1.Introduction:
In the present EFL
teaching context in my college, the teaching of listening and speaking relies
heavily on the language lab or tape-recorders. It is generally agreed in China
that the main reason for this is that most EFL teachers are non-native English
speakers and thus may lack proficiency in English. However, in the classroom in
which the tape-recorder is used frequently there are some common problems as I
have observed in my teaching experience. For instance, the teacher may just
manipulate the “machine,” supplemented by a few comprehension questions after
the students listen to the aural material. This can hinder the intrinsic
motivation of students. Normally, most of the teacher-posed questions are
answered by the better students. Meanwhile, the majority of students just
remain silent and listen. Some may even feel bored and sleepy. In such cases, I
usually find that I cannot motivate the students in the class to participate
actively in the listening lessons.
Unlike the listening
class, native English speakers have been invited to teach speaking in my
college. These teachers have made the speaking classroom more lively and have helped
more fluent student speakers. However, I find that many students speak as
poorly, if not worse, than those I taught years ago. Only the better students
took the opportunities to talk in group work. And usually it was these students
who spoke for most of the discussion time. These students, I think, were able
to monopolize discussions for the following reasons:
2. Reflections on
Teaching Concept:
In order to enhance the
speaking competence of the students in the oral communication classroom,
students must have sufficient comprehensible language input, most often through
language tapes. At the same time, language learning must be linked to
meaningful language use on the part of the learner in the communicative
classroom. The language learning experience must involve the expression of the
learner’s opinions and thoughts as s/he negotiates interactively with other
classmates and with the teacher.
Here personal investment
is crucial. Some students in the classroom don’t take the opportunity to speak
in group work or to respond actively after listening, partly because of a lack
of roles to play or turns to take and partly because of affective factors. One
of the major obstacles in learning to speak is the anxiety generated over the
risks of blurting things out that are wrong, stupid or incomprehensible. The
language ego here makes some students fearful of being judged or teased by
others. Some anxiety, however, is needed because it contributes to learning in
the classroom. So, teaching techniques must be very effective and practical for
the teaching of both listening and speaking. They can be best achieved by
integrating listening and speaking.
3. Improving Teaching Methods:
3.1.The teaching of
listening:
Focusing on listening is
particularly advantageous in large classes. Through proper speaking activities,
such as teacher-student interactions and student-student interactions, we can
get immediate feedback from the students and at the same time motivate them to
listen more attentively. The following procedures are proposed in the listening
classroom.
3.1.1.Pre-listening: Activity 1
Warm-up questions: This
activity can be done as pair work, the goal of which is to relate students’ prior
knowledge to the message they will listen to. In this case, students may lower
their affective filters, and have their respective turns to speak.
3.1.2.While-listening:
Activity 2
After students listen to
the message once or twice, the teacher may use pauses and ask questions (using
both bottom-up and top-down skills). Before asking questions, it is better to
tell the students that everybody will be asked to respond. In this way, the
students will listen more attentively.
3.1.3. While-listening: Activity 3
Teacher-led
evaluation and self/peer evaluation can be done with the help of tape recorders
or through the integration of the language skills, as described below:
(a) The teacher asks
listening comprehension questions one after another; all the students answer
them respectively through student microphones and simultaneously record their
responses with student tape recorders. Then, the teacher can ask any student (through
teacher-to- individual student calls) to play his/her tape to the class so that
other students will not know who answered the question. Then, teacher-led
evaluation and self/pair evaluations follow. In this manner, students learn in
an uncompetitive situation, and thus lower their affective filters. Moreover,
every student in a large class can get a chance to practice.
(b) Self/pair evaluation
can be done through the integration of listening with writing. Some forms or
blanks can be made beforehand by the teacher for the students to fill in after
they listen to the tape several times. And then, ask the students to check the
answers in pairs with the help of the teacher’s feedback or correction.
3.1.4.Post-listening: Activity 4
Role-plays: Ask students
to take roles in listening to conversations or dialogues. Role-playing one of
the speakers makes students listen more attentively to the speaker they will
play. These role-plays can be practiced in pairs or groups. Such speaking performance
after listening can be done in class, if time permits, or after class as
homework, as required later in the task for a speaking class.
3.2.The Teaching of
Speaking
In contrast to the
listening class, the focus of the speaking, of course, is to improve the oral
production of the students. Therefore, language-teaching activities in the
classroom should aim at maximizing individual language use. This requires the
teacher not only to create a warm and humanistic classroom atmosphere, but also
to provide each student with a turn to speak or a role to play. Pair work and
group work, therefore, are often implemented in the oral communication class.
Communicative language teaching, however, does not merely mean pair/group work.
Since learning and communication strategies form one of the components of
communicative competence, we should spend more time teaching speaking
strategies, or communication strategies. Our students need to learn not only
linguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge but also how to use speaking
strategies to keep conversations going.
In large EFL speaking
classes, pair work and group work are often difficult to carry out effectively
due to affective factors and problems of logistics. Here too, tape-recorders
and role-plays come to our aid. First, we can use tapes to warm up or promote
students’ pair discussion through songs, music, or sounds like whistling winds,
breaking waves, and so forth. Then, we can use role-plays in class to enable
each student to speak. Generally, there is in sufficient time for each group in
a big class to present their role-plays to the whole class. Homework,
therefore, should be assigned.
Some guidelines for
lesson planning can be summed up as in the following:
These guidelines can
only be helpful when the teacher is more aware of the communicative nature of
the teaching of speaking skills. And, I think it will be a long way before the
English teachers in a non-native classroom context attain a reasonable
understanding about the relationship between speaking and listening.
However, problems
presented in this paper and strategies or methods proposed to improve listening
and speaking teaching skills are only the results of my observation.
Suggestions should be further testified in order to be made more practical in different
teaching situations. And, it is my faith that an integration of listening and
speaking in EFL classrooms, especially in large classes, will be more and more
effective, thus more and more favorable.
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