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Abstract: The purpose of English teaching is to improve the students’ four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, with the base of necessary phonetics, large vocabulary and good grammar, but this is not the final purpose. The final purpose is to let students to use the language. When we talk about the four skills, people often say “First listening and speaking, then reading and writing”. The paper shows some useful methods for listening and speaking teaching. If we use these methods properly, the students can improve their listening and speaking skills easily and express themselves freely.
Key Words: English teaching; listening and speaking skills; methods
Learning a language is not a matter of acquiring a set of rules and building up a large vocabulary. The teacher’s efforts should not be directed at informing his students about a language, but at enabling them to use it.
Now most of the students do better in reading and writing English than in listening and speaking. They can read and write, but they can hardly communicate. They can hardly express themselves with their own words. In the past two years, I was thinking about the variety of current teaching methods and using them in my own classroom. This helps me to evaluate my own teaching. As a result, my students can express themselves more easily than before.
Ⅰ How to improve the students’ listening skill?
As everyone knows, a child first listens for a long time before he is able to speak. He has heard a lot before he can say something and walk. Then after he is able to walk and say, he has a chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker. If we could learn a foreign language in the same way, it would not seem so difficult. But for a foreign language, we do not have the same environment as our native language. We can meet it only in formal places, classes. So I think it is important to let the students be in a language environment.
Here are some sub-skills needed for good listening
1. When listening, we must be able to recognize differences between sounds. For instance, we must be able to notice a difference between /g/ and /k/ as in the words pig and pick.
2. Listening also involves the comprehension of structure or grammar. For example, in the sentences,
Would you please pick the freshest peach?
That is a very fat pig.
The students must notice that pick functions as a verb (or action word) in the sentence while pig functions as a noun naming something. In addition, the students must recognize from the word order and intonation pattern that the first sentence is a polite request, but the second sentence states a fact.
3. In listening, we must be able to hear differences in stress—both at the word level and at the sentence level. There are several important things to remember about stress. First, a difference in word stress can mean a difference in meaning. For instance, the word record is a verb, while the word record is a noun. Second, stress is also important for word emphasis at a sentence level, as in the sentence below:
Tom ate the bananas?
Tom ate the bananas?
Tom ate the bananas
4. Let the students use the skill of guessing at unknown words and recognizes whether or not they are necessary to understand the sentence meaning. For instance, in the sentence, The policeman hit the man with a billy club. The students can guess at the meaning of the word billy club or ignore it all together.
5. Students learn to know and recognize special kinds of words that hold sentences and phrases together. Such as: first, second, third, next, finally, but, on the other hand, etc.
6.Another important skill for listening is the ability to guess or infer information that is not directly stated. For instance, if a student hears the sentence, Yesterday after Beth got up and ate breakfast, she went to the park, he or she should be able to infer that Beth went to the park in the morning. If we listen carefully, we can learn to “hear” and understand many things that are not directly stated.
7. To predict what a speaker will say next. For instance, in order to listen more carefully, students must predict when a speaker will talk about something important. For example, as a student listens to a presentation, he or she must predict when a new point is being introduced so that he or she can listen more carefully and take proper notes.
8. Another sub-skill used in listening is skimming. When listening, a person seldom needs to understand every word he or she hears. But it is usually important to understand the main idea. When we listen mostly for the main idea, we are skimming.
9. At certain times, it is important to listen for total comprehension. Assume you are a visit in town and you need to find the train station before your train leaves in half an hour. You ask a kind man for directions and you listen carefully to what he says. If you don’t understand something, you ask him to repeat or to make it clearer. You don’t want to go to the wrong place and miss your train. Here, you must listen for total comprehension. Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is more important. You can understand your students through listening tests. Only through the practice can the students improve their listening comprehension.
Ⅱ How to improve the students’ speaking skill
Speaking can’t be taught separately. It is often connected with listening. So we often speak of listening and speaking.
The traditional way of listening and speaking is aural-oral method. Now, the new method of two-way communication is very popular.
1. Teaching with questions
Chaim Potok, a well-known twentieth-century Jewish-
American writer of novels and essays wrote a story about a wise father. When the young son returned home from school each day, his father would not ask the boy what he had learned that day in his classes. Instead the Father would say to his son, “What good questions did you ask today?”
Asking questions is one of the most basic elements of human communication. It is one of the most common ways in which parents and children communicate together. We find children all around the world asking their parents how things work, why something is true, what the family will eat for supper, or when grandmother will come to visit. All around the world we hear parents asking their children how they got so dirty, when they will finish their homework, where they lost their mittens, or how well they did on a test at school. Questions help us in connecting with each other, caring for each other, and talk with each other in meaningful ways.
