Blog Post 7: Teaching Listening and Speaking

Blog Post 7
October 8, 2012

The article that was assigned brought up some very important points that ELL teachers need to keep in mind.  Even though we may not speak any or all of the languages within our classroom, we still need to support our students’ native languages.  This was shown in the article when the teacher made sure to take interest in the students’ native languages as well as native cultures.  She made sure to communicate with the parents and encourage them to keep their native languages intact.  The teacher did something that was very important which was allowing the students to take turns being the language teacher.  By doing this, the students show pride in their language and their culture.  It empowers them as well as bring them together.  The only thing that I found maybe a little problematic were the stars that those who spoke more than one language got to wear that read something along the lines of “I speak more than one language!”  Those who don’t speak more than one language still got a star to wear but I can see the students who do not speak more than one language feeling less as special or as talented.

            Brown’s chapters talked about teaching listening and teaching speaking.  TPR actually was one of the first methods that placed a high value on listening comprehension.  The two types of dialogues are interpersonal, which are exchanges that promote social relationships and transactional, which are exchanges for the purpose of conveying propositional or factual information.  Both of these involve shared knowledge between the two participants.  Because of this, the familiarity of the interlocutors will produce conversations with more assumptions, implications, and other meanings hidden between the lines. This would be a great place to teach students certain social customs or social rituals that may be unique to the target language.  For example, in American English dialogue situations, formal dialogues may start off with a hand shake and an introduction.  This may be obvious to some students but for others it may be awkward or uncomfortable.  Depending on the classroom demands (specifically the cultural needs of the students) a teacher may need to decide if a mini lesson on these social customs is necessary or not.  Something that I believe would be very hard to teach would be, in addition to idioms, colloquialisms.  A lot of the time, native speakers such as myself do not even realize we use colloquialisms.  It seems almost impossible to teach something like that let alone teach the discourse in which they may be used.