Teaching by Principles Chapter 17 Teaching Speaking

Teaching by Principles Chapter 17 Teaching Speaking

ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN PEDDDAGOGICAL RESEARCH

1.Conversational discourse

- Transactional and interactional

- Topic nomination, maintaining a conversation, turn-taking, interruption, termination

- Sociolinguistic appropriateness, styles of speech, nonverbal communication, conversational routines

- Phonological, lexical, and syntactic properties

2.Teaching pronunciation

3.Accuracy and fluency

-Accuracy: clear, articulate, grammatically and phonologically correct

-Fluent: flowing and natural

-Fluency and accuracy are both important goals to pursue in CLT.

-While fluency may in many communicative language courses be an initial goal in language teaching, accuracy is achieved to some extent by allowing students to focus on the elements of phonology, grammar, and discourse in their spoken output.

-Message-oriented: teaching language use

-Language oriented: teaching language usage

4.Affective factors

- Language ego

-Teachers need to provide the kind of warm, embracing climate that encourages students to speak, however halting or broken their attempts may be.

5. The interaction effect

-Conversations are collaborative as participants engage in a process of negotiation of meaning.

-For the learner, the matter of what to say is often eclipsed by conventions of how to say things, when to speak, and other discourse constraints.

-Interlocutor effect: One learner’s performance is always colored by that of the person (interlocutor), he or she is talking with.

MICROSKILLS OF ORAL COMMUNICATION: Table 17.1

TYPES OF CLASSROOM SPEAKING PERFORMANCE

1. Imitative

-Drills offer students an opportunity to listen and to orally repeat certain strings of language that may pose some linguistic difficulty- either phonological or grammatical.

-Useful guidelines for successful drills

˙Keep them short

˙Keep them simple

˙Keep them “snappy”

˙Make sure students know why they are doing the drill

˙Limit them to phonology or grammar points

˙Make sure they ultimately lead to communicative goals

˙Don’t overuse them

2.Intensive

-Practice some phonological or grammatical aspect of language

3. Responsive

-Short replies to teacher- or student-oriented questions or comments.

4.Transactional (dialogue)

-Convey or exchange specific information

-Conversations may have more of a negotiative nature than does responsive speech.

5. Interpersonal (dialogue)

-A casual register; colloquial language; emotionally charged language; slang; ellipsis; sarcasm; a convert “agenda”

6. Extensive (monologue)

-Oral reports; summaries; short speeches

-Register is more formal and deliberate

-Planned or impromptu

PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGNING SPEAKING TECHNIQUES

-Use techniques that cover the spectrum of learner needs, from language-based focus on accuracy to message-based focus on interaction, meaning, fluency.

-Provide intrinsically motivating techniques.

-Encourage the use of authentic language in full meaning contexts.

-Provide appropriate feedback and correction

-Capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening

-Give students opportunities to initiate oral communication

-Encourage the development of speaking strategies.

˙Asking for clarification

˙Asking someone to repeat something

˙Using fillers in order to gain time to process

˙Using conversation maintenance cues

˙Getting someone’s attention

˙Using paraphrase for structures one can’t produce

˙Appealing for assistance from the interlocutor

˙Using formulaic expressions

˙Using mime and nonverbal expressions to convey meaning.

TEACHING CONVERSATION

-Indirect approach:

˙Learners are more or less set loose to engage in interaction

˙One does not actually teach conversation, but rather students acquire conversational competence, peripherally, by engaging in meaningful tasks.

-Direct approach

˙Planning a conversation program around the specific microskills, strategies, and processes that are involved in fluent conversation

˙Explicitly calls students’ attention to conversational rules.

-The prevailing approach to teaching conversation includes the learner’s inductive involvement in meaningful tasks as well as consciousness-raising elements of focus on form. 

-Richards’ list of features of conversation (p.277)

TEACHING PRONUNCIATION

-Rather than attempting only to build a learner’s articulatory competence from the bottom up, and simply as the mastery of a list of phonemes and allophones, a top-down approach is taken in which the most relevant features of pronunciation—

stress, rhythm, and intonation— are given high priority.

-Instead of teaching only the role of articulation within words, or at best, phrases, we teach its role in a whole stream of discourse.

-Communicative, interactive, whole language view of human speech

-Clear, comprehensible pronunciation

-Beginning levels

˙Learners surpass that threshold beneath which pronunciation detracts from their ability to communicative.

-Advanced levels

˙Pronunciation goals can focus on elements that enhance communication: intonation features that go beyond basic patterns, voice quality, phonetic distinctions between registers, and other refinements that are far more important in the overall stream of clear communication than rolling the English /r/ or getting a vowel to perfectly imitate a “native speaker”.

-Factors affecting pronunciation

˙Native language

˙Age

˙Exposure

˙Innate and language ego

˙Motivation and concern for good pronunciation

A MODEL FOR CORRECTION OF SPEECH ERRORS

-Affective and cognitive feedback: figure 17.7

-Affective feedback and cognitive feedback can take place simultaneously.

-Fossilization may be the result of too many green lights when there should have been some yellow or red lights.

-Cognitive feedback must be optimal in order to be effective.

-Too much negative cognitive feedback – a barrage of interruptions, corrections, and overt attention to malformations— often lead learners to shut off their attempts at communication.

-Too much positive cognitive feedback— a willingness of the teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not have occurred— serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner.

-Task of the teacher: providing enough green lights to encourage continued communication, but not so many that crucial errors go unnoticed; and providing enough red lights to call attention to those crucial errors, but not so many that the learner is discouraged from attempting to speak at all. 

-The affective and cognitive modes of feedback are reinforcers to speakers’ responses.

-A model for treatment of classroom speech error: figure 17.8