Reasons for teaching speaking

1. Speaking tasks provide rehearsal opportunities.

– Practice real-life speaking
2. Speaking tasks provide feedback for both teacher and students.
– Feedback on successful ways of speaking
– Feedback on language problems
3. Speaking tasks increase automaticity.
– Automaticity is the result of learning, repetition, and practice.
– It is characterized by a more efficient, more accurate, and more stable performance.
Characteristics of successful tasks (Herrero, 2006)
• The task
a) has to be motivating
b) has to address students’ needs. It has to be appropriate to achieve the goals and to the
proficiency level of the students
c) has to be meaningful
d) must elicit communication, promote conversation in English
e) must have a purpose that goes beyond a classroom exercise
f) should preferably be for pair or group work
g) has to train students to use strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies used
h) the text in tasks should be authentic
i) must include a pre-, a whilts-, and a post-task
Element for successful language learning: ESA trilogy
• ENGAGE
– Games, music, discussions, stimulating pictures, dramatic stories, etc.
– Making prediction and relating to their experience
• STUDY
– Construction of language
• ACTIVATE
– Exercises and activities to get students to use language freely and communicative.
In deciding how to structure and what to teach in speaking class, what should we consider?
1. Who are the students? 3. What do they expect to learn?
2. Why are they here? 4. What am I expected to teach?
Fluency vs Accuracy
• Fluency is ‘to keep going’. It is the ability to talk fairly freely, without too much stopping or
hesitating.
• Accuracy emphasizes ‘correct English’ – right grammar, right vocabulary.
Setting up a speaking class. Easy or not? What’s the problem?
1. Teacher might get complacent and not plan this stage properly.
2. Students may not see it as ‘real meaning’.
3. The class may be very small or very big (making a ‘control’ problem).
4. The class may be all from the same country.
5. They might perceive it as an ‘exercise’ that has to be finished as quickly as possible.
6. They might not have sufficient language to do what you have asked them to do.
Correction depends on the context of the lesson and the nature of the class.
– Controlled practice: Speaking practice using past tense
– Common mistakes
– A ‘significant’ mistake (Can I lend your dictionary?)
– It is comprehension, not accuracy.
Speaking activities
• Ranking • Discussions
• Balloon debate • Student talks
• Debates • Role plays
• Describing visuals • Conversations
Conclusion
• Fluency and accuracy are both important.
• The types of activities will depend on the size of the group and the level.
• Speaking activities needs to be properly planned.
• Speaking activities often fit naturally into a structure of a lesson, e.g., follow-up activity to a
reading or listening task.
• During speaking activities, you should observe and monitor, and give gentle encouragement
where necessary. Not to join in or to correct.
Reading
 Reason for reading
o Useful for Language Acquisition
 Provide students the understanding in what they read.
 Give positive effect on students’ vocabulary knowledge or spelling on their
writing
o Provide good models for English writing
 Encourage students to focus on vocabulary, grammar, or punctuation.
 Demonstrate the way to create sentences, paragraphs/ and whole text
 Students have good models for their own writing
o Can Introduce interesting topics, stimulate discussion, excite imaginative
responses and provide the springboard (stepping stone) for well-rounded lessons.
 Characteristic of written language
o Permanence o Complexity
o Processing time o Vocabulary
o Distance o formality
o Orthography (ejaan)
 Bottom up and top down processing
o Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into
smaller segments.
o A bottom-up approach is the piecing together of systems to give rise to more
complex systems, thus making the original systems sub-systems of the emergent
system.
 Strategies
o Identify the purpose in reading
o Use graph emic rule and patterns to aid in bottom-up decoding (esp. for beginning
level learners
o Use efficient silent reading techniques for relatively rapid comprehension (for
intermediate to advanced level)
o Skim the text for main ideas
o Scan the text for specific information
o Use semantic mapping or clustering
o Guess when you aren’t certain
o Analyze vocabulary
o Distinguish between literal and implied meanings
o Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationship
 Types of classroom reading performance
o Oral and silent reading
 Oral reading> can be used for evaluative check on bottom up process, for
pronunciation check and to ask students’ participation (beginner/
intermediate)
 Silent reading> Intensive and extensive
  Extensive reading > reading which students do often (but not exclusively)
away from the classroom (ex. Magazines, newspaper, etc.). It should
provide
 Reading for pleasure (the students choose what they read
 Intensive > refers to the detailed focus on the construction of reading texts
which takes place usually (but not always) in classrooms. Teacher may ask
students to look at wide range of text genres (styles of text). It is usually
accompanied by study activities.
 Principles for designing interactive reading techniques
o Make sure to did not overlook the importance of specific information
o Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating
o Balance authenticity and readability in choosing text
o Encourage the development of reading strategies
o Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques
o Follow the “SQ3R” sequence
o Subdivide your techniques into pre-reading, during-reading, and after-reading
phases
o Build in some evaluative aspect to teaching techniques
Listening
 Reasons for listening
o Good for students’ pronunciation
o Students will be exposed to different kind of English
 Listening Types
o Intensive: students listen specifically in order to work on listening skills, and in
order to study the way in which English is spoken. It usually takes place in
classrooms or language laboratories.
o Extensive: students listen to hear things that happen daily. (MP3s, DVDs, etc.)
 Things to consider
o What are listeners “doing when they listen?
o What factors affect good listening?
o What are the characteristics of “real-life” listening?
o What are the many things listeners listen for?
o What are some principles for designing listening techniques?
o How can listening techniques be interactive?
o What are some common techniques for teaching listening?
 What makes listening difficult?
o Clustering (memory o Colloquial language
limitation) o Rate of delivery
o Redundancy (rephrasing, o Stress, rhythm, and
repetitions, elaborating) intonation
o Reduce forms o interaction
o Performance variables
 types of classroom listening performance
o reactive (students act as tape recorder)
o Intensive (focus on components such as phonemes, words, intonation, etc.)
o Responsive (elicit immediate response)
o Selective (find important information)
o Extensive (develop global understanding of spoken language)
o Interactive (learners actively participate in interactive activities)
 Principles for designing listening techniques
o Don’t overlook techniques that develop listening comprehension
o Use motivating techniques
o Authentic language and contexts
o Considers the form of listeners responses
o Encourage the development of listening strategies
o Include both bottom up and top down listening activities
 Listening suggestion
o Jigsaw listening o Poetry
o Message taking o Storied
o Music and sound effect o monologues
o New and other radio genres