Aural and Oral Skills

 I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Please click to download a PDF of my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching. 

The two most basic language skills, listening and speaking, sound exactly alike when we describe them as oral and aural skills. “Aural” language, of course, refers to language as we hear it. “Oral” language is what we say.

These two words are “homophones” – words spelled differently that sound alike. There is no good reason why they should be homophones, but they are. Perhaps that accident of spelling can serve as a reminder that, while these two skills cannot be separated, they need to be developed in different ways.

Teaching Basic Skills: According to a hoary adage, “We are given two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we talk.” This is a maxim to remember when we plan our lessons – especially when we are dealing with a classroom of new learners.

Logically, listening should be the first skill you teach. In practice, however, most teachers get their students talking on the first day of class, and many make speech the major focus of their lessons. They tend to downplay the skill of listening, as do most foreign language textbooks. Yet listening is probably the more important skill involved in foreign language learning, as it certainly is in the acquisition of one’s native tongue.

Stephen Krashen and other thinkers have stressed that we acquire language best by using it in communicative ways. He was also one of the first to stress that language acquisition and language learning are not the same. Language learning (in the sense of making conscious discoveries about grammar, for instance) involves different mental processes, and those processes play distinctly secondary roles to those we use when we acquire language naturally. Language develops, he says, through exposure to and use of “comprehensible input” – target language the learner can understand and assimilate. All of this is textbook Krashen.

One reasonable conclusion from these observations is that language learners should understand what they are listening to before they begin to speak. Especially at the initial phase of language acquisition, teachers should avoid oral practice to some degree. Instead, they should have their students concentrate on comprehending what they hear. This idea parallels the experience of young children, who spend almost two years in linguistic silence before they begin to speak.

To use listening-focused learning, a communicative language teacher needs to incorporate active listening into their classes. This is done with activities in which the learners demonstrate that they understand, and receive gentle correction when they err. More advanced students must be explicitly taught to recognize reduced language forms heard in colloquial speech – as in “Whaddaya say?” Also, of course, part of aural comprehension is learning to decipher nonverbal clues.

Pure listening is rarely a good strategy for sustained language acquisition. Even if students are still in their silent period – a common phase for beginners, in which they speak very little if at all, – teachers should encourage active participation from them. This is the only way to confirm that they have understood. Participation can mean as little as a nod or a headshake, for example, or the words “yes” and “no” in English or their native language. Listening without speaking is important for foreign language learners, especially when their language learning has just begun, but at some level that listening should be participatory.

Listening activities do not always involve some other skill, but they generally do; the best classroom activities cross skill boundaries. Since the most typical pairing for a listening activity is to combine it with speech practice, a focus on listening can actually promote the effective development of speaking skills. To see how, let's turn to the activation of speech.

Focus on Conversation: Speaking activities best occur in classrooms in which learners feel comfortable and confident, free to take risks, and have plenty of opportunities to speak. While there are countless kinds of activities teachers use to develop speaking skills, they most commonly promote conversational speech. This, of course, requires the use of both listening and speaking skills.

Conversational language has four characteristics. It is interactive, in the sense that we talk back and forth in short bursts. Often, we do not even use complete sentences – “nice day, eh?” Conversation also has narrow time limits. We have to listen and respond without the luxury of thinking much about what we want to say. Conversation is also repetitive, in the sense that we tend to use a relatively small amount of vocabulary and a relatively small repertory of language structures.. And finally, of course, it is error-prone. Because of time limits, we may use the wrong word, pronounce something wrong or mangle structure. While we may hear the mistake and back up and correct ourselves, often we don’t.

Bearing in mind the earlier comments about listening, these characteristics of conversation illustrate an important difference between listening activities and speaking activities. Because listening is a learner’s primary source of comprehensible input, aural activities depend heavily on accuracy. To understand, learners must listen carefully, and their comprehension must be good. In many listening activities, we play a short recording of speech repeatedly until we think our learners understand it.

By contrast, learners shift heavily in the direction of fluency during conversation practice, which combines both listening and speaking skills. At this portion of the language class, the teacher kisses student accuracy goodbye. During speaking activities, the focus is on interactive, time-limited, repetitive and error-prone conversation. As is often the case in the language classroom, as we move from skill to skill, or from language study to language activation, we willingly compromise accuracy in the interest of fluency.

