Julia Damion

INTR 619
Dr. Alan Seaman
Rationale for Listening & Speaking Unit
12/15/16

Listening and Speaking Instruction for Adult ESL

Communication is the heart of language. It is how we form connections with others,

how we integrate into social and professional circles, and how we carry out many of the tasks

in the public sphere. For adult language learners, they must develop in their knowledge and

proficiency in these areas through direct instruction in both speaking and listening skills. The

following paragraphs outline my philosophy of teaching as relates to teaching listening and

speaking in adult ESL contexts, including suggested focuses for each of these areas of

instruction. The paper concludes with a summary of the classroom context for which the

lesson plans were created.

In teaching listening and speaking to adult learners, the material that the teacher

chooses to teach must be relevant to their students’ needs. As Folse (2006) states, “The

learner’s language-learning needs are the number one driving force behind what you do in

this class” (p. 5). In order for students to stay motivated in the process of language learning,

they must feel that what they are learning will serve a useful purpose outside of the language

classroom (Brown, 2014). For adults in an ESL context in the United States, instruction that

will allow them to carry out tasks related to employment and daily life in the United States

will be especially salient, and instruction should prepare them for a variety of real-life

encounters (Eyring, 2014). For speaking, this would include learning scripts for specific

situations (such as going to the doctor’s office, having a job interview) as well as language

functions (such as apologies and reporting issues) and strategies for carrying on

conversations with friends or coworkers (asking appropriate questions, asking for

clarification). For listening, adults need to be exposed to a range of different genres of aural

input that reflect what they will be hearing in their home, work, or social environments,

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including spontaneous free speech (casual conversation), deliberative speech (such as lectures

or interviews), and scripted speech (such as what one hears on television). This unit will deal

particularly with the former two categories. Additionally, teachers should remain mindful of

the needs specific to each learner and leave room for individualization, as much as possible;

for example, when preparing for a job interview, learners should be preparing as if they are

going for a job that they would likely pursue, and learn how to tailor their presentation to

their individual contexts.

When teaching any material, teachers must also capitalize on the prior experiences

and knowledge of adult language learners and view it as an asset to learning. Adults comes to

class with a wealth of life experiences and knowledge already accumulated, and making

connections between what they already know and what they are being taught can facilitate

transfer. Teachers should be aware that learning occurs best when connections are made

between the knowledge, skills, and emotions a learner already has, and the material to be

learned (Brown, 2014). An implication for this in all areas of ESL instruction is the

importance of the activation of background knowledge prior to the introduction of new

material. In this context, then, any intensive listening or speaking activity should be preceded

by background-building, in order to activate background knowledge on the topic at hand.

Additionally, this also means that material that is taught should be revisited at later points in

the course, in order to reinforce those points and to incorporate new material into previously

established schemata.

In terms of instructional goals, teachers should be preparing students for real

communicative contexts, and so listening and speaking instruction should seek to equip

students in all four areas of communicative competence: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse,

and strategic competence (Canale & Swain, as cited in Brown, 2014). Students need attention

to and practice with the grammar of the English language in order to develop linguistic

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competence; for adults, direct teaching of vocabulary and grammar is especially important in

order to build metacognitive awareness (Folse, 2006). Additionally, students need to be well-

informed in the sociopragmatic aspects of English in order to successfully communicate

across a variety of contexts and registers. This includes attention to both the functions of

language and also to extralinguistic features such as expression and body language (this can

be called interactional competence). The development of discourse competence is essential to

understanding and producing a variety of spoken (and written) texts; for example, in order to

even carry on a casual conversation, students must be aware of the specific genre features of

casual conversation in an American context, and they must know how to respond in

appropriate ways in order to sustain that conversation. Students must learn communication

strategies that they can utilize to ensure communication does not break down entirely, such as

asking for clarification. Adult students will be coming from various cultural contexts, they

need all four areas of competence in order to navigate the professional and social worlds of

the United States.

