1. Listening & speaking circles
© Nicola Carozza, 2018
Listening & speaking circles
Nicola Carozza, MT, OCT
University of Toronto, George Brown College

2. Outline Research Integration
Academic Listening in the 21st Century (Lynch, 2011)
Integrating Listening and Speaking (Tavil, 2010)
Understanding English Speaking Difficulties (Gan, 2013)
Listening Myths (Brown, 2011)
Research
Integration

3. Academic listening in the 21st century (Lynch, 2011)
“L2 listening remains the least researched of all four language skills” (Vandergrift, 2006, p. 191).
“Listening rarely has an observable product, even when a listener’s responses […] suggests successful comprehension […]; there is no guarantee that the utterance has actually been understood.”
“A more nuanced picture of note-taking has emerged […] and explores individual students’ conceptualisations of the purposes of taking notes in lectures.”

4. How do we better integrate listening?
Social Events

5. Academic listening in the 21st century (Lynch, 2011)
Interactive lectures (asking questions during lectures, pausing, etc.)
The “second-language learner users risk marking themselves out as less capable than the first language speakers, if they admit not having grasped a point in discussion” (Lynch, 2009, p. 67).
Lectures can be facilitated as social events, whereby creating more participation and understanding.

6. Academic listening in the 21st century (Lynch, 2011)
“Access to non-academic interactions can have an important influence on the development of the second language listening comprehension […] and their ability to understand lectures and other academic speech”(Myles and Cheng, 2003).

7. What non-academic resources can be used?
Non-Fluff

8. Agree or disagree
“Real success in English teaching and learning is when the learners can actually communicate in English inside and outside the classroom” (Davies and Pearse, 2000, p.99).

9. Agree or disagree
“Just as messages are listened in order to be able to do something else, the student speaking a foreign language should be less concerned with the language than with the message sent to communicate” (Tavil, 2010).

10. Integrating listening and speaking skills to facilitate English language learners’ communicative competence (Tavil, 2010)
“The process of integrating language skills involves linking them together in such a way that what has been learnt and practiced through the exercise of one skill is reinforced and perhaps extended through further language tasks which bring different skills into use.”
Competent learners should not only be learning the grammar of the language but also communicating in the language.
“The students can speak at a much higher level of proficiency than in the past when the preoccupation with grammar is used to deprive them of the opportunity to speak for the meaning.”

11. Understanding English speaking difficulties: an investigation of two Chinese populations (Gan, 2013)
Speaking is difficult, not for the grammatical aspect, but for the sociocultural competence it requires.
Psycholinguistic approach: speech production needs to be smooth; the process needs to be automatic
Ethnographic approach: language is socially situated—it must be socially motivated and cognitively managed
Discourse Analysis approach: effective strategies—how to say things, conversational rules, structure, and function

12. What could be an underlying cause of poor speech production?
Anxiety
My story

13. Anxiety
“Both the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students appeared most concerned about leading class discussions; […] group-based discussions appeared somewhat less demanding than class-based discussions and presentations.”

14. Understanding English speaking difficulties: an investigation of two Chinese populations (Gan, 2013)
Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production attends to both fluency and accuracy (Skehan 2009).
3 processes in speech production:
Conceptualisation (determining what to say)
Formulation (translating conceptualisations into a linguistic form)
Articulation (retrieving chunks of internal speech and executing a message)

15. Brown Listening is the same as reading
Listening means listening to conversations
Listening is passive
Listening is an individual inside-the-head process
Listening equals comprehension
Students should listen to authentic materials
Because L1 is effortlessly acquired, so is L2
Listening can’t be taught

