TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS: TEACHING SPEAKING LECTURE 9 TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS: TEACHING SPEAKING

Problems with speaking activities 1. Inhibition. 2. Nothing to say. 3. Low or uneven participation. 4. Mother-tongue use.

What the teacher can do to help to solve some of the problems Use group work Base the activity on easy language Make a careful choice of topic and task to stimulate interest Give some instruction or training in discussion skills Keep students speaking the target language

Characteristics of a successful speaking activity 1. Learners talk a lot. 2. Participation is even. 3. Motivation is high. 4. Language is of an acceptable level. Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of language accuracy

Principles to the teacher Speech must be motivated. It is necessary to think over the motives which make students speak. Rule: ensure conditions in which a student will have a desire to say something, to express his thoughts, his feelings.

Principles to the teacher 2. Speech is always addressed to an interlocutor. Rule: organize the teaching process in a way which allows your students to speak to someone, to their classmates in particular.

Principles to the teacher 3. Speech is always emotionally coloured for a speaker expresses his thought, feelings, and his attitude to what he says. Rule: teach students to use intonational means to express their attitude, their feelings about what they say (prove, give your opinion).

Principles to the teacher 4. Speech is always situational for it takes place in a certain situation. Rule: real and close-to-real situations should be created to stimulate pupils’ speech.

Speech and oral exercises There are two forms of speaking: monologue and dialogue. In teaching monologue we can easily distinguish three stages: the statements level – drill exercises with the sentence pattern; the utterance level - using different sentence patterns in an utterance about an object/a subject; the discourse level - speaking at discourse level (speaking on a picture, making up a story, commenting a text).

To develop students’ skill in dialogue students are taught: how to make responses: question-response statement-statement statement-question question-question 2. how to begin a dialogue, i.e. to ask questions, to make statements etc. 3. how to carry on a conversation, i.e. to start it, to join a conversation, to confirm, to comment using the following words and expressions.

In acquiring necessary habits in carrying on a conversation pattern-dialogues may be helpful. There are three stages in learning a dialogue: 1)Receptive: They listen to the dialogue, then read it silently for better understanding; 2) Reproductive: Students enact the dialogue. Three kinds of reproduction: immediate, delayed, modified. 3) Creative: Students make up dialogues of their own. They are given a picture or a verbal situation to talk about.

Students’ speech may be of two kinds prepared and unprepared. The main objective of the learner, however, is to be able to use the linguistic material in unprepared speech.

Discussion Questions Describe some positive effects of using games in the classroom. List some steps you might take to encourage a ‘silent’ class to begin speaking in English. In what ways does a teacher need to prepare students for a free speaking activity? Give an example of a personalized speaking activity. What are some possible benefits of using role-play in the classroom? List at least three. A student makes the same mistake several times during a free speaking groupwork activity. What would you do and why?