ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the teaching of listening and speaking skills, which are treated separately and prefaced by a brief discussion of the spoken mode and the variety of styles it encompasses. The discussion of listening begins with a catalogue of different listening purposes and listening styles. This is followed by a discussion of the sort of difficulties language learners may experience in listening to fluent speech. Practical suggestions with sample listening tasks are then made concerning how to introduce learners to listening. Further suggestions are made on how to increase the complexity of listening tasks as learners become more advanced. The advantages of listening to speech accompanied by a visual track, as in a video recording rather than an audio recording, are pointed out. A checklist for selecting suitable listening texts is then presented. Considerable attention is devoted to describing a three-phase structure for listening-comprehension lessons. The section concludes with advice about selecting songs as listening texts.
The balance of the chapter is devoted to developing speaking ability. First, the limitations of traditional classroom discourse as a model for real-world discourse are pointed out. Various spoken classroom activities which go beyond learners responding to teacher questions are presented. These include role-play, simulation, discussion and debates, as well as language games. Specific examples of each activity-type are worked through. To conclude, a set of guidelines for teachers to assess post hoc the success of any given speaking activity is provided.
