Week 8: Teaching of Listening and Speaking

I thought Brown’s chapter on teaching listening was really interesting because I can really relate to how difficult it is to learn how to listen an appropriately understand the locators intentions of the conversation and I really had no idea how to teach those ideas. When he suggests the multiple ways to teach listening skills they really captured my attention because I will one day need to use these techniques in order to ensure successful communication. For example, his suggestion of considering the form of the listener’s responses caught my attention the most because the learner’s responses really are a great indicator of how well they understood the utterance in the first place. I slightly disagree with this idea to some extent because with my learning experience, I feel that I always fully understand listening portions in a conversation but occasionally it is difficult to create a response without some minor errors so I don’t think that would be the best indicator.

Thus, Brown’s chapter on teaching speaking was equally as interesting because I am struggling with proving my fluency with the OPI exam and I thought it had some good pointers for language learners. Like we previously discussed in class, I think that the concept of language ego has a big impact on language learners and it is a difficult barrier to get passed since it is really on a more personal level. I thought that Brown’s most important principle for teaching speaking skills was providing appropriate feedback and correction. Although I feel that this depends directly on the learner and how they are most comfortable with the idea of feedback, I think it is still incredibly important for a learner to advance in their proficiency.

When reading Kumar’s chapter about teaching learner autonomy I couldn’t help but reflect back on the chapters that I presented on teaching learning styles and having students continually take self tests about their most appropriate learning styles and that by realizing how each individual learner has a different learning style, will best impact how a learner is successful in a language classroom.