Questions in the classroom
Many communicative activities in the English classroom include questions and answers between teacher and student. The teacher asks questions and the student answers them.
(1) Simple Questions for comprehension:
Yes/No Questions
True/False(Right/Wrong)Questions
Either/Or Questions
(2) Complex Questions for comprehension:
The “Five W-Questions”
When? /Where? /What? /Which? /Who?
b. Global Questions for comprehension of main ideas
c. Questions for deeper comprehension (Why-Questions)
2. Role play
A role play is a spontaneous conversation between two people who are imaging that they are other people or imaging that they are in a different situation. Role play is generally used for free speaking practice.
Role play helps take away a student’s fear. If students pretend that they are someone else, they may overcome shyness and anxiety and speak more freely. Role play gives the students an opportunity to talk about something other than themselves.
·New roles for students:
Example: You are a taxi driver. A customer asks you what you like and don’t like about your job.
·New situation for the speakers:
Example: Pretend you and your friend are going to a scenic area for the weekend. Discuss your plans with each other.
New roles and situations for the speakers
Example: Student A is a clerk in a food store. Student b is a shopper who notices that the meat he or she is buying is rotten. Discuss the problem.
Students learn to put themselves in many different situations and places and use natural speech while doing this. The roles that the students have to play may not be natural, but the communication will be natural-because there will be real information transfer, creative speaking, and real feedback (response) from the other person.
3. What to do about students’ speaking errors
Normally, in less teacher-controlled activities, students make more errors. However, for teachers to correct all the errors which students make is very time-consuming. In addition, this can make the students nervous and discouraged. Following are some suggestions for dealing with student errors.
·One suggestion is that the teacher simply rephrases an erroneous sentence without having the student repeat the correct version. In this way, the class will hear the correction. For example:Student: Last night I at home watch on TV tennis match.
Teacher (in a friendly manner): Oh, you mean, last night you watched tennis match on TV? Interesting! Who won?
·Sometimes, the teacher may indicate that there is a mistake and invite either the student to do self-corrections or the student’s peers to provide a correct answer.
·Sometimes the teacher will want to listen carefully to identify the particulars kinds of errors the students are making. Then the teacher could choose one or two of the most frequent or most severe errors, write them on the board, and discuss them with the class.
·Sometimes it is very wise just to let the students make mistakes as long as they are earnestly trying to talk English.
Key Words: English teaching; listening and speaking skills; methods
Learning a language is not a matter of acquiring a set of rules and building up a large vocabulary. The teacher’s efforts should not be directed at informing his students about a language, but at enabling them to use it.
Now most of the students do better in reading and writing English than in listening and speaking. They can read and write, but they can hardly communicate. They can hardly express themselves with their own words. In the past two years, I was thinking about the variety of current teaching methods and using them in my own classroom. This helps me to evaluate my own teaching. As a result, my students can express themselves more easily than before.
Ⅰ How to improve the students’ listening skill?
As everyone knows, a child first listens for a long time before he is able to speak. He has heard a lot before he can say something and walk. Then after he is able to walk and say, he has a chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker. If we could learn a foreign language in the same way, it would not seem so difficult. But for a foreign language, we do not have the same environment as our native language. We can meet it only in formal places, classes. So I think it is important to let the students be in a language environment.
Here are some sub-skills needed for good listening
1. When listening, we must be able to recognize differences between sounds. For instance, we must be able to notice a difference between /g/ and /k/ as in the words pig and pick.
2. Listening also involves the comprehension of structure or grammar. For example, in the sentences,
Would you please pick the freshest peach?
That is a very fat pig.
The students must notice that pick functions as a verb (or action word) in the sentence while pig functions as a noun naming something. In addition, the students must recognize from the word order and intonation pattern that the first sentence is a polite request, but the second sentence states a fact.
3. In listening, we must be able to hear differences in stress—both at the word level and at the sentence level. There are several important things to remember about stress. First, a difference in word stress can mean a difference in meaning. For instance, the word record is a verb, while the word record is a noun. Second, stress is also important for word emphasis at a sentence level, as in the sentence below:
Tom ate the bananas?
Tom ate the bananas?
Tom ate the bananas
4. Let the students use the skill of guessing at unknown words and recognizes whether or not they are necessary to understand the sentence meaning. For instance, in the sentence, The policeman hit the man with a billy club. The students can guess at the meaning of the word billy club or ignore it all together.
