‘No man is an island,’ John Donne wrote.

Language makes sure of it.

Speaking affords the opportunity to articulate your thoughts so that others can access them.

Listening provides the opportunity to know the contents of other people’s minds.

For most of us, the two skills are deeply ingrained; a fundamental aspect of who we are and how we experience the world.

We use them over and over, day after day, with as little thought as we might give to the movements we make with our hands or the steps we take with our feet.

It’s useful, then, to step back and think critically about the nature of speaking and listening.

By doing this, we can think about the experiences of our EAL learners, for whom speaking and listening is automatic in their first language, but more challenging (for now) when it comes to English.

Why think critically about speaking and listening in the classroom?

Speech provides an important, and at times necessary, prelude to writing.

Two people in discussion over some topic are both trying to make clear what it is they think so that the other can understand them.

In such situations mediation takes place.

What we know inside our head needs to be made known outside of it, so that others can understand.

Therefore, we must think about what words we can use to express ourselves most clearly.

We then use the information provided by the other person (facial expressions, gestures, responses) to adapt our choice of words, if need be.

Because speech comes to us before writing and because, for children particularly, it is likely to be the easier of the two mediums for us to use, speaking our thoughts prior to writing them can be a great boon.

It displaces some of the mental effort required to make our internal experiences communicable.

Speaking about an idea before writing about it means you are arriving at the writing having already started articulating your thoughts.

The additional demands that writing makes (compared to speech) are therefore fewer than if there had been no prior speaking.

Of course, there are also times when we do not consciously know what we think about a subject.

Or it may be that we are unable to provide an answer to a problem because none immediately presents itself.

To go straight into writing in such a situation may be doubly difficult.

In such a setting, the space, freedom and flexibility speaking provides helps us to develop our thoughts.

Constructing Understanding

Speaking about a topic helps construct our understanding of the topic.

Whenever we speak, we overcome the isolation of human existence.

This may sound a little over the top.

After all, do we not live in societies and come from families?

Is not human existence predicated on kinship and dependence?

Well yes, but this does not disguise the fact that each of us is separate and that who one is is who one is and no more.

Certainly, we may conceive of ourselves as being intimately bound up with others, perhaps even to the extent that our very self feels as if it is made up not just of ourselves but of others as well.

We would feel sympathy for the person who has nobody but themselves.

Most of us know the psychological pain that comes from the death of a loved one: ‘It is like losing a part of oneself’ so the saying goes, and so would many attest.

Nonetheless, it remains true to say that a human being is physically constituted within the body they inhabit.

It is communication that allows us to transcend this.

For most this comes in the form of speaking and listening (though this is not the only way).

Rapport and Relationships

In any classroom there are times for silence; independent work necessitates stillness and concentration.

However, just as important is the development of rapport between learners and the establishing of working relationships.

Speaking and listening are an integral part of this.

Giving learners structured space in which to communicate with one another helps to develop a positive atmosphere.

It can create a sense of belonging and commonality between members of the group.

How you plan, direct and regulate speaking and listening is crucial.

Learners may take opportunities to talk about things other than the work. You will have to judge how much of this you are prepared to let go (if any). The criteria could be to what extent off-topic chat is beneficial to rapport and relationship building, and whether this outweighs the time spent not on task.

Listening to someone speak is akin to being taken into a small but important area of their mind.

Small because speech is the end point of that teeming mass of ideas and experience we all possess.

Important because it is the part we choose to share with others.

Having a conduit to other people’s minds helps us retain levity when dealing with our own feelings and when developing our own thoughts.

It allows us to know the feelings and thoughts of others.

This is an important end in itself, as well as being the gateway to sympathy, empathy and compassion.

There is also the fact that what others say may challenge what we claim to know or believe.

At best, this will cause us to defend our views or to look at them more critically. Both these avenues may be left untrodden if we merely keep to ourselves.

Different Types of Listening

Listening provides us with information.

In the classroom this can take many forms. For example:

• Knowledge about the world (usually delivered as knowledge about a certain topic or subject).
• Knowledge about rules and expectations.
• The opinions different people hold.
• What others think about any of the above.

The list goes on.

Suffice to say, what learners do with the information they gather ought to be a matter of interest to us as teachers.

Listening, in its broadest sense, can be divided into two categories: active and passive.

In the latter, what we hear washes over us.

We are inert, a rock upon which waves are breaking.

We might be able to take in a lot of information this way and later recall the things which were said.

Unless we actually think about this information and interact with it mentally, however, what we are learning is the knowledge someone else possesses.

We are not making our own understanding. Instead, we are borrowing and assimilating someone else’s.

Of itself this is not a problem.

Especially if we are confident in the authority and expertise of the speaker concerning the matter on which they are speaking.

Yet, I would propose that there is a qualitative difference between this form of learning and that which comes through active listening.

It is the difference between knowing and understanding.

We might be able to give an account of how something works, based on a recollection of what we have been told.

This would not mean, though, that we understand how it is that it works.

It would mean that we know what we have been told about how it works.

In order to say we understand how it works we would have to engage actively with what we have heard (or go and find out for ourselves by investigating whatever the thing in question is).

This active engagement may be as simple as attending to the words of the speaker and using logic, reason or experience to test their validity.

On a deeper level, it might mean analysing what has been said and seeing if it accords with other information we already know, or whether we can connect it to existing pieces of understanding we possess.

A third example of active listening would be the use of analogy to ‘place’ the information we are hearing within a framework with which we are already familiar.

The extent to which any of these processes leads us to truly understand what is being said is debatable. What is clear though, is that active listening involves the listener’s mind doing things to that which they hear. This doing leads to understanding above and beyond the basic recall that is a consequence of passive listening.

Two Ends of a Continuum

It should also be clear that active and passive listening are not two separate and distinct processes. The best way to conceive of them is as opposite ends of a continuum.

All this should give us cause to consider the efficacy, in terms of learning, of the speaking and listening that goes on in our classrooms.

The more we can encourage learners to listen actively, the more likely they are to develop their understanding.

The teacher’s role in facilitating speaking and listening encompasses a great deal.

You will need to think about how much you are prepared to intervene in discussion; whether talk is to be highly structured or placed inside a loose framework; what type of activities will you use – paired, group or whole-class discussions for example.

You will also need to consider what the purpose of speaking and listening is in your lessons and whether you will communicate this to your learners.

There might be times when to do so would impair the naturalness of their conversation.

On other occasions it may be vital to make it clear why something is happening and how learners should act to ensure its success.

There is more we could say about speaking and listening, but we have said enough to indicate why it is an area of classroom practice worthy of critical consideration.

In so doing, it has been implicit that this extends to teaching EAL learners.

Everything noted above is of relevance to them, just as it is relevant to any other learner.

That their abilities in the English language may be behind those of their peers makes it all the more pressing that we as teachers attend to their experience of speaking and listening.

The activities, strategies and techniques in my EAL Toolkit, and across the EAL Knowledge Base, will help you to do that.