As an approach to teaching speaking, Folse (2006) argues that classes need specific

topics and tasks, and students should have opportunities to use authentic language to

accomplish meaningful tasks using target vocabulary and phrases. This includes activities

such as role play and information gap activities. The latter activity involves an increased

necessity for negotiation of meaning, which can encourage pushed output; that is, when

students struggle to communicate what they want to say, they have to think of new ways to

communicate their meaning, and these modifications can push learners’ interlanguage to new

levels. Researchers say that both comprehensible input and pushed output are necessary for

language acquisition (Folse, 2006). Additionally, Folse (2006) states that two-way tasks,

during which there is an information exchange that creates a necessity for students to

understand each other, are more conducive to language acquisition than tasks where students

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merely listen to the other person. During a task, students should be doing a good deal of

talking and listening to each other in these tasks, with the teacher’s role being minimal, other

than to offer feedback. Folse (2006) outlines three requirements for successful tasks: they

will involve language exchange, learners should have time to plan language, and tasks should

have one or a finite set of answers. To expand on this last point, closed activities have been

shown to generate more language than open-ended ones, such as telling students to simply

have a conversation about a topic. Furthermore, tasks which compel students to talk about

their differences result in more output than those that focus on their similarities. An

additional important factor that Folse (2006) notes, for teachers, is ensuring that students

have knowledge of the language that will occur in the task (such as topic specific

vocabulary), but that they also have the language necessary to complete the task itself.

Regarding an instructional focus for speaking, teachers need to attend to students’

development in both accuracy and fluency, with particular attention to the latter (Folse,

2006). Teachers should strive for students to be able to speak with few lexical and

grammatical errors, so as to ensure that their speech is intelligible, and so drilling and

accuracy exercises do have their place in the ESL classroom. However, fluency is important

to be able to hold conversation for longer stretches, and so opportunities should be provided

for students to practice their fluency without as much concern for error. Fluency exercises

leads to more risk-taking and exploration with language, as well as more aural input from

other classmates, thus increasing the potential for more acquisition. As many adult language

learners may spend a good amount of their day speaking their native language, spending time

in class to increase their English speaking fluency becomes especially important.

As Folse (2006) states, “it is not possible to have a conversation without good

listening ability” (p. 4). Listening is an active skill for which students are utilizing not only

their linguistic knowledge but also their knowledge of topics and genres in order to

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comprehend meaning. Thus, students need opportunities to develop both in their bottom-up

processing (using knowledge of words and grammar in order to determine meaning), and

their top down processing (knowledge of the world and of different types of texts) (Richards

& Burns, 2012). There are two types of listening for which teachers should ensure that

students are being trained that will aid in the development of these processing skills: focused

and global listening. Focused listening is a listening skill in which students are adept at

picking out key vocabulary and phrases in a stream of scripted or unscripted speech, in order

to be able to identify the topics being spoken about and to follow the flow or structure of the

speech. The ability to attend to details is important for much of transactional listening, for

which learners seek to accomplish a task (Richards & Burns, 2012), such as making a

doctor’s appointment. Global listening is a listening skill in which students can listen for the

overall gist of what the speaker is saying and understanding the main ideas. It seems that

spending time developing the skill of global listening could help students move out of a too-

heavy emphasis on bottom-up processing; additionally, it could be beneficial not only for

non-reciprocal speaking situations such as listening to lectures, but also for reciprocal

speaking situations, such as partaking in non-task-oriented, unscripted conversations. Thus,

both types of listening are important for different contexts.

During teaching instruction, errors should be selectively corrected. Correcting errors

is important in preventing fossilization of patterns or pronunciation, both in oral and in

written discourse. Errors which occur frequently, relate to material currently being taught, or

which impede intelligibility (including pronunciation errors) should be addressed

consistently, in order to avoid fossilization, or to raise awareness of reoccurring errors.