5. Students learn to know and recognize special kinds of words that hold sentences and phrases together. Such as: first, second, third, next, finally, but, on the other hand, etc.
6.Another important skill for listening is the ability to guess or infer information that is not directly stated. For instance, if a student hears the sentence, Yesterday after Beth got up and ate breakfast, she went to the park, he or she should be able to infer that Beth went to the park in the morning. If we listen carefully, we can learn to “hear” and understand many things that are not directly stated.
7. To predict what a speaker will say next. For instance, in order to listen more carefully, students must predict when a speaker will talk about something important. For example, as a student listens to a presentation, he or she must predict when a new point is being introduced so that he or she can listen more carefully and take proper notes.
8. Another sub-skill used in listening is skimming. When listening, a person seldom needs to understand every word he or she hears. But it is usually important to understand the main idea. When we listen mostly for the main idea, we are skimming.
9. At certain times, it is important to listen for total comprehension. Assume you are a visit in town and you need to find the train station before your train leaves in half an hour. You ask a kind man for directions and you listen carefully to what he says. If you don’t understand something, you ask him to repeat or to make it clearer. You don’t want to go to the wrong place and miss your train. Here, you must listen for total comprehension. Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is more important. You can understand your students through listening tests. Only through the practice can the students improve their listening comprehension.
Ⅱ How to improve the students’ speaking skill
Speaking can’t be taught separately. It is often connected with listening. So we often speak of listening and speaking.
The traditional way of listening and speaking is aural-oral method. Now, the new method of two-way communication is very popular.
1. Teaching with questions
Chaim Potok, a well-known twentieth-century Jewish-
American writer of novels and essays wrote a story about a wise father. When the young son returned home from school each day, his father would not ask the boy what he had learned that day in his classes. Instead the Father would say to his son, “What good questions did you ask today?”
Asking questions is one of the most basic elements of human communication. It is one of the most common ways in which parents and children communicate together. We find children all around the world asking their parents how things work, why something is true, what the family will eat for supper, or when grandmother will come to visit. All around the world we hear parents asking their children how they got so dirty, when they will finish their homework, where they lost their mittens, or how well they did on a test at school. Questions help us in connecting with each other, caring for each other, and talk with each other in meaningful ways.
Questions in the classroom
Many communicative activities in the English classroom include questions and answers between teacher and student. The teacher asks questions and the student answers them.
(1) Simple Questions for comprehension:
Yes/No Questions
True/False(Right/Wrong)Questions
Either/Or Questions
(2) Complex Questions for comprehension:
The “Five W-Questions”
When? /Where? /What? /Which? /Who?
b. Global Questions for comprehension of main ideas
c. Questions for deeper comprehension (Why-Questions)
2. Role play
A role play is a spontaneous conversation between two people who are imaging that they are other people or imaging that they are in a different situation. Role play is generally used for free speaking practice.
Role play helps take away a student’s fear. If students pretend that they are someone else, they may overcome shyness and anxiety and speak more freely. Role play gives the students an opportunity to talk about something other than themselves.
·New roles for students:
Example: You are a taxi driver. A customer asks you what you like and don’t like about your job.
·New situation for the speakers:
Example: Pretend you and your friend are going to a scenic area for the weekend. Discuss your plans with each other.
New roles and situations for the speakers
Example: Student A is a clerk in a food store. Student b is a shopper who notices that the meat he or she is buying is rotten. Discuss the problem.
Students learn to put themselves in many different situations and places and use natural speech while doing this. The roles that the students have to play may not be natural, but the communication will be natural-because there will be real information transfer, creative speaking, and real feedback (response) from the other person.
3. What to do about students’ speaking errors
Normally, in less teacher-controlled activities, students make more errors. However, for teachers to correct all the errors which students make is very time-consuming. In addition, this can make the students nervous and discouraged. Following are some suggestions for dealing with student errors.
·One suggestion is that the teacher simply rephrases an erroneous sentence without having the student repeat the correct version. In this way, the class will hear the correction. For example:Student: Last night I at home watch on TV tennis match.
Teacher (in a friendly manner): Oh, you mean, last night you watched tennis match on TV? Interesting! Who won?
·Sometimes, the teacher may indicate that there is a mistake and invite either the student to do self-corrections or the student’s peers to provide a correct answer.
·Sometimes the teacher will want to listen carefully to identify the particulars kinds of errors the students are making. Then the teacher could choose one or two of the most frequent or most severe errors, write them on the board, and discuss them with the class.
·Sometimes it is very wise just to let the students make mistakes as long as they are earnestly trying to talk English.