Baltabayeva G.M., Assanova A.Ye.

L.N.Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan

Teaching Integrated Skills: Listening and Speaking

Humans, in comparison to other creatures, listen not only for signals from the outer space but to gather information. Listening is a bewilderingly complex cognitive process unlike merely hearing which involves solely receiving sound waves without their further interpretation by brain. It is a psychological phenomenon, which takes place on a cognitive level inside people’s heads, and a social phenomenon, which develops interactively between people and the environment surrounding them. According to Howatt and Dakin, listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying which involves understanding a speaker's accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning. [1] Indeed, what happens in real life is that the degree of intelligibility of spoken message has a direct influence on listening comprehension. Most oral data is not recorded and the spontaneity involved in most speech means that false starts, hesitation, redundancy and ungrammatical sentences are extremely common. This makes listening problematic not only for language learners but for native speakers as well. Understanding one’s speech involves a number of competences which a listener should possess; these are linguistic competence and non-linguistic competence.

Linguistic competence enables a listener to identify the format of spoken utterance, recognize discourse markers (such as now, eventually, etc.), understand different intonation patterns and so on. Whereas non-linguistic competence involves listener’s background knowledge about the topic being heard [2]. Comprehending and understanding a language is necessary when students are learning a new language due to the fact that people always need to communicate and interact with others in different moments or situations in their life. Listening is a receptive skill. Hence, teaching only listening (e.g. within the courses that focus exclusively on listening or curriculum that necessitates the classes devoted solely to listening) can fail to prepare students to real life tasks when listening is alternatively replaced by speaking and vice versa. Thus, listening along with speaking becomes an indivisible and crucial part of communication. Based on these considerations an integrated skills approach was introduced.

The strongest arguments for an integrated skills approach are that it prepares students best for what they will encounter outside the classroom, and it allows more variety as a way of approaching language learning. The integrated-skill approach exposes English language learners to authentic language and challenges them to interact naturally in the language. The reasoning behind this approach is that you can’t learn to write without reading, and you can’t learn to speak without listening. In the same way that a good writer is a good reader, a good speaker is also a good listener. This rule is generally applicable to English learners and it has to do with the correlation between productive (writing and speaking) and receptive (reading and listening) skills.[3] One advantage of the integrated skills approach is that within this approach learners rapidly gain a true picture of the richness and complexity of the English language as employed for communication. Another advantage of this approach is that it allows teachers to track students' progress in multiple skills at the same time.

Moreover, speaking has the closest link to complement listening. According to Bueno, Madrid and McLaren: “Listening is important for speaking because it establishes the good basis for successful communicative exchanges”. [3] It should be noted that communication skills comprise receptive skills and productive skills. Here, we can come up with an ideal integration: listening as a receptive skill and speaking as a productive respectively.

Having considered listening and the idea of its combination with speaking, we need to identify what implications for teaching listening and speaking as integrated skills can be made. Often listening in a classroom entails using a recording or appears in a form of listening to the teacher. It is always good to give students a chance to practice listening with other students as well as recording an audio alone. This means teachers can have students spend some time speaking to each other. Moreover, according to a Multiple Intelligence Theory, students with interpersonal intelligence, who tend to be fluent but inaccurate, will benefit particularly from the speaking stages of the lesson because they learn by interacting with others. Therefore, it is essential to consider features of good speaking tasks which will help students to elaborate on a given topic.

There are several activities that integrate listening-comprehension with speaking. One of them is “Jigsaw Listening”. Jigsaw tasks involve student working together to share information, and in jigsaw listening the students have to share the information they heard from a recording. This task can be employed in a following way: first two to four groups of students separately listen to different recordings on the same subjects, e.g. the same journey with some differences in each version. Then follows a tape script with gaps that the students have to fill in. After they tell it individually to a student from the other group (s) and try to find the differences. Of course, the paper is not used, as it is now the speaking skill that is highlighted for integration with the initial listening comprehension.

To integrate listening and speaking video clips on different topic and popular songs can be used as well. Furthermore, colourful videos and enjoyable songs discharge rigorous academic environment that might occur in a classroom. Video clips may be watched and enjoyed and then be followed by a discussion on understanding the cultural information inherent in them. This may be highlighted and discussed. Songs for teaching integrated skills should be chosen carefully, so that they are extremely effective. Then many skills can be integrated: sound to spelling recognition (via gap filling activities), aural practice, topics for discussion and debates, etc.

To sum up, both listening and speaking comprehension are difficult to attain. Being prevailing components of communication, these two skills are interconnected in real life situations. This makes the integration of listening and speaking skills an underlying must in teaching English. In this sense, a wide range of communicative exercises should be proposed in the classroom and these should be as varied as possible: between students, a student and a teacher. Different activities using video clips or songs should be applied to successfully improve both listening and speaking skills. As it has been examined, integrated activities provide opportunities for much needed student behavioral-interaction. Integration of the language skills also promotes the learning of real content, not just the dissection of language forms. If a teacher integrates the language skills in teaching, learners will be able to utilize English effectively for communication.

References

1. Saricoban, A. The Teaching of Listening, The Internet TESL Journal. Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Articles/Saricoban-Listening.html

2. Richards, Jack C. Teaching Listening and Speaking From Theory to Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

3. Bueno, A., Madrid, D. & N. McLaren, (eds). TEFL in Secondary Education. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2006

4. Wilson, J. How to teach listening. Harlow: Pearson, 2008

5. Brown, S. Teaching Listening. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

6. Oxford, R. (2001). Integrated Skills in the ESL/EFL Classroom. Retrieved from ERIC database. (EDO-FL-01-05)