According to the reading, it can be said that
listening and speaking are closely interrelated; as it is said by Brown, “It is rare to find just a listening test
because listening is often implied as a component of speaking”. Then, in
the text there’s a question that calls my attention which is “How could you speak a language without
listening?” I think that listening is a good way to widen a foreign
language due to the fact that through listening you can learn many things such
as vocabulary, intonation, and even by listening to songs and watching movies
without subtitles you can develop your own listening skill and your speaking
fluency.
Another Brown’s statement that called my attention is
the part that says “To determine if someone is a proficient user of the
language, people customarily ask, Do you
speak Spanish? But rarely Do you
understand and speak Spanish? I think that this statement is true because
in some situations people have said that if a person is able to speak well
another language, it is not necessary to have a good listening skill or it doesn’t matter if you are not able to listen or not. Maybe this occurs because they don’t are aware of the relationship
between listening and speaking, maybe they don’t realize that in many cases if
there’s not enough understanding of the language, then the speaking performance
will be poor or limited.
As a conclusion it is important to say that it is
necessary to pay more attention to the practice and development of the
listening skill because it can be a great help for our students to have a good
second language learning process.
