CONCEPT OF SPEAKING AND LISTENING SKILLS

Language educators have long used the concepts of four basic language skills: 

a. Listening

b. Speaking 

c. Reading

d. Writing

The four basic skills are related to each other by two parameters:   

1. The mode of communication: oral or written

2. The direction of communication: receiving or producing the message

SPEAKING SKILLS

Speaking is the productive skill in the oral mode. It, like the other skills, is more complicated than it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words. There are three kinds of speaking situations in which we find ourselves: 

a. Interactive: Interactive speaking situations include face-to-face conversations and  telephone calls, in which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner.

b. Partially interactive: Some speaking situations are partially interactive, such as when giving a speech to a live audience, where the convention is that the audience does not interrupt the speech. The speaker nevertheless can see the audience and judge from the expressions on their faces and body language whether or not he or she is being understood.

c. Non-interactive: Some few speaking situations may be totally non-interactive, such as when recording a speech for a radio broadcast.

Micro Skills: Some of the micro-skills involved in speaking. The speaker has to:  

i) Pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them. This includes making tonal distinctions.

ii) Use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said.

iii) Use the correct forms of words. This may mean, for example, changes in the tense, case, or gender.

iv) Put words together in correct word order.

v) Use vocabulary appropriately.

vi) Use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversation partner.

vii) Make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.

viii) Make the main ideas stand out from supporting ideas or information.

ix) Make the discourse hang together so that people can follow what you are saying.

COMPONENTS OF SPOKEN SKILL  

The learners knowledge of the language system

The native speaker of a language is often good at the grammar and vocabulary of that language. He also knows the appropriate use of the language in a given situation. He can, therefore, communicate explicitly and most of the time succeeds in getting his message across. The situation is reverse in case of the speaker of a second language.

The speaker’s knowledge of the language

The speaker’s knowledge of grammar and vocabulary does not always ensure successful communication. Bygate, in his book “Speaking” compares the knowledge of a language with that of the working of a car. “What knowledge does a car driver need? E or she needs to know the names of the controls, where they are; what they do; how they are operat4ed. However, the driver also needs the skill to be able to use the controls to drive the car along the road without hitting the various objects that tend to get in the way. In this way the job we do when we speak is similar. We do not merely know how to assemble sentences in the abstract: we have to produce them and adapt them to the circumstances. This means making decisions rapidly. Implementing them smoothly and adjusting our conversation as unexpected problems appear in our path.”

Levels of speaking skills

An utterance is interpreted by the listeners with the help of the items such as the context in which it occurs, knowledge of the context (i.e. Knowledge of who is speaking to who and about what), recognition of the sounds, stress, intonation, pronunciation, grammar, style, or formality of speaking, register etc. 

  LISTENING SKILLS

Listening comprehension is the receptive skill in the oral mode. When we speak of listening what we really mean is listening and understanding what we hear. 

There are two kinds of listening situations in which we find ourselves: 

1. Interactive: Interactive listening situations include face-to-face conversations and 

telephone calls, in which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner

2. Non-interactive. Some non-interactive listening situations are listening to the radio, TV, films, lectures, or sermons. In such situations we usually don't have the opportunity to ask for clarification, slower speech or repetition

  Micro Skills: Richards (1983, cited in Omaggio, 1986, p. 126) proposes that the following are the micro-skills involved in understanding what someone says to us. The listener has to:

i) Retain chunks of language in short-term memory

ii) Discriminate among the distinctive sounds in the new language

iii) Recognize stress and rhythm patterns, tone patterns, intonational contours.

iv) Recognize reduced forms of words

v) Distinguish word boundaries

vi) Recognize typical word-order patterns

vii) Recognize vocabulary

viii) Detect key words, such as those identifying topics and ideas

ix) Guess meaning from context

x) Recognize grammatical word classes

xi) Recognize basic syntactic patterns

xii) Recognize cohesive devices

xiii) Detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, and the like

COMPONENTS OF LISTENING SKILL 

Listening comprehension can be divided into five sequential components each dependent upon the preceding one:

a. The ability to identify the sounds, stress and intonation pattern, voice qualities in the second language and to discriminate between them and similar sounds in the native language.

b. The perception/construction of a message from them.

c. Holding the message in one’s auditory memory until it can be processed.

d. Decoding the message with the help of the previous information stored in the memory

e. Plan a response or store it in the second language.