Integration of listening and speaking skills to foster communicative competence of students

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Academic lyceum Fergana polytechnic institute

Secondary school №17

Integration of listening and speaking skills to foster communicative competence of students

Gofurov V.O. - Teacher;

Abdujabbarova D.Z. - Teacher,

Ortikova M.A. - Teacher

Abstract

The article under discussion depicts integration of listening and speaking skills to foster communicative competence of students studying in lyceums and secondary schools in Uzbekistan. The authors of the article consider that in real life, listening and speaking are always in integration, so teachers should teach these two skills in interacted way. Although the students may know how to listen and speak in the language, they may still not be able to communicate in this language mainly because these skills are not used in integration. Use of authentic materials and real life situations could naturally lead to the integration of skills since this is the case in real life.

Keywords: integration, listening, speaking, skills, language, integration, communicative, competence, outcome, interaction, information-gap, class, instructors.

Speaking and listening skills have been regarded as being too difficult to cope with, so generally students are not willing to participate in tasks focusing on these two skills. When they are integrated through information-gap tasks, students might see the actual outcome and become more willing to practice to achieve more success in communicating their ideas. Some instructors do not prefer information-gap tasks thinking that the class may get out of control which may cause barriers in communication process. Teachers should sweep away the boundaries and create a safe stress-free environment to encourage and motivate the students to speak. An informationgap task is a task where learners have the lack of the needed information to complete a task and they are in need of listening or speaking to each other in order to complete the task as in real- life. Information gap tasks are beneficial in a foreign language setting for various reasons. To start with, they both enhance the opportunity of speaking practice and highlight the real communication, therefore; the motivation of the students is high. One of the challenges that teachers meet in the classroom is motivating the students to speak in the target language. Active and confident students always participate, but the others who are less confident are not willing to speak [1, p.p. 23-27].

As Flowerdew, J., and Miller, L. suggest “speaking in the target language requires more than one mental task at one time like choosing words, pronouncing them, and stringing them together with the appropriate grammatical markers” [2, p.p. 7-9]. In order to perform these operations while communicating, complex and nonspontaneous mental operations are required and failure to do so may lead to reticence, self-consciousness, fear, or even panic, similarly with respect to listening. The instructor should be the facilitator in the classroom to create an unthreatening environment. Hence, another important feature of information-gap tasks is that each student has only part of the information they need to complete a task, so they must cooperate and share their information by speaking or listening to each other. Within this framework, in the learning process the students talk to one another, not exclusively to the teacher, which provides the involvement of all students into the tasks while at the same time fostering student-centered learning in the classroom.

In real life, listening and speaking are always in integration, so teachers should teach these two skills in an interacted way. Although the students may know how to listen and speak in the language, they may still not be able to communicate in this language mainly because these skills are not used in integration. Use of authentic materials and real life situations could naturally lead to the integration of skills since this is the case in real life. The aim of this article is to prove that listening and speaking both in practice phase in the classroom and in real communication situations entail unique features that result in real contributions to overall language learning. It is the teacher's task to comprehend and make use of how closely listening is related to the speaking skill and how listening can be integrated with speaking through information-gap tasks.

Integration of skills exposes English language learners to authentic language and challenges them to interact naturally in the language. By this way, English becomes a real means of interaction and sharing among people. In addition to this, it allows the teacher to color his/her lesson with varieties because the range of tasks is wider. Real success in English teaching and learning is when the learners can actually communicate in English inside and outside the classroom.

Students, at all grade levels, are encouraged to work collaboratively, finding best ways to communicate. Often, wrongly so, we assume that if a person can talk they have mastered the speaking mode of literacy; or, because they can hear they are good listeners. foreign listening communication skill

We need to create learning opportunities for students to engage in meaningful speaking activities and to improve listening skills through purpose-driven strategies. Fortunately, there are various communicative activities that allow us to meet these challenges.