Teachers should be aware of the role interlanguage plays and its various stages, recognizing

that many errors result from meaningful attempts to approximate language in the L2.

Teachers should also take care to correct errors without making students embarrassed or feel

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singled-out, as this will raise their affective filters and impair learning (Folse, 2006). An

example of how to accomplish this would be to monitor students during speaking tasks and

collect a list of overheard errors that would be beneficial to correct. The errors can then be

addressed as a whole group.

Following from this, teachers should be helping students grow in their self-monitoring

abilities, so that they can become aware of their areas of both strength and weakness and

develop the ability to self-correct. Self-monitoring is important to the development of learner

autonomy, and so teachers should be encouraging students to evaluate their current levels of

ability and to set goals for improvement, thus taking more responsibility for their own

learning. Self-monitoring is important to address not only with lexical, grammatical, and

syntactic features of language, but also with pronunciation, as certain features may be

impairing intelligibility, unbeknownst to the speaker (Brown, 2014). For pronunciation

issues, especially, recordings one’s speech in a consistent fashion can help destabilize

fossilized features by raising students’ awareness of pronunciation issues they might have

and by helping them enhance their self-monitoring abilities.

As pronunciation has an impact on intelligibility, an adult ESL class should seek to

incorporate pronunciation instruction into listening and speaking classes. While learners may

vary in language backgrounds and thus have different pronunciation issues (Brown, 2014),

suprasegmentals issues, such as sentence and word stress and intonation, as well as certain

segmental issues, such as minimal pairs and consonant endings, deserve attention in the ESL

classroom, as instruction in these features can enhance a learner’s intelligibility (Goodwin,

2014). Thus, pronunciation instruction should be incorporated whenever possible.

Finally, teachers must consider the sources of input that are used for instruction.

While textbook listening samples are good for establishing key vocabulary and grammar

related to a subject, they are sometimes too “filtered” – that is, they don’t include certain

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discourse features that are the hallmark of spoken English such as fillers and reduced speech.

There are benefits to using textbook materials, but at the intermediate level, we also need to

be exposing students to more authentic speech that contains features common to

conversations. Sensitivity to context dictates that adult learners should be exposed to various

accented speech that is not native but still intelligible. Their social and professional circles

will most likely include both native and non-native speakers, and potentially speakers who

speak a World English. Thus, exposure to authentic speech would be beneficial for adult

learners.

This unit has a strong functional component, with the goals of giving students the

tools to respond to situations in the workplace, as well as preparing them for a job interview.

It is designed for a class of twelve mid-intermediate-level learners taking classes through a

community college. The class meets in the morning for four times a week (every day except

Wednesdays) over the course of the semester. Within this unit, all topics covered relate to

occupations. The design of the two components of this unit varies in order to suit the context.

The first week, which focuses on developing communicative competence in a variety of

situations in the workplace, utilizes a format consisting of listening activities followed by

communicative tasks. The second week of the unit focuses on building verbal, nonverbal, and

listening skills for a job interview, and more time is devoted to practicing for an interview,

which will take place on the last day of the unit. While listening texts for the first five

sessions come from a variety of sources, the second half of the utilizes audio from Ventures

3, which is a text appropriate to intermediate-level students.

References

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Brown, H. D. (2014). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, 6th

ed. White Plains, NY: Pearson.

Eyring, J. L. (2014). Adult learners in English as a second/foreign language settings. In M.

Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, & M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or

Foreign Language (pp. 568-583). Boston, MA: Heinle.

Folse, K. S. (2006). The Art of Teaching Speaking: Research and Pedagogy for the ESL/EFL

Classroom. The University of Michigan Press.

Goodwin, J. (2014). Teaching Pronunciation. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. M. Brinton, & M. A.

Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (pp. 136-152).

Boston, MA: Heinle.

Richards, J. C., & Burns, A. (2012). Tips for Teaching Listening: A Practical Approach.

White Plains, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.