ESOL learners: listening and speaking

There are specific constraints that apply to ESOL learners across all the progressions in Listen with Understanding and Speak to Communicate.

These constraints are expressed below as listening skills that are prerequisites for developing the knowledge, skills and strategies that are described in both the listening and the speaking progressions. Note that when learners are still developing these skills, the learning that is taking place may be difficult to identify, with the result that learners’ abilities may be underestimated.

Prerequisite listening skills

ESOL learners who are just beginning to learn English need to learn to:

• discriminate between intonation contours in sentences
• discriminate between phonemes
• listen selectively for known morphological word endings
• select details from oral texts (including the recognition of specific words), and
• listen for normal sentence word order.

ESOL learners at an intermediate stage need to learn to:

• recognise fast speech forms
• find (identify) stressed syllables
• recognise words with reduced syllables (abbreviations)
• recognise words as they are linked in the speech stream, and
• recognise pertinent details in a speech stream.

ESOL learners who have learnt these skills have reached a stage of competence in spoken English that will enable them to learn the knowledge, skills
and strategies described in the progressions.