Oral skills

How can we develop listening comprehension in our students?

To answer this question we must start by thinking about how we listen. We tend to listen to things in two different ways:

• Intensive listening: if we want to know lots of detail about what we are listening to, we are listening intensively. If we are listening to the direction to a friend's house, for example, then we need to understand all of what we hear.
• Extensive listening: If we only need to get the main idea about what we are listening extensively. This is what we do when we listen to an interview on the radio at the same time as cooking dinner.

Students need to be able to do both kinds of listening and to choose the right skill depending on the circumstances.

Image: Anxiety by Practical Cures

Here, it's relevant to pay attention to how to overcome anxiety. Students often get the idea that they have to understand everything in the new language. They tend to feel anxious and stop listening immediately when they come across something they don't understand. This is not helpful for them and they need the opportunity to realise that they can be successful learners without understanding every word.

One way to help students become more independent listeners is to give them choices about the skills they want to practise. For example, if you are playing a recording of the news, your students can choose to listen:

• Extensively and find out how many stories are in the headlines that day.
• Intensively to a particular news story for specific details.

When you do a listening activity, think about how you could give your students some autonomy. Try designing two different sorts of task or tasks at two different levels and give your students a choice about which one they want to do first. For example: a) play them an English pop song and let them choose between completing a gap-fill of the words of the song and answering questions like 'What is this song about?'; 'How many verses are there?'; b) get the students to evaluate how successful their listening was by asking them whether they found out what they needed to know from the track or if they enjoyed choosing the task by themselves.

As far as speaking is concerned, students have very different abilities and levels of confidence about speaking in English. Some may be shy about speaking English; be nervous about making mistakes; be embarrassed if they get something wrong, give up very easily if they don't know the right word, etc. Others are more willing to take risks and, as long as they get their message across or simply they do not worry too much about making mistakes.

Anxious students worry about accuracy and more confident students concentrate on fluency. To find out what your students' worries are, a questionnaire can be offered to them in order to identify not only their worries, but also their interests. Some statements for the questionnaire are given as examples: I enjoy speaking English; I like making English friends and talking to them in English; I try to avoid speaking in English in front of the rest of the class; I never volunteer to speak in English in class; I enjoy doing role plays in class; I don't mind speaking in English if I know exactly what to say; I hate making mistakes when I speak English. Thus, students will tick the statements which are true for them and then compare their answers with a partner's.

Accuracy and fluency are important for effective language learning so we need to help learners understand the difference and develop both. They need to know what kind of learner they are already and we need to give them strategies to develop further in and out of class.

Apart from this, students should learn some strategies to get out of difficulty when their communication goes wrong. For example, they need to be able to: ask for clarification; say that they do not understand, and paraphrase what someone else has said to check that they have understood.

Ask your students to make a list of all the different ways they know in English to say that they don't understand and to ask for clarification, e.g., 'Sorry?'; 'Pardon?'; 'Could you say that again?'

Students can practise these in pairs. Get them to take it in turns to say something very difficult or very fast and get the other student to choose an appropriate way of asking for help. If your students are beginners or cannot think by themselves of what things to say, you could give them a list of ideas to start them off.

Here, special emphasis will be given to rhythm, rhyme and music. Students can improve their pronunciation with activities which are fun and involve rhythm and music so that we are making use of more than one sense at the same time. You can get your students to: sing current pop songs in English (they can sing along to a CD); and recite poems with a strong rhythm and lots of rhymes (try using poems written for younger children). Students will concentrate on the patterns and rhythm and the individual sounds will take care of themselves. They enjoy songs and poems and they can write their own and recite these in class. Some students with a strong musical sense will find this a really good way of learning and may want to extend these activities outside the classroom by singing and reciting songs and poems at home.

Image: Church (Portfolio) by Jake Guild

Another way to improve students' spoken skills is to put on an end of term English concert where students perform and produce songs, poems or short plays in English. It could be fun for teachers and students.

Independence can also be promoted by having students record themselves. They are setting their own standards of what is good enough and are deciding by themselves which particular aspects of pronunciation to work on. In fact, students often set themselves very high standards: they can use this for speaking as well as listening practice; they may enjoy singing along to English pop songs; they might also record themselves. This is an excellent way to improve pronunciation without the embarrassment of being heard by anyone else.

Teachers (in class) can make a list of aspects of speech for students to work on at home and get them to monitor their own progress. For example: a) practise distinguishing between /t/, /d/ and /id/ sounds in the regular past tense verbs: kissed, walked, visited, jumped, smoked, collected, cried; b) work on a list of ten new two or three syllable words learnt that week, saying them and putting the stress in the right place.