The How and Why of Language: Language originated with the two linguistic skills we have just reviewed – listening and speaking. But why? What is the purpose of language? And how did it evolve to play this role in our lives?

Whether we hear it or voice it, the purpose of language is to do the things that speech can do. In no way is it abstract. Like an axe, language is a tool with which we do things.

According to linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle, we use language to perform five kinds of “speech act”. These are commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative. Commissive speech commits the speaker to do something – for example, “I promise to bring it tomorrow,” or “Watch out or I will report you.” Declarations change the state of things – “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “You’re fired!” Directive speech gets the listener to do something – “Please come in,” “Watch out!” or “Why don’t you take your medicine?” Expressive language explains feelings and attitudes: “Those roses are beautiful,” or “I hate broccoli.” Finally, representative speech describes states or events – “Rice is an important Thai export,” or “The United States is at war again.” All of our speech seems to do one or more of these five things.

Language is such an important part of our lives that we use it to meet virtually all of our daily needs. Consider psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which is often illustrated as a pyramid. In Maslow’s model, we can only move to a higher level of need after we have scrambled up the lower levels.

In his view, people have five kinds of need. Our most basic needs are physiological – food and water, for example. The next level up is the need for safety and security, which we achieve, for example, by dealing with emergencies. Tier 3 involves needs for love, affection and belongingness. The need for esteem – self-respect and respect from others – comes next, but the highest level in this hierarchy is the need for self-actualization. According to Maslow, in this last level “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” The point of this discussion is that we meet virtually all those needs through speech acts.

The gradual evolution of language has profoundly affected the nature of our species. As Stephen Pinker observes,

Human practical intelligence may have evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.

It is impossible to overstate the value or complexity of language. It is perhaps the most fundamental feature of our lives.

The Structure of Language

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.


By Peter McKenzie-Brown

You are studying a foreign language, you want to learn ten new words every day, and the mental task of managing your growing word list seems formidable. To put the job into context, consider the following from linguist Stephen Pinker.

“Children begin to learn words before their first birthday,” he says, “and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

Smaller than a toddler’s daily intake, your ten-word vocabulary list suddenly seems like a pauper in a palace. And the problem of properly learning vocabulary involves much more than remembering words. In the classroom, only a few words and a small part of what the learner needs to know about a word can be dealt with at any one time. For the common words, which often have multiple meanings and complex nuances, you can only teach a bit at a time. The more information you present, the more likely your learners are to misunderstand.

For both teacher and learner, vocabulary is a huge challenge. But help is at hand from vocabulary researcher Paul Nation, whose magisterial 480-page tome, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, offers endless insights into the science and practice of teaching and learning vocabulary. He calls his preferred method of vocabulary teaching the direct approach.

Nation describes vocabulary learning as a “meeting” between the learner and the word, and he stresses that it only makes sense to have close encounters with common, useful words. Most teachers emphasize the most common 2000 English words. The most widely accepted list is available on the Internet by googling Michael West’s General Service List.

“Useful vocabulary needs to be met again and again to ensure it is learned,” Nation says. “In the early stages of learning the meetings need to be reasonably close together, preferably within a few days, so that too much forgetting does not occur. Later meetings can be very widely spaced with several weeks between each meeting.”

There are essentially four ways to learn and teach high-frequency words.
• One is direct teaching, mentioned earlier. For the language teacher, explaining vocabulary is a critical part of classroom duties.
• Also, encourage your students to participate in direct learning, which involves study from word cards and dictionary use.
• A third method, incidental learning, can involve guessing from context in extensive reading or through word use in communicative activities.
• The fourth method Nation calls “planned encounters.” These encounters include vocabulary exercises and graded reading – that is, using reading materials like shortened novels with reduced vocabulary for language learners.(Graded readers are available in many language teaching bookstores.)

Nation’s direct approach to vocabulary teaching is built upon three main ideas. First, vocabulary teaching should focus on high-frequency words that will be of continuing importance for the learners. As a teacher, you have a duty to pass over low-frequency words completely or with little comment. Also, you have to make sure the learners come back to the word frequently, to diminish the power of forgetfulness.

