Page 73 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

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Listening and Speaking

Chapter Objectives
• Recognising the importance of teaching an FL by integrating all language
skills
• Discovering ways of making learners engaged in a listening activity
• Understanding the role of meaningful context for an effective
development of listening and speaking skills
• Reflecting on ways of making speaking activities with YLs more
communicative

Language learning and teaching has traditionally been based on the divi-
sion of four language skills: listening and reading tend to be described as
receptive and speaking and writing as productive skills. However, proponents
of the communicative perspective argue that language cannot be broken
down into discrete skills sets since we rarely use only one single skill when
we communicate. In real life, language skills are hardly ever used in isolation,
they are more often than not integrated and interwoven. When we engage
in a conversation, for example, we usually listen and speak at the same time
and it is not hard to imagine a situation in which all the four skills are used si-
multaneously. Following the principles of the Communicative Approach, the
four language skills are today usually taught in an integrated manner, which
is reflected in syllabus design, teaching goals, course books, assessment in-
struments and other instructional materials and types of activities. This is in
line with a holistic approach to language teaching which would focus on ev-
erything the learner needs to know to communicate effectively. In addition,
as we have seen in Chapter 2, CEFR has replaced the traditional model of the
four skills with communicative language activities and strategies, which are
still based on the receptive (listening and reading) and productive (speaking
and writing) skills but include two more types of activities – interaction and
mediation (Council of Europe, 2018).
In this chapter, we focus on listening and speaking which dominate the
learningprocessin theYLs’classroom,whilethenext chapterlooksat arange
of opportunities for developing reading and writing. While it is clear that it
would be unproductive to teach each skill separately, discussing language
learning in terms of the four skills helps us define the teaching goals and un-
derstand how the teaching process can be organised. In addition, focusing
on individual skills enables us to recognise the potential of different activities

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