2.1.2 Goals of English listening and speaking

In the new English Curriculum Standard[24] (2011), English curriculum aims to develop students’ comprehensive language competence. About the listening and speaking aspects, students should be able to communicate with others fluently and correctly as well as understand the attitudes and intentions of the speaker according to the stress and intonation. Some foreign researchers also say the training of English listening and speaking aims to cultivate communicative competence. Tavil(2010) says integrating listening and speaking skills can facilitate English language learners’ communicative competence.  

2.1.3 Input and Output

Comprehensible input is the language material that learners read and hear. Krashen and Long have argued strongly that second language acquisition depends on the availability of comprehensible input before the learner’s internal processing mechanism can work.

Comprehensible output is the language material that the learners write and speak. Developed by Merrill Swain, the comprehensible output hypothesis states that learning takes place when encountering a gap in the linguistic knowledge of the second language. By noticing this gap the learner becomes aware of it and might be able to modify his output so that he learns something new about the language.

If we want to improve students’ language competence, we should keep balance between the comprehensible input and output. Both of them are necessary in language learning. Language input is the base of language output (Ma Yingyin, 2011). Input and output should be closely integrated and they can promote mutually. Output is always regarded as a way to practice existing knowledge or to elicit new input, not a way to gain new knowledge. In this process, learners should cultivate their thinking about output according to the existing knowledge, which can help learners transmit more information to others. If learners only pay attention to comprehensible input, their creative ability will be limited. Besides, only when learners convey their own knowledge can others as well as themselves find the defects in the learning process. What’s more, with comprehensible output, learners can take in others’ knowledge actively.

Back to listening and speaking courses, listening is the input and speaking is the output. Both of them are very important and are mainly influenced by four factors. Gong Zhu pointed out that the first one is students’ lacking of language knowledge, including phonetic, vocabulary, grammar and the storage of cultural knowledge. The second one is the interfere of mother-tongue. The third one is the different mode of thinking. The fourth one is the lack of English-speaking environment which limit the comprehensible language input and decrease the opportunities for students to practice speaking.

In teaching process, a good pre-listening part can make a preparation of the listening and speaking tasks. Pre-listening consists of activities that can facilitate listening comprehension and cultivate students’ sense of pronunciation. In while-listening part, imitating and retelling are efficient ways to promote speaking. By imitation, students can correct their pronunciation and model the intonation according different emotions. Retelling gives students more chance to exert their speaking ability according to their own understanding about the original material. All in all, the interesting and meaningful tasks can help students to promote listening and speaking ability.