How do you teach listening and speaking?

There are two ways to approach this question. The first is in a global, impersonal sense. The focus is procedure. Think of it as similar to questions such as "How do you copy a paragraph in a MS Word document?" and "How do you find a common denominator?" Many of us could quickly rattle off the process for finding a common denominator, but how many of us are prepared to describe the process for building strong oral communication? How do you teach listening and speaking?

My sense is that when many teachers consider the question, their first thought is, "Well, you really don't have to. Speaking? My kids are always talking! And teaching listening? We are always doing that—always reminding them to sit still and be quiet." But is this true? Are all of our students well spoken? Have they all mastered listening to each other, entertaining diverse points of view, evaluating evidence and supporting arguments, collaborating with others, and analyzing the media they are exposed to daily? Do they all communicate effectively in conversations, discussions, and presentations? Obviously not. Listening and speaking are skills, and like all skills, they can be improved significantly with deliberate instruction and purposeful practice.

The second way to respond to the question is personal: How do you teach listening and speaking? What do you do in your classroom to help students learn to listen and speak effectively?

Imagine you are in a faculty meeting, and your administrator stands up and explains that the school will be launching a listening and speaking skills initiative in line with new standards. "As part of your assessment this year," your administrator says, "I will look for specific lessons that teach to the listening and speaking standards."

Be honest, now: How prepared would you be?

If the new initiative had focused on writing standards, you'd probably be in good shape, especially if you teach elementary school or language arts. In those contexts, every teacher teaches writing and knows that there's more to "writing instruction" than simply "make students write." It's necessary to prepare specific lessons that teach students how to be better writers—lessons that break the skill of writing well into subcomponents. There are lessons and worksheets about capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure. Students complete practice exercises focused on topic sentences and supporting details, good word choice, and effective organization.

Yet when the topic turns to listening and speaking, how many of us can break oral communication skills into subcomponents? How many of us can point to specific lessons? Yes, we incorporate oral activities into our instruction. Our students listen to lectures, explanations, and material read aloud. They ask questions, speak in small groups, and present reports on various topics. But just as making students write a lot doesn't automatically make them good writers, making students listen a lot does not automatically make them good listeners. And occasionally making them speak in front of the class does not automatically make them good speakers.

Challenging Current Practice

When I ask teachers at workshops how they teach speaking, these are the kinds of answers I get:

 

Our 7th grade students do a history project, and they have to dress up like a historical figure and do a seven-minute presentation in front of the class and parents. Other students listen and give feedback.

We record a podcast about our favorite activities and post it on the class wiki where students can post comments.

Students have a weekly Share Time, and they take turns talking about the item they bring in. The class asks questions.

I do "Ignite" presentations about our project-based learning topics.

After the poetry unit, we have a "Poetry Café," and each student memorizes and presents a poem to the class. The students vote on the best poem.

The students take turns doing "Science in the News," an oral report about scientific events that are making headlines. I have students discuss the events.

 

What you see here is a nice sampling of the kinds of listening and speaking activities that go on, formally and informally, at all grade levels and in all subjects. However, none of these responses actually answers the question I asked: "How do you teach listening and speaking?" These teachers do not distinguish oral communication activities from oral communication instruction. It's a very common mistake—and one that must be challenged. To the Poetry Café teacher, I might say the following:

 

Yes, you require every student to recite a poem and require the class to listen, but do you teach specific lessons first? For instance, poetry will only come alive if the poems are well delivered. Do you have lessons about vocal inflection, what it is, how it affects meaning, and how it sustains interest? Do you make it clear to students that the speaker must add life to the words and the audience must listen for it? Do you have lessons focused on pacing, pausing, and adjusting speed for effect so that your students will be able to use each of these techniques to enrich their presentation? Do you ask listeners to be aware of the techniques used?

 

I might challenge the teacher who assigns "Science in the News" this way:

 

How do you prepare your students for these oral reports? Do you have lessons on eliminating "like," "ya know," and similar phrases? Do you have lessons on effective volume and pronunciation to ensure that every word is heard? How do you prepare your students to discuss these news stories? Do you teach them to ask questions for elaboration? Do you teach them to analyze and evaluate the speaker's motives—to ask, for example, why the speaker chose this article, "Hottest July in History," as newsworthy and not some other topic?

