Fostering Learners’ Language Proficiency in Oral Class: A Lesson Plan for Integrated Instruction of English Listening and Speaking Skills

This paper aims to foster language learners’ English proficiency by means of integrated instruction of listening and speaking skills in English oral class. It develops a comprehensive lesson plan from the selected textbook, which is applied to first-year English-major students in a northern university in China. The findings of the study are that students’ language accuracy and metacognitive awareness would be significantly improved through perception practice in the listening process. In addition, sufficient input previous to listening exercises enables students to produce spoken output more effectively and efficiently. An integrated lesson plan, emphasizing both English listening and speaking skills, helps language learners in improving language fluency and complexities, and eventually in enhancing their pragmatic competence to develop into strategic listeners and competent speakers in the target language.

most educational institutions aim to help their students pass local, national or international examinations. And many of these examinations are written, with little or no listening/speaking element to them. Thus it is unanimously acknowledged that listening and speaking skills can be ignored because it is much more important to improve reading and writing skills for the examination (Fareed et al., 2016).
As it is known that listening is one of the crucial components of spoken language processing, and there is no spoken language without listening (Rost, 2011;Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016). That is to say, listening and speaking are closely connected. One skill cannot be greatly improved unless the other skill is also developing. The lesson plan proposed in this paper is to integrate listening into speaking instruction in the context of EFL classroom in China. It serves its purpose in two ways: First, it aims to increase students' listening ability through perception practice and metacognitive instruction. Second, it also strives to improve students' speaking ability with a framework of teaching-speaking cycle (Goh & Burns, 2012;Sabnani & Renandya, 2019). Thirdly, it emphasizes the use of interactive strategies from a pragmatic perspective and takes students' confidence and motivation in those processes into consideration.

Rational for Listening Instruction
It is widely believed that a bottom-up approach focusing on the perception stage of the cognitive process would be more suitable for intermediate EFL leaners in listening comprehension (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012;Wah, 2019). Recognizing words in fluent speech is the basis of listening comprehension, and the development of automaticity of word recognition is considered to be a critical aspect of both L1 and L2 acquisition (Segalowitz et al., 2008;Hui & Godfroid, 2020). Although different factors may contribute to comprehension, listeners will tend to rely on lexical information alone (Mattys et al., 2009;Han et al., 2020).
Unfortunately, unlike reading a continuous text where white spaces between words are obvious, EFL learners often find themselves lost in a continuous incoming flow of utterances and unable to distinguish word boundaries. Indeed, identification of phonological words is a process involving estimating lexical units and boundaries within larger phonological groupings (Luo et al., 2020). Therefore, perception practice is one of the essential goals of this listening lesson plan.
On the other hand, there are certain times that word recognition does not always succeed and yet listening comprehension still can continue successfully because the listener can make inferences about the meaning of an utterance through other sources of information, including the pragmatic context. In the listening material, a group discussion was held among a few people about campus love. Students may not be able to catch the details of everyone's opinion but still can decide which side the speaker is standing based on other factors, such as prosodic features of speech: Rising tone at the end of a pause unit is most often used to indicate common ground or information that the speaker considers already shared with the listener; the level tone is used to indicate that additional information is coming. And the falling tone is used to identify focal or new information, and it also fills a turn-taking function (Rost, 2011;O'Grady & Bartlett, 2019). Together with their common world knowledge, it is not difficult for students to interpret the speech act of agreement/disagreement.
Nevertheless, it would be insufficient for students to develop their listening competence with only a bottom-up approach and perception focus. They also need scaffolding in increasing their metacognitive knowledge and strategies so as to better understand and manage their listening process.
Metacognitive knowledge is one's self-knowledge about learning in terms of person, task and strategy (Goh, 2000;Teng, 2020). To be specific, firstly, having clear person knowledge of one's listening problems and various affective factors determines one's self-concept and his/her success or failure in learning (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012;Hwang et al., 2017). Secondly, task knowledge is about the purpose and nature of the learning task. Students need to know how to approach and complete a real-life listening task. In this case, they are required to listen and write down different opinions on campus love.
Lastly, students should know which strategy could be used to accomplish a specific goal. In this listening practice, students are expected to listen selectively for the main arguments in the group discussion.
Equipped with the knowledge of the three aspects, students would become more aware of the listening process. At the same time, they also learn to plan, monitor and evaluate their comprehension efforts and the progress of their overall listening development (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012;Hwang et al., 2017).
During this process, they are also better able to perceive, parse, and utilize the aural input they receive. Gradually, they will become self-regulated learners, which in turn generates more effective listening, confidence and motivation.
As designed in the warm-up activity, students plan and organize their opinions on discussion topic while predicting what aspects the following listening material might cover. They compare notes and monitor comprehension in group work and finally evaluate their overall performance in a reflection diary.

