The English Raven Speaking and Listening Across the Curriculum (or SLAC for short) materials are designed as simple and highly flexible activities for teachers to apply a range of speaking and listening tasks that specifically target and develop other key areas of EFL/ESL curriculums: most notably reading and grammar and writing. These activities are very adaptable, but generally suited to late elementary through advanced levels, from Elementary/Primary grade 3 through to adult ages.
In many English classrooms, teachers often lament the fact that entirely too much of the speaking and listening interaction is based on teacher-student exchanges. Another problem can be where speaking and listening are not addressed thoroughly, or do not take advantage of unique opportunities to reapply and extend knowledge covered in reading, grammar and written work. The four activities and sets of materials documented in this section of the site may be very helpful to teachers in facilitating:
a) More student<->student interaction;
b) More cooperative approaches to task work;
c) Targeted listening directly related to reading content;
d) Listening that incorporates grammar review and
application;
e) Speaking activities that seek to put grammar elements
at the core of natural communicative tasks;
f) Basic ways to both observe and give feedback to
students about their speaking and listening skills;
g) A gradual building of the skills needed to do well on
listening segments of international English tests;
h) Listening skills needed to handle academic content in
English and confidence in interactive conversation with other English speakers (crucial in ESL contexts).
These materials were first put together to address some concerns I had whilst responsible for an EFL curriculum at a private language institute in South Korea. At the particular place I worked, subjects such as reading, grammar, writing, listening and speaking were all segregated from each other and were implemented by different teachers using different materials. This was a business move on the part of a national franchise to show students' parents that this particular chain of schools "covers everything comprehensively". My main concern was how to bring the separate subjects and teachers together in a cooperative and collaborative sense and somehow achieve a more holistic approach to the overall language instruction taking place.
These speaking and listening materials were part of the move in that general direction, designed specifically to apply listening and speaking to other areas of the curriculum. Teachers in similar contexts will no doubt appreciate some of these activities, while teachers in other contexts may simply enjoy having more options and materials at their disposal to generate listening and speaking tasks. Another key aspect of the materials has to do with their versatility and the rapid manner in which activities can be set up - a crucial consideration for teachers with overwhelming schedules and/or very limited time to prepare materials. All of those factors have been carefully considered in the design of each material in this section.
