This article intends to solve the problems in teaching listening and
speaking. Based on the author’s own learning and teaching experiences, it makes
a theoretical analysis of our current problems in English language teaching and
provides some practical and effective techniques in solving these problems.
1 A profile of Traditional Teaching Situation
in the Past Twenty Years
English as a course in schools was established in the late 1970's.The
ways we were taught at that time were comparatively old and inefficient. They
fall into three major stages:
At
the beginning of the English course, phonetics, new words and sentences were
taught through repetition and imitation of the teacher’s modeling. Students
never heard any foreign words spoken by native speakers, neither in real life
nor from the recorded materials. Theoretical bases for teaching methods and
techniques were rare except for Grammar - Translation Approach .
There wasn' t any specific course on listening and speaking until at
college level. One way employed to improve students' listening ability is
Dictation. Students were also taught to make effective use of the Pause and
Repeat buttons on the tape - recorder. At the meantime they were asked to
listen to the BBC world news and the VOA Special English Program.
At the third stage, students were not only asked to focus on listening,
but on speaking. Recorded materials like the New Concept English were introduced,
both for comprehension and imitation of the pronunciation and intonation of the
native speakers.
At the same time, the teacher trained students on listening and speaking
by using Audiolingual approaches. They were asked to repeat and recite some of
the typical drills and dialogues and even the whole passages on the textbook.
It was very useful in adjusting their pronunciation and intonation. Students
would be able to speak fluently in class. But whenever they came across a
native speaker, they dared not open their mouth, because they were not sure how
to speak properly and acceptably.
Since what they have learned is not authentic language,but classroom
English. It has little to do with the outside world. What they lack is practice
of the communicative use of the language. "People don't follow a set
pattern when asking and answering questions" (Turner, 1995).
2 Current Problems in
Teaching Listening and Speaking
Nowadays, listening is taught through comprehension -based approach in
most schools,and the recorded passages of prose are produced originally to be
seen rather than heard. Speaking was minimized, if not neglected, especially for the non - English majors.
Their learning is focused on comprehension rather than communication. Every week
two hours are spent on listening practice and comprehension exercises. However,
students are bored and progress is slow,because most teachers just act as
recorder-players in class.
3 Several Applicable Teaching
Strategies
From the above analysis we can see that we need to improve our teaching
methods to fit students’ needs and to make them more interesting, practical and
applicable.
For the first stage, while teaching phonetics, stress and rhythm, we can
still ask them to read aloud, but this time with a new method, Back Chunking,
to familiarize students with the sentence segments. It means to read the
sentence from the back, to be exact, the last word or phrase, and then by
adding the proceeding words or phrases to it one by one, until the students can
read out the whole sentence. For example, normally we will chunk the sentence
in a linear order: Nothing could disturb // our feeling of peace //and contentment, since students can’t read
out the whole sentence at one time. But if we read the sentence from the back,
we can read it in this way:
contentment // peace and contentment// our feeling of peace and
contentment // disturb our feeling of peace and contentment // Nothing could
disturb our feeling of peace and contentment.
When new information comes first, students can remember it more easily,
and the words that come after it will have been enforced. Thus students can
read the whole sentence more fluently.
At the second stage, Dictation is still an effective method to use,
since it entails much more than spelling and word forms. It is also a good
measure of listening comprehension and overall language proficiency. We should
not just read to students word for word or sentence by sentence, but to chunk
the sentences into sense groups, to make them meaningful and easy to
understand. And various forms of materials such as dialogues,passages, reports,
stories, etc. will make it more interesting.
Another interesting method can be employed is giving instructions, like
drawing pictures, diagrams, lines, following a route etc. This method is
especially applicable when students are tired and bored. The purpose of it is to develop accuracy in
listening.
Then we will come to the third stage: listening to recorded materials,
but recorded materials should be authentic and interesting. Students working
with non - authentic materials are easily led into false expectations about
what will occur in the ordinary spoken language,and they will have to transfer
what they have learned by listening to non-authentic materials to their
attempts to understand authentic materials. For this reason there is
considerable support for using authentic
materials or 'near -authentic’ materials from the earliest stage as a
significant part of the students listening experience.Authentic speech has
natural rhythm, natural intonation and pronunciation, natural starts and
pauses,normal rate of delivery and background noises. Authentic materials allow students to hear a
much more real act of communication with all the interactional features which
are not found in scripted materials. It gives them a true representation of
real, spontaneous speech with its hesitations,false starts and mistakes, which
will make them more able to cope with 'real- life' speech when they meet it outside the
classroom. Authentic materials can provide students with a much wider variety
of listening experiences. They may listen to a speech, a news report, a
conversation, they can hear different speakers with different accents speaking
at different
speeds; and it provides opportunities for
students to hear native speakers of the language. (Underwood.
1989)
Recorded materials should be carried out in three steps: pre-listening,
while-listening and post -listening. Pre-listening activities is to prepare
students to work out expectations of what is going to hear. Pictures, a list of
some extremely difficult new words, or some hints on the plot can help them
form the schema about the listening material. During-listening is the most
important because we hope the students
to benefit from it.The topic and content must be interesting and to the
students' taste;Post-listening is an
assessment of comprehension and should not be neglected but it mustn't be very
long and boring.We can ask them to complete puzzles or solve problem.
Speaking can be started a bit later,say at stage three, but not earlier,
because students may not have the readiness to open their mouth. Moreover, if
students don't know what authentic speech really sound like, they should not be
allowed to try to produce it. Otherwise it may have some negative effects,
because as students hear their own speech out-put - - classroom dialect, the
distorted form of the language serves as auditory input and become permanent
stereotype.It is hard for them to overcome later in life.（作者单位：西安文理学院）
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