Developing Language Skills in Teaching English to Young Learners:

Listening and Speaking

By Vera Savi

Teaching Speaking

Language Skills in Teaching English to Young Learners: Listening and Speaking

Teaching Listening

Teaching Listening

Teacher should understand listening as a complex interactive process

How can children be taught to use the acquired language for meaningful communication in new context?

Teachers should do variety of listening activities that should focus on developing microskills

retaining chunks in short-term memory, discriminating among English sounds, recognizing English stress patterns, reduced forms and grammatical word classes, patterns, systems and rules, distinguishing word boundaries and interpreting word order patterns, processing speech at different speeds of delivery, detecting sentence components, recognising cohesive devices and communicative functions, developing listening strategies and using nonverbal clues to understand meaning

Successful listening activities involve three stages : Pre-listening Listening Post Listening

Listening strategies are very important for young learners as these help students improve their listening comprehension beyond the classroom Demonstrating language by using realia in contexts that are of interest to children or personalising a context can be also effective

Activities that support development of these microskills are songs, chants, role play and drama

Total Physical Response (TPR) Top-Down Bottom-Up Choosing, transferring information, answering questions, condensing or extending the heard utterances

Teaching Speaking

Teachers should provide the balance between controlled and guided activities and allow children to enjoy natural talk in the classroom

Teachers should take care of accuracy by immediately correcting all students errors. No straightforward correction should be done when children are engaged in free speaking activities; correction should follow once the activity is over

Meaningful communication in a foreign language depends on both aural and oral skills

New vocabulary should be presented orally with extensive support of pictures, drawings, puppets, realia, video, and/or mime, gesture, facial expressions or acting out

Free speaking activities are paths to achieving fluency and developing communicative competence, i.e. confidence in using language in new contexts.

Give children some time and support to rehearse their speech before engaging in a role play. This is crucial to confidence building and to achieving successful communication in a foreign language.

In these activities children dont just use words, but also all other parts of speaking a language tone of voice, stress, intonation, facial expressions, etc. which contributes to achieving fluency

Do activities that will help children get ready for similar real-life contexts

Assessing Young Language Learners Chapter Six : Assessing Oral Language

By Penny McKay

Oral language at school

Assessing Oral Language

The relationship between spoken and written language

The nature of oral language ability

Issues in the assessment of the oral language of young learners

The scope of oral language to be assessed in young learners programmes

The complexity of oral language assessment of young learners is compound by these maturational factors; children may not participate because they do not yet have the cognitive and social skills that are needed

Children use oral language either in conversations or in extended talk

Conversations usually involve unplanned speech and more casual in nature. Extended talk usually involves planned speech and is more formal
In conversation, speakers are supported by feedback from interlocutors(other speakers) through nods, smiles, responses

The ability to use language for conversational interaction and oral presentations is not necessarily present in young learners

The Nature of Oral Language Ability

Spoken language often has incomplete sentences, nonspecifies words and may contain relatively little information

Children are likely to contribute more when teachers ask referential questions than two-choice or display questions.

In wider classroom interaction childrens opportunities for participation depend on the nature of the classroom interaction that is set up by the teacher Childrens participation may be affected by the behaviour of one or several of the other participants, and by the kinds of interaction with the teacher

Young learners grammar can be assessed in oral language through observation involving analysis of childrens oral language as they engage in meaningful language use activities

Selecting oral language assessment text

Motivation Determining the appropriateness and usefulness of oral language assessment tasks Other dimensions of oral language tasks that influence performance and the selection of tasks The use of written text

Assessing grammar

Issues in the assessment of the oral language of young learners

Opportunities to assess oral language use in the classroom may not be available

Assessing pronunciation As childrens language abilities develop to more advance levels, assessment will be checking that children have the vocabulary they need to understand and use language for a range of purpose in a range of different context Assessing vocabulary

Opportunities for assessment of oral language will not automatically be available in the classroom, it can take place only if the pragmatic climate of the classroom is right Teachers need to ensure that children have equal opportunities to participate in classroom and to learn.

Best assessed in the context language use. The central criterion for assessment should be intelligibility

References
Savi, V. (2012). Developing language skills in teaching english to young learners: listening and speaking. Retrieved February 14, 2014 from http://www.britishcouncil.rs/files/2013/05/serbia-elta-newsletter-2013-marchyoung_learners_playground-savic.pdf McKay, P. (2006). Assessing young language learners. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press