Ibn Zohr Univ. Professor: A.Karim benlaayouni
Department of Anglo-Saxon Studies
Agadir
Teaching Speaking
Why do we need to teach speaking at all? What do we teach in a speaking course? Can a teacher divide a pure speaking course or just integrate it in the course of reading and other skills? To what extent speaking is a useful skill for the E.F.L students? How can we encourage and develop the speaking abilities of our students? …
These and other issues will be the central points of this lecture wherein we always bear in mind that speaking activities can give learners more confidence and satisfaction; hand in hand with teachers’ guidance speaking activities will give learners will and open their appetite into further study.
1 Four main processes related to Speaking.
1) Conceptualization: plan the content of the message. The knowledge of the topic, situation, and discourse structure are gathered in order to express the message.
2) Formulation: Find the suitable vocabulary and phrases to send the messages and arrange them into the correct order, then prepare the sound patterns
3) Articulation: speak out what has been prepared in the previous stages
4) Self-monitoring: we find the mistake and make changes. This stage works both before and after the speech.
The theory of communicative competence proposes that the ability to communicate in a language comprises four dimensions:
1) Grammatical competence: including rules of phonology, orthography, vocabulary, word formation, and sentence formation.
2) Sociolinguistic competence; rules for the expression and understanding of appropriate social meanings and grammatical forms in different contexts
3) Discourse competence; rules of both cohesion—how sentence elements are tied together via reference, repetition, synonymy, etc—and coherence—how texts are constructed
4) Strategic competence; a repertoire of compensatory strategies that help with a variety of communication difficulties
Teachers are expected to have balance and focus both on accuracy and fluency as well.
2 What does the term “fluency”mean?
The term fluency has two meanings:
A) Ability to link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation. This is what is commonly understood as fluency in language teaching materials and in language assessment procedures.
B) Natural language use; it is more holistic sense of fluency and is likely to take place when speaking activities focus on meaning and its negotiation, when speaking strategies are used, and when overt correction is minimized.
3 Sources of information
No longer is learning seen as a one-way transfer of knowledge from teacher to student; today we understand that students learn from teachers, from classmates, and from the world outside the classroom, and the more the learner seeks these opportunities, the more likely he or she will learn to use the language. In the oral skills classroom, students should be allowed and encouraged to initiate communication when possible, to determine the content of their responses or contributions, and to evaluate their own production and learning progress.
4 Activities
A) Discussions: discussions are probably the most commonly used activity in the oral skills class. Typically, the students are introduced to a topic via a reading, a listening passage, or a videotape and are then asked to get into pairs or groups to discuss a related topic in order to come up with a solution, a response, or the like. Teachers must take care in planning and setting up a discussion activity.
e.g.) Information-gap task
Opinion Gap tasks
B) Speeches:
* The prepared speech is also a common activity. Topics for speeches will vary depending on the level of the student and the focus of the class, but in any case, students should be given some leeway in determining the content of their talks. In other words, the teacher can provide the structure for the speech—its rhetorical genre (narration, description, etc) and its time restrictions—while the students select the content. Speeches can be frightening for the speaker and, after awhile, boring for the listeners, so it is a good idea to assign the listeners some responsibilities during the speeches.
* The Impromptu speech is another type of speech（with no planning or preparation in advance）, which can serve several purposes in an oral skill. This activity gives students more actual practice with speaking the language, but it also forces them to think, and speak, on their feet without the benefit of notes or memorization.
e.g.) Story retelling
Personal experiments….
C) Role Plays:
The students are assigned roles wherein they act using the language as if in the real situation.
Create the need for students to use their memory and retrieve the necessary vocabulary items they would need in order to convey the messages.
For example: in the airport, making a shopping list…….
Depending on the level, role plays can be performed from prepared scripts, created from a set of prompts and expressions, or written using and consolidating knowledge gained from instruction or discussion of the speech act and its variations prior to the role plays themselves.
D) Conversations: it is not adequate to have students produce lots of language; they must become more meta-linguistically aware of the many features of language in order to become competent speakers and interlocutors in the foreign language.
Other Activities
Opinion gap tasks
Information-Gap Task
StoryRetelling/ transformation drills
Group- work activities
Pair -work activities
Plus-one Dialogues
Games/ substitution tables
Describing pictures….
4 Communication Strategies
In order to help students carry the conversation in English, it would be better to teach them how to avoid the situations when they can’t go-on in the conversation. Those strategies which help themcarry the conversation are called “communication strategies”.Among these we can mention the following:
1) Avoidance:
2) Paraphrase
3) Conscious transfer
4) Appeal for assistance
5) Mime
Conclusion
Speaking is one of the activities that should be encouraged and the skill of using the language in order to send messages, express opinions and feelings is the clearest manifestation of students’ mastering or at least knowledge of the foreign language. Speaking skills should be given more importance in the sense that they are beneficial not only to learners but to teachers as well in the sense that they show the structured aspect of the teaching process as well. By giving students speaking tasks they are driven to use all and any language at their command. Moreover it is a good feedback for both the teachers and their students as well.
For more information:
* Lazaraton, A. (2001). "Teaching Oral Skills", Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Langauge. Boston: Heinle &Heinle. (.p.103-117)