The importance of teaching listening for teaching speaking

In order for students to be comfortable recognising and eventually using phonemes in the target language, there needs to be lots of listening and exposure to the target sounds. 

I think listening is a bit of an underrated skill, and potentially isn’t given as much time as it should be. However, in my school context, we often find that listening is the score with the highest results. In addition, I find that when listening is done really well, speaking becomes much easier for students.

We do listening in every lesson, and the task type is different depending on the stage of learning of the students. At the start of a new topic, this might be choral repetition (listening and repeating), or sentence bingo, or sentence chaos (listening and identifying a specific sentence). It could be activities requiring closer listening, such as break the flow (adding spaces between words), faulty transcript tasks (spot the extra word or the pronunciation mistake), reordering words in a sentence, or multiple choice options within a sentence. 

It could also be activities that explicit draw awareness to a phoneme or pronunciation pattern, for example spotting silent letters or spotting a specific sound or a grid where you tick the box if you heard the word. The common thread here is that all of these activities require sentences written in TL, developing the link between spoken and written form. 

Later on in the learning journey, I also include listening tasks more focussed on meaning, such as bad translation (sentences in English), slalom listening (chunks in English – chunks in TL also work well at earlier learning stages), ‘complete the grid’ (in English), or quickfire translations (hear a sentence and write it in English). The aim here is students linking their knowledge of the spoken form with its meaning, although at this stage students may also have a visualisation of the word in their mind; anecdotally students often say they find this helpful and you may choose to work this into the task purposefully and tell students to try to visualise the words while they listen.

When students are ready to move onto productive skills, listening tasks become about hearing the TL and writing down what they hear accurately in TL. Activities could include gapfill ‘fill in the blanks’ tasks, and dictation activities, which can be done in many different ways. The focus of these tasks could be different depending on your learning intentions: it could have a communicative focus, where the main aim is to write and identify lots of words, or an accuracy focus, where the main aim is to spell words and phonemes correctly despite writing fewer words.

All of these tasks at all these stages can be done to target specific phonemes or patterns, or a mix of longer and shorter, trickier and simpler words. The important thing is that listening is given time in lesson to deliberately develop this skill. This aspect of the learning journey can’t be neglected if students are going to succeed, and it’s important that as teachers we have an understanding of the sub-skills of listening, and we know how to get students to the next stage.

I’ve written about the sub-skills of speaking previously, on a post about how to teach reading aloud. I think that listening (including both listening to repeat, and listening for meaning or listening to link sound and spelling) is an excellent model for speaking for our students and builds a valuable awareness of the target language that is part of the process of building speaking.