Table of Contents

1  Introduction  3

2  Teaching Listening and Speaking.  3

2.1  Teaching Listening  3

2.1.1  Characteristics of Listening Situation  4

2.1.2  Learner Problems with Listening  5

2.1.3  Listening Activities  5

2.2  Definition of Speaking.  6

2.2.1  Teaching Speaking  6

2.2.2  Speaking Methods  7

2.2.3  Learner Problems with Speaking  8

2.3  The Oral Presentation.  8

3  Final Conclusion.  10

4  Attachment.  11

5  Bibliography  13

2

1 Introduction

Since we are studying to become future teachers of English, it is really important to teach the “so-called ´four skills`- listening, speaking, reading and writing” (Brumfit, 1984, p.103). This term paper will only deal with two of the four skills, which are listening and speaking. Both of these skills need to be learned and require active behaviour.

This term paper starts off by introducing the reader to the topic of teaching listening, continues by explaining the characteristics of listening situations, learner problems with listening and different listening activities which can be used at school. Furthermore, it gives a definition of speaking, how to teach speaking at school, some important speaking methods and learner problems.

The next topic is the oral presentation itself and what we did in class, which tasks we gave to the other students, which aims we wanted to achieve and how everything worked out. In the final conclusion we want to show what we learned while we prepared our presentation and actually presented it in class. Some problems that occurred in class and how we could have improved the organisation of the presentation and the get involved part will be mentioned as well.

We finish our paper with the attachment and the bibliography.

2 Teaching Listening and Speaking

2.1 Teaching Listening

Listening is a basic skill for different learning processes. It is an active behaviour in contrast to reading which is just a receiving of sound waves. There are three basic steps listening involves: hearing, understanding and judging.

Listening has two major intentions, which are to maintain the communicational relation (interactional function) and to impart information (transactional function). The most important factors of which listening is composed are the knowledge of linguistic structures, the numbers of vowel and consonant phonemes (liaison, elision), rhythm (syllabletimed or stress-timed), intonation, prior knowledge, attention and the short- and long-term memory (Sakuma, 2000).

There are three different stages of teaching listening: pre-listening, while-listening and postlistening. Pre-listening means that the teacher makes the students aware of a situation and

3

activates their prior knowledge. While-listening means that the teacher gives the students visual support or guiding questions beforehand. Post-listening is the stage where the students become active and work with what they had heard.

Listening needs to be taught with interest, variation and motivation

2.1.1 Characteristics of Listening Situation

There are five characteristics of listening situations: the informal spoken discourse, listener expectation and purpose, looking as well as listening, ongoing purposeful listener response and speaker attention (Ur, 1996).

The informal spoken discourse means that most of the conversations are spontaneous and therefore informal. There are various features informal speech has. One is called the brevity of “chunks” and denotes that conversations are usually broken into short chunks because people take turns. Pronunciation is another important aspect because it is often different from the phonological representation given in a dictionary (e.g. can’t versus cannot). In addition to that vocabulary is often colloquial (e.g. kid versus child) and informal speech is somehow ungrammatical. Because we usually comprehend less than 100 per cent of what is being said a certain amount of noise is meaningless noise. Redundancy includes repetition, paraphrase or the use of fillers like well, eh. The last feature is non-repetition. The discourse will not be repeated unless you request for repetition.

Listener expectation and purpose denote that the listener knows in advance what is going to be said and expects to hear relevant things in a conversation.

Looking as well as listening indicates that we usually do have something to look at which is linked to the topic and can be the speaker, a map or a picture. Only a small proportion of listening is done without looking (blind) like listening to the radio or talking to someone on the telephone. Ongoing, purposeful listener response means that we normally respond at intervals to show that we, as a speaker, are still listening and comprehend what is being said. The speaker attention is the last characteristic of listening situations and says that a speech is usually directed at the listener and the listener’s character and intentions will be taken into account.

4