 

In all likelihood, few students assigned to recite a poem receive the kind of lessons I've described, and few students discussing content-area topics, current events, and project work get the sort of guidance I have mentioned. Although their teachers might make comments on such matters after the presentations, only a very small number offer direct instruction before. I know that for part of my teaching career, the answer to "How do you teach listening and speaking?" was "Well, I guess I really don't." I suspect the same is true for many other teachers. And it might be true for you.

This book is designed to change that—and to help you answer the "How do you teach listening and speaking?" question in both the general and the personal sense. Together, we will look at the importance of listening and speaking skills—whether for conversing one-to-one, engaging in a small-group discussion, participating in a meeting or webinar, delivering or consuming a podcast, making a major presentation, or learning online—and consider specific ways that you might teach listening and speaking.

Listening and Speaking: "Core" Skills

So why this focus on listening and speaking? Why now?

The immediate impetus may be the Common Core State Standards. As I write this, most U.S. states have adopted the standards, and the Common Core's set of English Language Arts and Literacy (ELA) standards include "Speaking and Listening" as one of four content strands, alongside reading, writing, and language (grammar and usage). I will talk much more about the standards in later chapters. And I will say outright that I am happy that after decades of oral communication being an afterthought (if not ignored completely), it is getting attention.

I have structured this book to align with the six Common Core anchor standards for speaking and listening. Although I am aware that the Common Core may one day disappear and be replaced by a newer educational initiative, I believe the concepts these standards address—skills that all parents would see as appropriate and necessary for their child to learn—have enduring value and are a sound foundation for oral communication instruction.

Consider too, that the Common Core State Standards reflect the movement toward improved college and career readiness. Ask yourself, what skills are most useful in the world beyond our K–12 classrooms? What will our graduates be doing, and what must they all be able to do successfully, no matter what field they are in? I would argue that the answer is communicate. And what does communicating in the workplace entail? Take a look at these numbers (Worth, 2004, p. 3):

How We Spend Our Communication Time Writing:   9% Reading:   16% Talking:   30% Listening:   45%

As adults on the job, we devote fully three-fourths of our communication to listening and speaking. I believe that alone is justification for increasing efforts to prepare students to listen and speak well, but I will offer additional justification as we explore these skills.

Changing Our Teaching

As I said, few of us have a firm idea of how to teach listening and speaking. This is not surprising. Our teacher preparation included classes about how to teach writing, reading, math, and science. We took classes on discipline and classroom control and on how to work with diverse learners and learners with special needs. In our teaching practice, we have professional development focused on differentiation, response to intervention (RTI), bully proofing, and using technology. Is there anything about how to teach oral communication skills, either in pre-service or in-service training? No.

Successfully teaching listening and speaking is a matter of both rethinking what we do and redefining our expectations of students. For example:

 

• Parroting back information does not signify good listening or good speaking.
• Quietly waiting for the chance to give an opinion without considering what anyone else is saying is not acceptable.
• Watching hours of video without being able to critique the techniques used to produce the video is problematic.
• One-way presentations in which a teacher or student talks at the class without the class thinking about and analyzing the presentation should not be allowed.
• Assigning speeches before students have learned the specific skills needed to give a good speech is unfair.
• Making podcasts without having first honed the communication skills involved and then posting the resultant poor speaking on the class webpage or YouTube is an embarrassment.

 

In short, this book is about taking something we all "sort of" address and making our instruction much more purposeful, directed, and specific. I will examine the expectations in the Common Core's Speaking and Listening standards and suggest ways to help students meet these standards. They are more wide-ranging than the words listening and speaking suggest and, again, they would have broad value even if there were no such thing as the standards movement. While some teachers may be masters at fostering the targeted, standards-based skills—collaborative discussion, evidence-based argumentation, valid reasoning, and so on—for many, teaching this content presents new challenges. For them, I offer activities associated with each skill, targeted to a variety of grade levels.

Finally, this book is intended to motivate you. As the examples in the chapters ahead illustrate, speaking and listening skills cross all content areas, and they are tied to long-term student success. For a long time now, instruction has focused heavily on the subjects addressed in state-mandated tests, and because listening and speaking were left off "the big test," they have not received the instructional emphasis they deserve. That has to change, and it is changing—due to new standards focused on college and career readiness and the reality of 21st century communication. It's time to teach listening and speaking. Let's get started.