Adult Literacy Core Curriculum - Nationally developed Skills for Life ...

Speaking
and listening
Speaking and listening is by far the most widespread form
of communication even in the most literate person’s life. In
most jobs people spend much more time speaking, listening
and discussing than reading or writing, so it’s worth
knowing something about how it all works, and using that
awareness to increase confidence and effectiveness. Talk
is an important medium for getting things done, but equally
important is the ability to listen carefully and both act and
reflect on what is heard.
Many adults will not have received explicit teaching in
speaking and listening before. But they will have a lot of
implicit knowledge and experience – in some cases in quite
specialised fields. Improving skills in speaking and listening
can be about getting better at what you do, and also
learning to extend what you do to other contexts. The
literacy teacher’s role is to focus on improving
communication skills, but the teaching will inevitably take
some people into new territories. It is hard to make people
better communicators in a purely instrumental way; as
people get better at it, they tend to find they have more to
think about and more they want to say!