Rational for Speaking Instruction
Hymes ( was further developed by Canale and Swain (1980) in the second language acquisition context. They divided students' communicative competence into four components: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. The ability of strategic communicative skills was highlighted as a key component of second language communicative competence. The second language speaking is a "combinatorial skill" as it involves doing various things at the same time (Johnson, 1996, p. 155). The notion of language skills is based on a definition of linguistic knowledge which covers language structure, meaning, and use (Canale & Swain, 1980;Canale, 1983). Learners need to acquire spoken grammatical knowledge to produce speech that is natural and authentic (McCarthy & Carter, 2001;Masruddin, 2018). They also need to master the pronunciation of target language sounds and avoid common errors associated with their first language (Hewings, 2004;Susilowati et al., 2018).
Learners' speaking competence largely depends on their lexical knowledge. In other words, their individual vocabulary size decides the content and fluency of speaking ability. Additionally, learners' spoken knowledge also needs to be complemented by pragmatic knowledge about speech acts and sociocultural practices. To put it another way, they need to enhance sociolinguistic competence to be aware of the norms in communication in different societies (McKay, 2002;Muhamadjonovna, 2020).
Learners should be able to proceduralize their linguistic knowledge through increasing use of this knowledge in various communicative contexts (Johnson, 1996;Wei et al., 2018). The concept of "skills" refers to learners' knowledge about language and communication that is put into action when in speech production. There are four categories of core speaking skills that learners need to develop. They are pronunciation, speech function, interaction management and discourse organization. The pronunciation skills are the ability to produce the segmental and suprasegmental features of the target language. Studies have indicated that prosodic features, such as intonation and stress have an essential impact on the intelligibility of learners' speech production (Hahn, 2004;Peñuela, 2018). EFL learners strive to develop pronunciation features that are similar to the American or British native-speaker models that they selected. Moreover, the mastery of expressing and interpreting speech functions is a significant part of learners' pragmatic competence in different cultural contexts in which English is used. It strengthens the opportunities for appropriate and successful communication with not only native-English speakers but also other speakers of English from cultures they are likely to encounter.
In spite of the previous two core speaking skills, it is still not enough for learners merely to know the ways of expressing their basic wants and intentions. To be exact, they also need to learn to manage interactions and influence the direction these interactions take. Finally, effective speaking is dependent on the ability of learners to organize extended discourse in accordance with accepted linguistic and sociocultural conventions. It requires knowledge of discourse routines and lexico-grammatical knowledge to establish cohesion and coherence. As language speaking is a challenging and demanding process for language students, communication strategies are utilized for this purpose. They include cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies and interaction strategies. In this way, it could enable language learners not only to participate more effectively during oral communication but will develop their language further.
To conclude, it is necessary for teachers to establish a holistic view of what the speaking competence entails in order to teach speaking effectively. It will facilitate teachers in planning and delivering lessons that develop students' speaking ability in a comprehensive and balanced way. Also it helps teachers in their reflection of teaching materials in a critical manner.

The Teaching Speaking Cycle
In the speaking section, the Teaching-Speaking Cycle, proposed by Goh and Burns (2012), is adopted to meet the needs of students in the Chinese EFL context. Each stage is incorporated a specific activity to address students' particular needs in the speaking process (as shown in the following figure).

Figure 1. The Teaching Speaking Cycle from Goh and Burns (2012)
As illustrated in the above figure, there are seven stages in this framework, fulfilling specific functions in the process of teaching speaking in oral English classes. Stage 3. Conduct a speaking task. Students express their own opinions to group members and ask for their opinions in the ways that they learned from the transcript. It focuses on both form and meaning.
The purpose of this task is for students to develop speaking fluency via group discussion.
Stage 4. Post-speaking activity. Teacher discusses with the students the language skills and strategies in giving and asking for an opinion from a pragmatic perspective in terms of politeness in the speech act of agreement/disagreement. Students are asked to interpret implicit messages, such as pauses, fillers, repetitions, etc. that accompany the sample discussion.
Stage 5. Task repetition. A minor change should be noted in task repetition. That is, students are asked to get out of their original group and talk to the rest of the class. They need to find out who holds a different opinion and write down at least one reason on the worksheet. Meanwhile, they also need to record their performance of interaction using their smart phones. In this stage, both fluency and accuracy are emphasized for the reason that repeating the task can facilitate automaticity in using different types of linguistic knowledge and skills (Goh & Burns, 2012).
Stage 6. Direct learners' reflection on learning. Students watch their previously recorded performance and write reflections based on the provided template. Then they share and compare reflections with their peers. It is an effective way to examine one's language learning through structured reflections.
Besides, students tend to learn faster and better from peers.
Stage 7. Summary and feedback. Teacher summarizes the key learning points of the lesson in class.
And after class, the teacher reads and writes comments on the reflection sheets before returning to the learners. Students would benefit from teacher's feedback on individual performance and gradually become more confident and competent speakers.

