The Language Teacher
July 2003

Current Trends in Teaching Listening and Speaking

Jack C. Richards

SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore; Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia



Purposes for Learning English

Today, like it or not, English is the language of globalization, international communication, commerce and trade, the media and pop culture, and this affects motivations for learning it. English is no longer viewed as the property of the English-speaking world but is an international commodity sometimes referred to as World English or English as an International Language (EIL). The cultural values of Britain and the US are often seen as irrelevant to language teaching, except in situations where the learner has a pragmatic need for such information. The language teacher need no longer be an expert on British and American culture and a literature specialist as well. English is still promoted as a tool that will assist with educational and economic advancement but is viewed in many parts of the world as one that can be acquired without any of the cultural trappings that go with it. Proficiency in English is needed for employees to advance in international companies and improve their technical knowledge and skills. It provides a foundation for what has been called "process skills"—those problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are needed to cope with the rapidly changing environment of the workplace, one where English is playing an increasingly important role.

Traditionally the target for learning was assumed to be a native-speaker variety of English and it was the native speaker's culture, perceptions, and speech that were crucial in setting goals for English teaching. Native speakers had a privileged status as "owners of the language, guardians of its standards, and arbiters of acceptable pedagogic norms" (Jenkins, 2000, p. 5). Today local varieties of English such as Filipino English and Singapore English are firmly established as a result of indigenization, and in contexts where English is a foreign language there is less pressure to turn foreign-language speakers of English (Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, etc.) into mimics of native speaker English, be it an American, British, or Australian variety. The extent to which a learner seeks to speak with a native-like accent and sets this as his or her personal goal, is a personal choice. It is not necessary to try to eradicate the phonological influences of the mother tongue nor to seek to speak like a native speaker. Jennifer Jenkins in her recent book (2002) argues that received pronunciation (RP) is an unattainable and an unnecessary target for second language learners, and she proposes a phonological syllabus that maintains core phonological distinctions but is a reduced inventory from RP. A pronunciation syllabus for EIL would thus not be a native-speaker variety but would be a phonological core that would provide for phonological intelligibility but not seek to eradicate the influence of the mother tongue.

Teaching Listening

Listening, hardly mentioned at all in journals in the 1970s, has today come into its own. Although it continues to be ignored in SLA theory and research, at least in teaching it now plays a much more prominent role. University entrance exams, school leaving and other examinations have begun to include a listening component, acknowledging that listening proficiency is an important aspect of second language proficiency, and if it isn't tested, teachers won't pay attention to it. An early view of listening saw it as the mastery of discrete skills or microskills (e.g., Richards, 1983) and that these should form the focus of teaching and testing. A skills approach focused on such things as:

The changed status of listening was partly prompted by Krashen's emphasis on the role of comprehension and comprehensible input, i.e. the input hypothesis, in triggering language development, which lies at the heart of his Natural Approach. In the 80s and 90s applied linguists also began to borrow new theoretical models of comprehension from the field of cognitive psychology. It was from this source that the distinction between bottom-up processing and top-down processing was derived, a distinction that led to an awareness of the importance of background knowledge and schema in comprehension. The bottom-up model holds that listening is a linear, data-driven process. Comprehension occurs to the extent that the listener is successful in decoding the spoken text. The top-down model of listening, by contrast, involves the listener in actively constructing meaning based on expectations, inferences, intentions, knowledge of schema and other relevant prior knowledge and by a selective processing of the input. Listening came to be viewed as an interpretive process. At the same time the fields of conversation analysis and discourse analysis were revealing a great deal about the organization of spoken discourse and led to a realization that written texts read aloud could not provide a suitable basis for developing the abilities needed to process real-time authentic discourse. Authenticity in materials became a catchword and part of a pedagogy of teaching listening that is now well established in TESOL. Mendelsohn (1994) summarizes the assumptions underlying current methodology:

Teaching Speaking

Speaking has always been a major focus of language teaching; however both the nature of speaking skills as well as approaches to teaching them have undergone a major shift in thinking in recent years. Speaking in the early seventies usually meant "repeating after the teacher, reciting a memorized dialogue, or responding to a mechanical drill" (Shrum & Glisan, 200, p. 26), reflecting the sentence-based view of proficiency prevailing in the methodologies of Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching. The emergence of the constructs of communicative competence and proficiency in the 1980s led to major shifts in conceptions of syllabuses and methodology, the effects of which continue to be seen today. The theory of communicative competence prompted attempts at developing communicative syllabuses in the 1980s, initially resulting in proposals for notional syllabuses, functional syllabuses, as well as the Threshold Level, and more recently proposals for task-based and text-based approaches to teaching. Fluency became a goal for speaking courses and this could be developed through the use of information-gap and other tasks that required learners to attempt real communication despite limited proficiency in English. In so doing they would develop communication strategies and engage in negotiation of meaning, both of which were considered essential to the development of oral skills. Activities borrowed from the repertoire of techniques associated with Cooperative Learning became a good source of teaching ideas.

In foreign language teaching a parallel interest led to the proficiency movement in the 1990s, which attempted to develop descriptions of bands of proficiency across the different skills areas and to use these bands as guidelines in program planning. The proficiency concept was said to offer an organizing principle that can help teachers establish course objectives, organize course content, and determine what students should be able to do upon completion of a course or program of study.

Hadley (1993) proposes five principles for proficiency-oriented teaching:

The notion of English as an International Language has prompted a revision of the notion of communicative competence to that of intercultural competence, a goal for both native speakers and language learners and with a focus on learning how to communicate in ways that are appropriate in cross-cultural settings. At the same time it is now accepted that models for oral interaction cannot be based simply on the intuitions of applied linguists and textbook writers but should be informed by the findings of conversation analysis and corpus analysis of real speech. These have revealed such things as:

Current approaches to the teaching of speaking thus reflect the following principles:

References and Further Reading

Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002). World English: A study of its development. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Hadley, A. O. (1993). Teaching language in context. Boston: Heinle and Heinle.
Higgs, T., & Clifford, R. (1982). The push towards communication. In T. Higgs (Ed.), Curriculum, competence, and the foreign language teacher. Skokie, IL: National Textboook Company.
Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKay, S. L. (2002). Teaching English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mendelsohn, D. J. (1994). Learning to listen: A strategy-based approach for the second-language learner. San Diego: Dominie Press.
Richards, J. C. (1983). Listening comprehension: Approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly, 17(2): 219-240.
Richards, J. C., & Schmidt, R. (2002). Longman dictionary of applied linguistics and language teaching (3rd edition). Harlow: Longman.
Rost, M. (1990). Listening in language learning. London: Longman.
Schmitt, N. (Ed.) (2002). An introduction to applied linguistics. London: Arnold.

Jack Richards has worked in many parts of the world, including New Zealand, Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States. Since 1999 he has been based in Singapore again at the Regional Language Centre, where he is adjunct professor. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops for language teachers, and visits some 12 countries every year. He is also a long-term consultant to the Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman. He has written over 60 articles and 20 books.


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