Teaching oral skills.

I. Speaking in a second and foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding of the 4 skills. What specifically makes speaking in a foreign language difficult? To start with, fluent speech contains reduced forms, such as contractions, vowel reduction, and elision, the use of slang and idioms in speech. Students must also acquire the stress, rhythm, intonation. The most difficult aspect of spoken English is that it is almost always accomplished via interaction with at least one speaker. Oral skills have not always been figured so centrally in second and foreign language pedagogy. In comprehension- based approaches, listening skills are stressed before speaking, in a production- based approach and audiolingualism speech production was tightly controlled. With the advent of theory of communicative competence, (Hymes, 1972), the teaching of oral skills has become central point in many ESL classrooms. Today, teachers are expected to balance a focus on accuracy with the focus on fluency as well. According to Hedge(1993), the term “fluency” means “the ability to link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation, where negotiation of meaning is a major goal.” In the current ESL classroom learning is no longer a one-way transfer of knowledge from Teacher to Student, today students learn from students, from the Teacher, from the world outside. Students are responsible for their own learning.

II. In deciding how to structure and what to teach in an oral skills class, questions should be considered: Who are the students? What do they expect to learn? What am I expected to teach? One basic consideration is the level of the students. Nowadays, teaching oral skills at all levels are often structured around functional uses of the language( like basic greetings, give and request personal information, talk about family, describe clothing, etc.) Teachers must be critical consumers of published materials, they will have to decide and pick activities from a variety of sources and create some of their own materials.

III. Activities

The major types of speaking activities that can be implemented are: discussions, speeches, role-plays, dialogues, conversation, audiotaped oral dialogue journals and other accuracy- based activities.

Discussions: students are introduced to a topic via a reading, a listening passage, a video tape. Then they are asked to get into pairs or groups to discuss a related topic to come up with the solution, a response. Each person in a group has a specific responsibility, whether it be to keep time, take notes or report results. There should be guidance beforehand and follow-up afterwards. A well-known example is the “Desert Island”, “Cocktail Party”.

Advantages of pair and group work.

a. more language practice.

b. more involvement on the part of the students.

c. students feel more secure.

d. students share knowledge, help each other.

Problems:

a.noise (working noise).

b.the teacher can not correct all mistakes(must make notes, correct only those that impede comprehension).

d.difficult to control the class (Instructions must be clear: what to do, when to start, when to stop, time restrictions).

Speeches.

Another common activity is the prepared speech. The teacher should provide the structure for the speech,its rhetorical genre (narration, description, dialogue, monologue, etc). In teaching monoloque , the teacher should distinqish 2 ways.

First way is bottop- up process, where we distinguish 3 stages:

statement level- students make up sentences according to the patterns

utterance level- students use different sentence patterns in an utterance.

discourse level- students speak on the picture, film strip, text, make up a story.

Second way – top-down, where we distinguish 3stages: The main unit is the text.

answering the questions, making up a plan, making up a program.

retelling of the text - close to the text retelling , retelling in the first person, retelling in the third person, retelling in the name of the characters.

complete transformation of the text.

A good idea is to assign the listeners some responsibilities during the speeches. This is an excellent time for peer evaluation (Example of an assignments : note strengths or relate the speech topic to a personal experience). Variations: videotaping and audio-taping of speeches.

Teacher evaluation of speeches can be conducted according to the following criteria:

· Delivery - was the volume loud, speed appropriate, did the student observe time?

· Interaction/ rapport in the audience- eye contact, posture, gestures, nervousness?)

· Content and organization- appropriate introduction, conclusion, main point of the talk.

· Language skills. (particular problems in the grammar, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation).

A second type of speech- is an impromptu speech (unprepared). This activity gives the students more actual practice with speaking the language. Students must be taught a speaking strategy, the use of hesitation markers (for example, kind of, um, eh, well, sort of, like…). Example of an activity: give a one- minute unprepared response on some topic.

Role-play.

Role- play is suitable for practicing the sociocultural variations in speech acts, such as complimenting, complaining and the like. Depending on the students’ level, role play can be performed from prepared scripts (a set of prompts and expressions) , using the knowledge gained from instruction or discussion of the speech act.

Olshtain and Cohen (1991) recommend several steps for teaching speech acts.

1. a diagnostic assessment to determine what students already know about the act in question.

2. a model dialogue, presented aurally and/or in writing- to listen to and practice prototypical phrases used in the speech act.

3. perform a role play (after considering the information about the participants, their ages, relationship, etc.).

In teaching dialogue there are several stages:at the receptive stage, the teacher explains new language material, at the reproductive stage , the pupils reproduce what they have learnt, at the constructive stahe, the pupils construct a similar dialogue using the new patterns .

Conversation- is the speaking activity, which is the most fundamental form of oral communication. For example, the students can find a native speaker and arrange to tape-record a 20-30 minute interaction with this person. The next step is for the students to transcribe a portion of their interaction. Students are warned not to correct grammar or pronunciation mistakes, to include all hesitation markers, false starts and pauses. Students are to find instances of “communications difficulties”. Variation of the task – “to take an interview” from a native speaker.