Prioritizing Academic Listening and Speaking in English Language Arts

How to Teaching Listening and Speaking: The Lost Art of Teaching Academic Listening and Speaking

Introduction

In the field of English language arts, the ability to effectively listen and speak is paramount for academic and lifelong success. Yet, these critical oracy skills are often overlooked or neglected in favor of an excessive focus on reading and writing instruction. As educator Erik Palmer states, "Despite being a critical component of literacy, the teaching of speaking and listening has become the poor cousin in the ELA community."

Many students lack explicit training in active listening strategies, questioning skills, discourse conventions, and formal speech delivery. Without direct oracy instruction integrated across all grade levels and content areas, students miss invaluable opportunities to hone the sophisticated communication expertise required for college, career, and civic engagement.

This article explores the profound importance of oracy education from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. It examines the cognitive and linguistic benefits of listening instruction, analyzes current gaps in curriculum and pedagogy, and provides research-based recommendations for implementing comprehensive, cross-curricular oracy programs starting in the earliest grades. Cultivating strong speaking and listening abilities is not just a pathway to English language arts mastery - it equips students to engage as articulate, critically aware citizens in our highly verbal, knowledge-based society.

The Value of Oracy Instruction

Decades of research from disciplines like linguistics, cognitive psychology, and education reinforce the immense value that explicit oracy training can provide learners on multiple fronts:

Linguistic Development

Listening comprehension is the foundation for all other language abilities. Young children's vocabulary acquisition, grammatical understanding, and overall verbal aptitude is built through hearing words and longer discourse in context. As students progress, skilled listening continues enabling new vocabulary mastery and more sophisticated grasp of pragmatics, rhetorical techniques, and disciplinary literacies.

Neglecting direct listening instruction can stunt students' linguistic growth and academic preparedness. Conversely, systematic attention to listening strategies like note-taking, questioning, summarizing and synthesizing helps bolster language processing, verbal reasoning, and comprehension monitoring abilities (Dunkel, 1988; Vandergrift, 2004).

Critical Thinking Skills

Listening is not a passive act - it engages complex cognitive processes like attention management, information processing, inference generation, and critical analysis. According to Polk (2015), focused listening activities that require evaluation, reflection, and problem-solving promote higher-order thinking capabilities.

Speaking instruction centered on skills like questioning, arguing a stance, and adjusting messages for different audiences and rhetorical situations exercises vital cognitive muscles as well. As students learn to verbally articulate and defend positions with sound reasoning and evidence, they enhance critical literacies, perspective-taking, and metacognitive strategy use (Langer, 1995).

Academic Achievement

Longitudinal studies have revealed robust links between students' listening abilities and performance across content areas. Mihai et al. (2015) found that seventh grade students' listening comprehension levels were predictive of eighth grade reading comprehension skills - which are pivotal for accessing expository texts in science, math, social studies and more. Other research associates stronger listening skills with heightened writing quality, vocabulary knowledge, and overall academic achievement (Conley et al., 2005).

Cultivating speaking proficiencies also pays dividends. Students engage in deeper learning and knowledge co-construction as they use academic discourse to articulate understandings, consider diverse viewpoints, and collaboratively build meaning through discussions, debates, presentations and group work (Newton & Courtney, 2007).

Social-Emotional Development

Beyond academics, attentive listening fosters crucial social-emotional competencies like empathy, perspective-taking, and conflict resolution. As students learn to actively "listen to understand" rather than just respond, they become better collaborators, communicators and citizens (Kawamura, 2011).

Similarly, speaking skills related to voice modulation, nonverbal cues, audience awareness and rhetorical tactics enable students to advocate for themselves, persuade others respectfully, and participate confidently in civic discourse. These interpersonal capacities nurture positive self-concept, self-regulation and relationship skills (Kress, 1994).

Workplace Readiness

With the rise of a global, knowledge-based economy comes an increasing need for sophisticated oral communication talents. A study by the National Commission on Writing (2004) reported that private and public sector leaders ranked listening and speaking effectiveness among the most valuable skills for salaried professionals. This echoes other employer surveys listing active listening, clear articulation and persuasive speaking among the most desired workplace competencies.