Lesson Plan
This study is targeted towards a group of intermediate first-year English major students at Yuncheng University in China. Their English language-learning span differs from 6 to 9 years of formal school study where they received extensive training mainly on vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension. It is anticipated that their reading and writing abilities are overtly higher than listening and speaking abilities. Thus, this integrated instruction could meet students' needs to a large extent.
The lesson plan for the integrated instructions of English listening and speaking skills consists of three steps, namely, a lesson plan for integrated skills, lesson plan for listening skills, and lesson plan for speaking skills. The audio materials are selected from the textbook of Contemporary English, which the subject students are currently using in this semester. The link is provided for future research: (https://player.fm/series/round-table/mar-30-controversial-dragon-pattern-in-wheat-field).   As the speaking skills are considered more challenging for students, more steps and time are provided to prepare and guide them in their actual output.

Discussion
This proposed lesson plan outstands itself in the following two major aspects. Details of advantageous benefits to students' overall language proficiency are listed below.

Listening Instructions
Firstly, authentic listening materials. Unlike the traditional unappealing textbook, the listening material is downloaded from a popular English-learning website with a real-life topic about campus love. It task: Opinion-expressing To be specific, the learners in question need more scaffolding on sound perceptions, word boundaries and segment of sound streams. The lesson design for listening section focuses on a bottom-up process to enhance learners' perceptual competence. In addition, it is also dedicated to raising their metacognitive awareness by instilling the ideas of planning for the listen, monitor their listening process and evaluate their listening performance.
Thirdly, metacognitive awareness-raising. In a traditional class, listening comprehension failure was mostly attributed to students' inability to comprehend or lack of close attention. Yet, metacognitive instruction discloses the source of difficulties in three ways. First and foremost, it encourages students to know more about themselves concerning strength and weakness in listening and the problems they have in the listening process. In this way, students could plan their listening before the start by allocating their focus and attention reasonably. Furthermore, students don't listen for the sake of the listening. Instead, they could learn to gain knowledge about the purpose, demands, and nature of listening task so that they are more able to adjust themselves mentally and intellectually for general interpretation.
Fourthly, students grow to be more aware of listening strategies and have their understanding about how best to approach the listening task. For example, they start to accumulate both effective and ineffective strategies into their general strategy repertoire. On the one hand, they adhere to certain specific principles to facilitate comprehension and manage learning. On the other hand, they consciously avoid unhelpful listening habits, such as word-for-word translation, anxiety, and distraction, etc. To put it another way, students don't always have to be the slave of listening; instead, they can gain control and become the master of listening. Accordingly, it is believed that students would enjoy listening class more and become more motivated to learn the language. And once they become strategic and autonomous learners, the benefits are beyond the classroom.

Speaking Instructions
Firstly, sufficient input from the listening section. In current practice, listening and speaking are two independent courses delivered by two different teachers. Students are expected to speak up immediately after given a topic at the beginning of a class. Without much input or activation of their prior knowledge, students remain reticent and passive. Unfortunately, the speaking class turns out to be a listening class solely from the teacher. By integrating listening with speaking instruction, it lays a solid foundation (in both linguistic and informative term) for students to familiarize and relate to themselves. It also facilitates the transfer from what they know in mother tongue to the target language, thus greatly enhances students' motivation.
Secondly, task repetition boosts overall competence. The shift of focus from language accuracy to fluency or setting higher requirement in task repetition activity, in fact keep students interested and challenged. Their overall ability, including linguistic, grammatical, and interactive skills, could be developed.
Thirdly, pragmatic instruction. It is highly necessary for teachers to integrate pragmatic elements into language learning because students are expected to use the language to interact with people in specific contexts. Their pragmatic awareness should be raised for communicative purposes. For example, it is considered direct and impolite to disagree with other people by starting with "No, I don't agree." Yet, it is suggested that students begin with a compliment or partial repetition of previous remarks before their disagreement. In this way, students could realize the function of language and become more culture-sensitive.
Fourthly, indispensable reflection and feedback. Keeping a reflection diary would benefit students' learning in the long run. Through this, students could get a chance to reflect themselves and their behaviors in language learning so that they would have a better idea of where and how to improve. In addition, with the scaffold of the teacher's specific feedback, students could develop into successful metacognitive and autonomous learners.
In summary, learners face challenges in three stages. Their relatively limited scope of topical knowledge could be the first and foremost barrier in conceptualizing an idea. Moreover, the formulation process fails to complete due to their inadequate grasp of linguistic and grammatical knowledge. Besides, poor pronunciation and intonation, inaccurate use of vocabulary and a lack of fluency also impede their ability of articulation.

Conclusion
This lesson plan aims to integrate listening with speaking instruction for a group of first-year English-major university students in a northern university in China. An audio listening material on campus love is used for listening and speaking activities. Students' language accuracy would be improved through perception practice, and their metacognitive awareness is raised to plan, manage and reflect on the listening process. Sufficient input from the listening section enables students to produce spoken output more effectively. In task repletion activity, their language fluency or even complexities develop to a certain extent. Meanwhile, their pragmatic competence increases as well. Ideally, with the teacher's guidance and scaffold, they would develop into strategic listeners and competent speakers in the target language.