SPEAKING IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

▣ Speaking

▶ SPEAKING IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

■ What makes a classroom activity useful for speaking practice? The most important feature of a classroom speaking activity is to provide an authentic opportunity for the students to get individual meanings across and utilize every area of knowledge they have in the second or foreign language. They should have the opportunity and be encouraged to become flexible users of their knowledge, always keeping the communicative goal in Speaking mind. Speaking activities, like listening activities, can be presented on a continuum from more accessible to more complex tasks.

 

 

 

■ Roleplay is an excellent way to simulate, in the classroom, honest communication that is relevant to experiences outside the classroom (Crookall & Oxford, 1990; Jones, 1982; Bygate, 1987; Shoemaker & Shoemaker, 1991; Shrum & Glisan, 1994). In roleplay, students can have an opportunity to use their knowledge of vocabulary. Narration, speech acts, discourse fillers, turn to take, pauses, etc. However, role play can be a problematic or unnatural task if the students do not have sufficient language or information about the participants, the situation, and the background for the simulated interaction. Care must be taken that all these are available to students so that the activity can be both meaningful and challenging. 

 

 

 

■ Group discussions are an effective speaking activity in large classrooms (Ur, 1981). Students in the second or foreign language classroom should have ample opportunity to participate in group discussions, doing brainstorming, and in many other speaking activities where they need to participate by producing a word, a term, an expression, or a clause and not necessarily maintain a long stretch of conversation. A considerable amount of classroom time should be devoted to such group activities to facilitate the spoken production of individual students, thereby preparing them for more autonomous speaking activities. 

 

 

 

■ Using the target language outside the classroom can be a beneficial requirement in homework assignments where the target language is spoken in the environment (second language contexts). Students can be given tasks that require them to collect meaningful information from stores, restaurants, museums, offices, and other public establishments and then report back in class. Thus, we have a multipurpose activity: Natural interaction in the spoken language serves as a speech initiator outside the classroom for data collection; then, the student reports on a planned oral presentation in class. 

 

 

 

■ Using the learner's input to create meaningful speaking activities helps make the activity relevant to the learner and authentic in the real sense of the word. Making and choosing friends is a genuine concern for teenagers anywhere. An activity based on this topic can start with some self-reporting on the characteristics that the individual students look for in their friends and then continue to a pair discussion or a class discussion on the issue (Olshtain et al., 1993:27). 

 

 

 

■ Feedback, as an integral part of spoken practice, is critical to encourage learners to develop a variety of communication skills needed for successful oral communication. Teachers must have ample opportunity to provide learners with personal feedback on vocal performance that can point out individual difficulties and strengths on which the learner may capitalize, such as a rich vocabulary, good stress and rhythm, or a pleasant personality. Such feedback must be conveyed to support the learners rather than embarrasses them. 

 

 

 

■ Looking at an authentic speech in written transcripts can be a helpful instruction technique for learners to think about features of oral discourse that they may not be aware of. Such transcripts might provide examples of useful expressions, connectors, feedback techniques, and many other details that would stand out more clearly in the written form than if the identical learners were listening to these bits of discourse. 

 

 

 

■ Self-evaluation and self-analysis can be another helpful means of improving one's spoken delivery in a foreign or second language, with a range of points to watch out for, from fundamental intelligibility at the end of the continuum to compelling and persuasive talk at the other end. Students can be recorded or can record themselves using videotaping with playback for analysis. While watching themselves and others on playback of their participation in spoken interaction, learners can perform self-analysis that will enable them to improve their oral deliveries significantly. 

 

 

■ Particular emphasis is placed on a variety of spoken genres to which learners can be exposed in various forms accompanied by analysis and discussions. For example, a casual conversation of a confirming nature might involve two long-term friends talking to each other at a book club meeting; in contrast, a more formal conversation might be a lecturer and an undergraduate student talking to each other at an end-of-course party. Being exposed to and discussing the key features in such different types of authentic interaction can be a vital part of developing the learner's pragmatic and interactional competence (Burns, 1998:109). 

 

 

 

■ A significant new development in language teaching is computer conferencing. Lappanen and Kalaja (1995) describe experimenting with such techniques for a content area course where Finnish students used their second language by participating in a discussion followed by an instructed writing activity. In comparison to more traditional settings, students in this study were initiating much more "talk;" even though they were typing instead of speaking, they were interacting and using a variety of speech acts such as disagreeing and challenging, among others. Perhaps most important, students were exposed to each other's feedback much more than they would in any other context. 

 

 

 

▶ CONCLUSION 

 

■ Teaching spoken language in the language classroom is often a complicated task for both the teacher and the students. Most of the teaching materials based on the communicative approach claim to present "real communication in authentic situations" but are, in fact, still heavily based on descriptions of written English (Yule, 1995).

 

 

 

■ The teaching of speaking from a discourse perspective implies taking a pedagogical shift from focusing on linguistic performance to focusing on a more pragmatic perspective. Contextual and situational features of spoken interaction must become an integral part of classroom activities and personal considerations, and choices must be offered to students practicing speech production. This chapter has raised the various issues related to teaching speech production from a discourse perspective and offers the teacher a range of appropriate activity types and resources (see the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of the chapter) for implementing such an approach.