Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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Box 7.4 A strategy and task-based exercise for ESP 
(Flowerdew and Miller, 2005)
1 Teacher introduces topic of ‘manufacturing systems’ and gets students to
discuss it.
2 Teacher plays video; students listen for general ideas.
3 Teacher plays video again; students listen for specific stages in the system.
4 Students work in small groups to establish particular points.
5 Students fill in a skeleton handout.
6 Students practise giving oral summaries of the video in pairs.

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Cambridge First Certificate with native speakers and found that they did less well
than my students. The explanation was that I had trained the students in the spe-
cific task of storing information from the text; the natives were untrained.
A further incidental problem comes back to the power struggle in con-
versational discourse. An interview is a very specific type of speech; the inter-
viewer is allowed to play the leader and to ask all the questions, but must remain
neutral; the interviewee has to respond to whatever happens. I remember once
seeing the film star Danny Kaye being interviewed on television after he had
arrived at a London airport; he asked the interviewer why she had come to the air-
port and about her life and opinions. The effect was hilarious because it broke the
usual conventions of the interview. While all of us are passively familiar with
interviews from the media, we are seldom called on to take part in them ourselves.
Listening materials should not stress interviews too much as they are a rather
untypical and unequal encounter, as described in Chapter 9. It would be better to
use examples of genuine monologues, whether lectures or stand-up comedians, or
real-life two-person encounters in more everyday settings – the supermarket, the
library, and so on. And it is vital to give the students situations involving success-
ful L2 users, so that they can see models to aim at that are not just monolingual
native speakers.