E.g.

role-plays vs. simulations. Do you think this is a useful distinction? What
sort of preparation is appropriate? You might think about the balance
between linguistic and psychological preparation.

improvisation vs. scripted drama. What seems to be the effect of learners
having scripts? You might look at the results on lexical chunks or
intonation.
8. You might think about the balance and/or order between spoken input and
output. For, example COBUILD (Willis & Willis 1988) has a typical task cycle
which starts with learners doing a task and then listening to competent
speakers doing the same task. This may be appropriate for your learners,
alternatively action research might demonstrate that your learners feel more
comfortable ‘having another go’ .
Buck (2001:104) featured in Richard (2008) identifies two kinds of strategies in
listening:
1. Cognitive strategies: Mental activities related to comprehending and storing
input in working memory or long-term memory for later retrieval:
Comprehension processes: Associated with the processing of linguistic
and nonlinguistic input
Storing and memory processes: Associated with the storing of linguistic
and nonlinguistic input in working memory or long-term memory
Using and retrieval processes: Associated with accessing memory, to be
readied for output
2. Metacognitive strategies: Those conscious or unconscious mental activities
that perform an executive function in the management of cognitive strategies:
Assessing the situation: Taking stock of conditions surrounding a
language task by assessing one’s own knowledge, one’s available
internal and external resources, and the constraints of the situation
before engaging in a task
Monitoring: Determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s
performance while engaged in a task
Self-evaluating: Determining the effectiveness of one’s own or another’s
performance after engaging in the activity
Self-testing: Testing oneself to determine the effectiveness of one’s own
language use or the lack thereof
Example 1 (From )
http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num3/jeon/default.html
Oral Interaction Around Computers in the Project-Oriented CALL
Classroom by Gumock Jeon-Ellis, Robert Debski, and Gillian Wigglesworth
1
Teacher
One silly thing...sometimes when you've looked for pictures on
the Web and you put the
2
pictures in your webpages, it's very important to ensure that
you've saved the picture's
3
file in the same fold as your text, because if you don't, when
you move the text, the
4
picture won't appear. So you have to save everything in a
folder. And it's good to have a
5
folder within your folder called IMG with your pictures.
6
Alice
Quite clear...
7
Kelly
How do I do it?
8
Alice
Go down...click and hold an image...there it is...[inaudible],
pictures.
9
Kelly
Downloading it...
10
Alice
Okay, now we need to put it in a good place...yes. This is,
damn it. This is not 14.
11
Cause, remember how we had to save it?
12
Kelly
Oh...
13
Alice
It's alright. It doesn't matter...we can open our own
folder...Montmartre?
14
Kelly
Yep.
15
Alice
Create...
16
Kelly
[inaudible] sounds good to me.
Two extracts are from
Shamsini I. 2012. Learners’ Engagement with Internet Materials: An Action
Research Study into the Use of Internet Materials with EFL Learners in a Syrian
Context. Unpublished PhD Thesis –
Available from wrap.warwick.ac.uk/46017/
Extract 5.123 (Shamsini 2012: 229)
047 Zein:
no one choose Nicole Kidman, please, I choose her.
048 TR:
okay, Zein, Nicole Kidman.
049 T:
but you already know about her, Zein, don’t you?
050 Zein:
no, not really ((laughs))
051 T:
and Lina?
052 TR:
yes, please, who would you like?
053 Kamal:
all.
054 TR:
all of them, yeah!
055 Kamal:
okay, I will choose Al Capone.
056 TR:
Al Capone, okay.
057 T:
(talking to the TR) would you like me to help you?
058 TR:
yes, please, I’m trying to find it, yeah, okay,
059
here you are.
060 T:
and Fares?
061 Fares:
Van Gogh?
062 T:
Van Gogh, yeah.
063 TR:
okay, you can choose two, if you like.
064 Lina:
Mother, Mother Teresa.
065 T:
can I take something?
066 TR:
067 T:
068 TR:
069 Lina:
070 TR:
071 T:
072 Lina:
yes, sure, but I’m afraid you’re only left with three choices.
Karl Marx?
Zein got it, you could take this.
can you give me another one? Prince Philip, please.
yes, of course.
are you happy now?
yes, thanks.
(Extract from interaction transcript, 05.10.2009)
Extract 5.124 (Shamsini 2012: 229)
033 Fares:
034 Zein:
035 T:
036 Zein:
037
038 T:
039 Zein:
040 Fares:
041 Zein:
042 Fares:
043 Zein:
044 T:
where and when was she born? Where and when?
she was born in “Honolulu, Hawaii”, US.
but she is Australian.
yes, she is Australian, but born in, her birth in “Honolulu”
in “Hawaii”, US.
mm.
so she has two citizenships, Australian and American.
and what about the date she born in?
she born in “June 1967”.
sixty?
“sixty seven”, yes, so she (laughs).
so she is not good for you, what do you think?
(Extract from interaction transcript, 05.10.2009)
Cabbage (A shortened poem by Roger McGough)
John Wayne died of it
People are terrified of it
cancer
I hate that stuff
Hospitals are packed with it
Saw my mother racked with it
pain
I hate that stuff
Schoolboys are force-fed with it
Cattle are served dead with it
cabbage
I hate that stuff
Radio Gibbet Hill – A simulation
Who Am I? (Cards on the back)
Quick Fun Speaking
What I didn't do this weekend. Ask students to write 3 short
sentences about what they did this past weekend on a slip of
paper. It can be mundame like I cleaned the bathroom or I had
dinner with friends. Then pair up students and ask them to
exchange papers. Now tell them that you are going to ask your
partner what they did on the weekend. They use the
information on the slip of paper to answer their partners
questions. Encourage them to follow up with at least 2
questions to elaborate on the idea. This activity is quite
entertaining. Have fun with it!
Find more quick ideas at esl-about.com
Internet resources Speaking
ScreenR
http://www.screenr.com/
Top 10 Games and Activities
http://www.tesolzone.com/tefl-games.html
Mailvu
http://mailvu.com/
ESL Speaking Activies
http://www.tesolzone.com/esl-speaking-activities.html
Educreations
http://www.educreations.com/
Postermywall
http://www.postermywall.com/