16. integration

17. Integration
Higher Level Thinking
Critical Listening
Speaking Circles

18. Higher level thinking Comprehension Inferencing Implications Bias
Arguments

19. Critical listening Scaffolded listening Bottom-up  Top down
Connections to other texts

20. Speaking circles Audio input Text input
Functional language and phrases

21. LSC (Listening and speaking circles)

22. Level 1 Completed in class AV Following a unit’s theme
Bottom-up skills

23. Level 1: Bottom-up Processing
Recognize key words
Recognize key transitions in a discourse
Recognize grammatical relationships between key elements in sentences
Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence functions
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #2 – bottom-up processing. Retrieved from

24. Level 1: Bottom-up Processing
Identify pronouns in an utterance
Distinguish between positive and negative statements
Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance
Identify sequence markers
Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #2 – bottom-up processing. Retrieved from

25. Level 1: bottom-up processing
The following exercise practices listening for word stress as a marker of the information focus of a sentence. Students listen to questions that have two possible ‘information focuses’ and use stress to identify the appropriate focus. (Words in italic are stressed.)
Students check                                             Students hear information focus The bank’s downtown branch closed today.          Where / When Is the city office open on Sunday?                       Where / When I’m going to the museum today.                           Where / When
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #2 – bottom-up processing. Retrieved from

26. Level 2 Same AV Main idea, supporting points, examples
Strategies and skills
Note-taking

27. Level 2: top down processing
Students generate a list of things they already know about a topic and things they would like to learn more about, then listen and compare.
Students read a list of key points to be covered in a talk, then listen to see which ones are mentioned.
Students read news headlines, guess what happened, then listen to the full news items and compare.
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #4 – top-down processing. Retrieved from

28. Level 2:
Guided note-taking
Comprehension questions

29. Level 3 Individual level
Look for more AV or text related to theme or topic
Extend knowledge and higher level thinking
Make connections between first AV and second AV and/or text

30. Listening Journal
Brief description of the listening event—What did you listen to; where / when did the event take place, etc. (1-2 sentences) Write in complete sentences.
Summary of the event—plot of the movie; main idea of the news report; gist of the conversation, etc. (1-2 sentences) Write in complete sentences.
Your reaction to the material—Did you find it difficult / easy? Why? What do you think / how do you feel about what you saw / heard? Write in complete sentences.
Strategy—What strategy(ies) did you use to help you focus on your "skill?" (Note: It is insufficient to say you just listened many times or used subtitles.). Write in complete sentences.
Skill—What skill did you want to focus on? Why this skill? Write in complete sentences.
Vocabulary—You should list new vocabulary heard, including: words, phrases, idioms, slang, etc. You should demonstrate understanding (definition, your own usage, etc.)

31. Now what?

32. How do the AV and LJ connect?
Class AV BU TD
Individual Level LJ
Compile
How do the AV and LJ connect?
Speaking
Structured
There should be guidance along the way—end goal is speaking. What are they working towards?

33. Example LSC Listening Speaking LSC 1 News Clip Small Group Discussion
Interview
Socratic Seminar
LSC 3
Short Documentary
Debate
LSC 4
Lecture
Seminar

34. Reflecting on LSC Not only about grammar
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators
Scaffolding
Students become aware of what makes a difficult learning situation for them
Active participation
Timing—multiple classes

35. Reflecting on LSC
Psycholinguistic (smooth and automatic), Ethnographic (socially situated), Discourse Analysis (effective strategies)
Conceptualisation (what to say), Formulation (into a linguistic form), Articulation (retrieving chunks of internal speech and executing a message)

36. Questions?

37. Thank You

38. References
Brown, S. (2011). Listening myths: applying second language research to classroom teaching. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gan, Z. (2013). Understanding English speaking difficulties: an investigation of two Chinese populations. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(3), doi: /
Lynch, T. (2011). Academic listening in the 21st century: reviewing a decade of research. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(2), doi: doi.org/ /j.jeap
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #2 – Bottom-up processing. Retrieved from
Richards, J. (2016). Teaching listening #4 – top-down processing. Retrieved from
Tavil, Z. M. (2010). Integrating listening and speaking skills to facilitate English language learners’ communicative competence. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 9,