Communicative activities refers to the classroom activities that provide a genuine information gap and make it possible for language learners to communicate with target language in Communicative Language Teaching Approaches. In other words, communicative activities are activities that give students both a desire to communicate and a purpose which involve them in a varied use of language. They have real purposes: to find information, to break down barriers, to talk about oneself, and to learn about the culture. Even when a lesson is focused on developing reading or writing skills, communicative activities should be listening and speaking into the lesson. Communicative activities are fluency-based activities. While such activities may involve students to practice a particular grammatical form, they are likely to do more than this. The key element is that the activity is based on a realistic situation. This could be anything from an encounter in a department store, to a group of friends discussing holiday plans, etc. Within this kind of context, students should be required to negotiate for meaning. This is likely to require multiple turn taking.

Wilson, R. claims that “the problem at present is that some of the activities being introduced as communicative activities are not communicative at all but structure drills in disguise”. Thus many teachers may think that the activities they design and use in class are communicative, but actually they are not. Therefore the features that make a real communicative activity should be focused on [5, p.p.78-87]. Based on related views about communicative activities, Sun & Cheng summarizes three common features as follows:

• Communicative activities are task-based. Task-based English teaching concentrates on communicative tasks that learners need to engage in outside the classroom.

• Communicative activities are learner-centered. The emphasis of teaching activity is on students' initiation and interaction. Students are expected to participate in the activities as real people and take responsibility for their learning.

• Communicative activities emphasize the use of authentic language input and the teacher's native or near native language competence in order to produce communication in the classroom.

Activities that are truly communicative also have three features in common; they are information gap, choice and feedback.

• An information gap exists when one person in an exchange knows something the other person does not. For instance, if two students both know today is Tuesday and one asks the other “What is today?” and he/she answers “Tuesday”, their exchange is not really communicative. Speakers' choices in communication are very important. Speakers should have a choice of what they will say and how they will say it. If the teacher's activity is tightly controlled so that students can only say something in one way; they have no choice and the exchange; therefore, seems not to be communicative.

• True communication is purposeful. A speaker can thus evaluate whether or not his/her purpose has been achieved based on the information he/she receives from his/her listener. If the listener does not have an opportunity to provide the speaker with such feedback, then the exchange is not really communicative.

From these features, it may be easier to distinguish between communicative activities and non-communicative activities. In a communicative activity, students must have a desire to communicate, and there must be some communicative purposes to their communication. Their attention, of course, will be focused on the content of what they are saying rather than the form. They will use a wide variety of language, and the teacher will not intervene by telling students they have made mistakes in their English or correcting their pronunciation, etc. The teacher would not expect the materials which students were using would control their language. For non-communicative activities, there will be no desire to communicate, nor will students have a communicative purpose. Students are involved in repetition or substitution drills so that they can be motivated by the need to attain accuracy, not by a desire to achieve a communicative objective. In these activities, the emphasis will be on the form of the language, not the content. As a result, the teacher will intervene to ensure accuracy, and the materials used will often designed to concentrate on a particular item of language [4, p.p. 88-94].

In conclusion it's essential to underline that communicative listening and speaking activities have a strong effect on student's motivation in the lessons. They help students have more chance to talk to lots of classmates without a fear of making mistakes. In a communicative listening and speaking activity, instead of having students stand in front of class and talk to others, the teacher sets up the activity that they can talk to some other students but not the whole class and the teacher. That makes a better effect on helping students avoid their fear of making mistakes. Then they seem to be more confident to speak and eager to speak a lot.

References

1. Anderson A. and Lynch Т. Listening. Oxford: Oxford University, 1998. P.p. 23-27.

2. Flowerdew J. and Miller L. Second language listening: Theory and practice. Cambridge university press, 2005. P.p. 7-9.

3. Guariento W. and Moreley J. Text and task authenticity in the EFL classroom. ELT journal. Oct. 2001. 55 (4). P.p. 347- 351.

4. Ur P. Teaching Listening Comprehension, New York: Cambridge University Press., 2005. P.p. 88-94.

5. Wilson R. Supporting Speaking and Listening. London: London University Press., 2004. P.p. 78-87.

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