Also, when you teach a word you should focus on its “learning burden” – that is, the features of the word that actually need to be taught. These can differ quite dramatically from word to word. Take the word “think.” You need to explain that it is an irregular verb; that it includes the irregular spelling “thought”; and that “thought” can also be a noun.

Finally, direct teaching should be clear and simple. To learn a word in all its complexity, learners need to meet it many times. Don’t try to teach a complex word – for example, the many meanings of the word “right” – in one sitting. That kind of intensive vocabulary teaching takes place in boring classrooms, and it frequently leads to perplexed students.

Words, Words, Words

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.


By Peter McKenzie-Brown

You are studying a foreign language, you want to learn ten new words every day, and the mental task of managing your growing word list seems formidable. To put the job into context, consider the following from linguist Stephen Pinker.

“Children begin to learn words before their first birthday,” he says, “and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

Smaller than a toddler’s daily intake, your ten-word vocabulary list suddenly seems like a pauper in a palace. And the problem of properly learning vocabulary involves much more than remembering words. In the classroom, only a few words and a small part of what the learner needs to know about a word can be dealt with at any one time. For the common words, which often have multiple meanings and complex nuances, you can only teach a bit at a time. The more information you present, the more likely your learners are to misunderstand.

For both teacher and learner, vocabulary is a huge challenge. But help is at hand from vocabulary researcher Paul Nation, whose magisterial 480-page tome, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, offers endless insights into the science and practice of teaching and learning vocabulary. He calls his preferred method of vocabulary teaching the direct approach.

Nation describes vocabulary learning as a “meeting” between the learner and the word, and he stresses that it only makes sense to have close encounters with common, useful words. Most teachers emphasize the most common 2000 English words. The most widely accepted list is available on the Internet by googling Michael West’s General Service List.

“Useful vocabulary needs to be met again and again to ensure it is learned,” Nation says. “In the early stages of learning the meetings need to be reasonably close together, preferably within a few days, so that too much forgetting does not occur. Later meetings can be very widely spaced with several weeks between each meeting.”

There are essentially four ways to learn and teach high-frequency words.
• One is direct teaching, mentioned earlier. For the language teacher, explaining vocabulary is a critical part of classroom duties.
• Also, encourage your students to participate in direct learning, which involves study from word cards and dictionary use.
• A third method, incidental learning, can involve guessing from context in extensive reading or through word use in communicative activities.
• The fourth method Nation calls “planned encounters.” These encounters include vocabulary exercises and graded reading – that is, using reading materials like shortened novels with reduced vocabulary for language learners.(Graded readers are available in many language teaching bookstores.)

Nation’s direct approach to vocabulary teaching is built upon three main ideas. First, vocabulary teaching should focus on high-frequency words that will be of continuing importance for the learners. As a teacher, you have a duty to pass over low-frequency words completely or with little comment. Also, you have to make sure the learners come back to the word frequently, to diminish the power of forgetfulness.

Also, when you teach a word you should focus on its “learning burden” – that is, the features of the word that actually need to be taught. These can differ quite dramatically from word to word. Take the word “think.” You need to explain that it is an irregular verb; that it includes the irregular spelling “thought”; and that “thought” can also be a noun.

Finally, direct teaching should be clear and simple. To learn a word in all its complexity, learners need to meet it many times. Don’t try to teach a complex word – for example, the many meanings of the word “right” – in one sitting. That kind of intensive vocabulary teaching takes place in boring classrooms, and it frequently leads to perplexed students.

Noam Chomsky's Black Box

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.



By Peter McKenzie-Brown

What is language, and where does it come from? The answer to this question has great bearing on how we teach language.

Before the coming of Communicative Language Teaching, most thinkers believed that behaviourism – a powerful approach to psychology – explained language. In effect, according to this view, language is a set of habits we develop through mimicry of our parents and those around us.

We learn language because it brings us a reward of some kind. The basic model these thinkers – led by B.F. Skinner, a renowned Harvard psychologist – used to explain psychological phenomena is a simple one. If an organism responds in a certain way to a stimulus and gets positive reinforcement, its behaviour will be repeated. If it gets no reinforcement or negative reinforcement, its behaviour will stop. Thus, any kind of vocal output can become part of language, given sufficient reinforcement.

