Week 8: Teaching Speaking & Listening

After doing the reading, I had a better understanding of how important it is to properly teach listening and speaking. These are two aspects of learning and acquiring a second language that I think play one of the biggest roles. Both encompass a lot of different characteristics in which to take into consideration.

Our students naturally go through the different steps and processing when it comes to learning listening and speaking. I believe that Brown makes a proper break down of the different ways to approach listening and the process in which input in the L2 plays an important role in processing the language itself. As many have heard, use it or lose it, and this is the biggest determinant in whether the input is converted into intake and placed in short term or long term memory. If we don't help our students correctly process the information they are given orally, how can we expect them to store it and continue to use it?

As important that listening is, speaking is just as equal. There are a lot of different skills that come into play when learning speaking. The following are: conversational discourse, teaching pronunciation, accuracy and fluency, affective factors, the interaction effect, questions about intelligbility, growth of spoken corpora, and genres of spoen language. I believe that these are all important things to consider, and they work together to help L2 learners. While correction is something to always be aware of, it's always a good idea to be careful of how you go about handeling errors with your students. I know that as a future educator, the last thing that I would want to do is to make my students feel discouraged about learning their second language. With the many structures that exist in L2 learning, I think it's a good idea to be picky when you have to (for example focusing on a particular grammar concept, or colloquial language) and not so picky when the minor mistakes are made.

Lastly the article by Cary looks into a different realm of foreign language learning. Making your students feel proud of their different background/culture is something very serious to maintain both in and out of the classroom. Making people of all values and traditions feel wanted, important, and celebrated. The key to helping a student with this is to support the primary language, aid them in the continuous with their L1 while also being able to develop their L2. I believe that for a lot of us, this may be the biggest struggle as we try to overcome and tackle the cross-cultural issues if learning a second language (especially English) while also encouraging where they come from.