「聞き手」からの英語スピーキング指導の可能性
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概要
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This paper discusses the potential possibility of applying current research findings on listener responses for the development of more effective speaking instructions for the novice Japanese learner of English. Listener is an active entity in communication and they conjointly construct a conversation with the speaker by sending various backchannel signals (Maynard, 1993) like uh huh and yeah and by making a variety of listening queries to the speaker (Ross, 1996). Though the listener is sometimes regarded as a passive entity in a conversation, they sometimes take over the speaker's floor (Hayashi, 1996) for a brief moment and take a lead of the local interactions like the speaker. For Japanese EFL learners, speaking is said to be the most challenging learning issue (ACTFL-ALC Press, 2000), and developing more effective speaking instructions is one of the most urgent issues to be considered. However, looking at the current trends of English speaking instructions in Japanese high schools, many teachers administer such high-risk communication activities (See Bennett, 2003) as speech presentation, debate and direct contact with international students, which can eventually rather decrease learners' learning motivation. To avoid this negative possibility of those communication activities, we propose in this paper that teachers should set some introductory classes for learners to learn how to behave in a conversation as the listener, not as the speaker, before starting more speaker-oriented communication activities. Listener responses in a conversation are generally shorter than the speaker's utterances and learning how to speak as the listener will be more suitable for the novice Japanese learners.