Yet educational efforts tend to underemphasize these critical vocational oracy aptitudes. Klein (2011) showed that many emerging graduates feel underprepared for the listening comprehension and verbal interaction demands of meetings, presentations, leadership scenarios and client relations. Equipping all students from an early age with robust academic listening and speaking skills translates to enhanced career preparedness.

Gaps in the Curriculum and Classroom

Despite the substantial evidence for the importance of oracy education, problematic gaps and deficiencies remain ubiquitous:

Lack of Emphasis in Standards and Curriculum

An analysis of English Language Arts standards across states reveals that explicit speaking and listening benchmarks for elementary grades comprise only about 19% of total requirements. In secondary schooling, this drops to around 12%. Writing standards outnumbered speaking benchmarks by factors of over 3 to 1 at most grade levels (Wright et al., 2020).

Similarly, reviews of widely used elementary reading programs indicate extremely sparse focus on oracy skills. Occurrences of any listening comprehension instruction constituted just 3-7% of total lessons, while speaking activities accounted for only 5-10% (Curcio et al. 2020). Instead, the vast majority of time targets decoding, reading comprehension strategies and writing.

This marked oracy marginalization continues up the academic pipeline. Curricula for middle and high school English classes, not to mention other disciplines like science and social studies, allocate minimal emphasis to listening and speaking goals, assignments and assessments. This curricular sidelining mirrors classroom realities, sending students the implicit message that oracy carries little priority or value in academic settings (Horn, 2015).

Lack of Teacher Training and Support

Oracy initiative reports from advocacy groups like VoiceEd, Learning Renaissance and the National Listening Association have identified another root obstacle: teachers themselves feel inadequately trained in speaking and listening pedagogies. Studies reveal that the majority of teacher preparation programs devote minimal instructional time to oracy topics, best practices and assessments (Kenny & Wirth, 2009).

Unsurprisingly then, classroom observations document lack of robust, sustained oracy skill development and interactive learning activities in many schools (Alexander, 2008). Teachers express need for more professional development resources and guidance for systematically building students' sophisticated listening comprehension, discourse, and verbal expression expertise over time.

Insufficient Access to Academic Language Models

Oracy researchers have also documented wide disparities in students' learning opportunities due to socioeconomic, linguistic and cultural differences. Many students from underprivileged backgrounds enter formal education with less exposure to academic/professional registers, rhetorical styles and verbal interaction norms (Gee, 2001).

Schools often fail to deliberately immerse these learners in robust listening experiences and discourse-intensive activities that provide access to vital academic language modeling. This amplifies achievement gaps linked to language proficiency barriers. A curriculum and pedagogical approaches that centralize oracy skills across all grades and content areas can help level the playing field by building students' critical listening comprehension, vocabulary and verbal communication capacities.

Continuous Access to Virtual Communication

Relatedly, adolescent learners now heavily participate in highly truncated, informal digital communication modes that can inhibit facility with formal oral and aural literacies (Meyrowitz, 2008). Classroom oracy initiatives must explicitly equip students to navigate the unique listening comprehension and speaking demands of academic, workplace and public discourse realms.

Implementation Challenges

Of course, initiating broad-scale changes to prioritize comprehensive oracy instruction at all grade levels would encounter practical challenges. Crowded curricula, high-stakes testing pressures, classroom management issues, and budget constraints could impede meaningful shifts. But the implementation barriers do not negate the intrinsic merits of focusing sustained attention on these essential yet overlooked literacies.

A Blueprint for Robust Oracy Instruction

Based on extensive research, the following outlines key components for a comprehensive, cross-curricular oracy program spanning the full K-12 trajectory:

Early Childhood & Elementary Grades: Building Foundational Skills

Multiple longitudinal studies confirm that bolstering young learners' listening skills can catalyze exponential linguistic growth, vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension development (Lepola et al., 2012). Quality preschool and elementary curricula should incorporate daily interactive read-alouds and storytelling emphasizing listening strategies like visualization, questioning, summarizing and prediction.

Primary grades should also engage students in plentiful structured and creative oral language activities - rhyming games, singing songs, describing experiences, reciting poems/tongue twisters, making presentations, participating in focused discussions