Speaking and Listening in English For Today at SSC and HSC Levels

Abstract

To be communicatively competent, speaking and listening skills are two of the four macro-skills to be given importance. However, teaching these two is highly neglected in Bangladeshi classrooms as there have been no initiatives to assess them although the prescribed textbooks English For Today: Classes Nine-Ten and English For Today: Classes Eleven-Twelve by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board, Bangladesh (NCTB) assign speaking and listening tasks to perform in CLT methodology, which Bangladesh introduced in 2001 (Rahman & Karim, 2015). This study investigates how much emphasis these two set books have given to the two neglected skills i.e., speaking and listening by comparing the tasks assigned in the books. Also, this paper attempts to find out the classroom practices of these activities in reality. To achieve these aims, the books were evaluated following a textbook evaluation checklist. Five teachers teaching English in classes 9-10 and 11-12 were interviewed and 50 students in classes 9-10 and 11-12 were given questionnaires to know the actuality of classroom practices following the activities in the books. The study shows that the books have a range of listening and speaking activities though little exposure to speaking and listening activities is made in classrooms and there is no sufficient logistic support or motivation (i.e., central assessment) for the actualization of them. Keywords: Speaking, Listening, Textbook, Secondary Level, EFL, CLT