This model of language learning had a powerful impact on the teaching method known as audiolingualism. This method was based on the belief that language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. It placed a strong focus on drills, on teaching through speech at the expense of the other skills, on inductive teaching (repeating a structure many times, then deciding for yourself how the grammar works) and on learning vocabulary within a linguistic and cultural context. This approach is still widely used in East Asia.

In effect, behaviourism denied the concept of human nature. It taught that people can be made to become almost anything, given the right sequence of stimuli and responses. On the matter of language, the logical conclusion was that there were no limitations to what language could be. Any linguistic habit that people somehow developed could become part of language. In academic circles these notions were widely accepted until Noam Chomsky turned them upside down.

The Language Instinct: In a famous phrase, Chomsky said he wanted to "look deeper" into some basic questions about human language. His early theoretical books and papers gave his answer to an extremely profound question: Is language infinitely changeable (the basis of audio-lingualism), or are all languages in some way a part of being human? In the following passage, one of Chomsky’s best-known admirers summarizes the thinker’s basic conclusions:

Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.

Chomsky’s ideas explained the facts in a way that no other theory can. Acquiring language is not a normal mental problem. Everyone sees small children pick up language effortlessly. But few of us ever give a thought to what an amazing phenomenon this is. No one would expect a three-year-old to master calculus. Yet we are not in the least surprised when a three-year-old learns grammar, which is a much more difficult task. Children learn the rules of their native grammar (whatever it might be) by hearing a limited set of sample sentences. According to Chomsky's followers, the limited information they receive is mathematically insufficient for them to determine grammatical principles, yet somehow they are still able to do so. This is what is sometimes called “The paradox of language acquisition”. As Chomsky explained,

In a given linguistic community, children with very different grammar arrive at comparable grammars, indeed almost identical ones, as far as we know. That is what requires explanation. Each child has a different experience, each child is confronted by different data – but in the end the experience is essentially the same. As a consequence, we have to suppose that all children share the same internal constraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct.

Chomsky proposed that each of us has a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – what he sometimes called a “little black box” – that starts functioning when we are still infants. By the time we are five or six, that device has enabled us to vacuum from our immediate environment a native language based on universal grammar. Put another way, all languages are fundamentally the same, irrespective of the cultures we live in. They are the function of a large number of words (arbitrary symbols whose meaning is set by convention) and a limited number of grammatical rules that are somehow structured into our brains and minds.

Those who learn during the “critical period” – roughly, during early childhood – acquire language without effort. However, our little black boxes begin to function in different ways after we reach six years of age. We remain able to acquire language fairly easily until we reach puberty, after which our ability to acquire language seems to be reduced again.

Older learners must therefore learn languages in quite different ways from the effortless acquisition of young children. The ways in which language acquisition changes form are of vital importance to language teachers.

A helpful book in this area of study is How Languages Are Learned by academics Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada. The two educational psychologists offer useful insights into the differences in learning styles. They say, “We have all heard people say that they cannot learn something until they have seen it. Such learners would fall into the group called ‘visual learners.’ Other people, who may be called ‘aural’ learners, seem to need only to hear something once or twice before they know it. For others, who are referred to as ‘kinaesthetic’ learners, there is a need to add a physical action to the learning process.”

These ideas are common in teaching circles. However, Lightbown and Spada go on to discuss two learning styles that are highly cultural in nature. “In contrast to these perceptually based learning styles, [there is] a cognitive learning style distinction between field independent and field dependent learners. This refers to whether an individual tends to separate details from the general background or to see things more holistically.” In general, westerners, who tend to see things as black or white, are field independent. By contrast, East Asians are field dependent inasmuch as they see things as part of a large mingling of relationships.

In their challenging text, Lightbown and Spada describe three theories about how we acquire our first language. The most important of those theories, innatism and behaviourism are covered at the beginning of this essay. A third approach is called interactionism.

The interactionist position is that “language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the uniquely human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops.” A kind of umbrella that covers several different kinds of language theories, contemporary interactionism assumes the validity of Chomsky’s idea that innate structures in the mind are responsible for language learning, but has a variety of questions about the contributions of environmental factors to language learning.

In a summary of these questions, the authors propose that behaviourism may help explain our acquisition of vocabulary and other parts of grammar. For its part, innatism seems “most plausible in explaining the acquisition of complex grammar.” And “interactionist explanations may be useful for understanding how children relate form and meaning in language, how they interact in conversations, and how they learn to use language appropriately.”