• The most fundamental form of oral communication.

• One way to approach this activity is to assign students to find a native

speaker or near native speaker they know – a friend, roommate, or
colleague – and arrange a tape record a 20-30 minute interaction with
the person.
• The next step is for the student to transcribe a portion of their interaction
• Transcription involves a faithful reproduction of what was said on the
tape onto paper and can provide a genuine awareness of what speech
is really like.
• Once the transcript is produced, there are various activities that can be
pursued.
• They can be asked to define and exemplify the ones, on their own tapes
and then ask them to determine what happened, why, and how the
difficulty could have been avoided and repaired.
SPEAKER 1: I…
SPEAKER 2: DON’T…
SPEAKER 1: BUT…
SPEAKER 2: SO…
SPEAKER 1: FOR…
SPEAKER 2: REALLY…
SPEAKER 1: LET’S…
SPEAKER 2: NEVER…
SPEAKER 1: THIS…
• One format where practice with fluency and attention to accuracy can be accomplished can be accomplished
at the same time.
• Ordinarily, the student gives an audiocassette tape to the teacher, who starts the journal on the tape by
giving some directions for the assignment and perhaps suggesting a topic.
• Be sure to remind students to speak extemporaneously and explain why.
• Remind them that the purpose of the activity is to work on unplanned speaking.
• These audiotapes are an excellent resource for the teacher to provide individual feedback and instruction on
pronunciation or grammar problems since the students has a recording speech to which he or she can refer.
• Brown recommends that if drills are to be used, they should be short, simple, and snappy, they
should be used sparingly, and they should lead to more authentic communication activities.
• Activities that promote students’ getting acquainted with each other lend themselves to
practice with specific structures but in realistic context.
• More advanced students would be expected to produce more than just the structure; lower-
level students would probably benefit from some preteaching of the vocabulary, and all
student could benefit from some instruction on the present unreal conditional!
• Another early course activity is structure interview in which students talk to their classmates
using an interview form which requires the use of wh- and/ or yes-no questions.
• In the meaning-centered activities discussed here, explicit error correction will probably be
out of place because it disrupts the communication that is going on.
• Teachers may note errors that occur at these times for some later instruction to the class as a
whole or to individual students, as necessary.
• During accuracy-based activities, the basic decision to be made is whether to treat any
actual error or to ignore it, which will depend on several factors, including the error being
made and the context in which it occurs.
• Teachers must determine, perhaps in consultation with their students, how these errors should
be corrected and by whom.
• Brown (1994) presents some useful guidance on the topic of error correction, but he stresses
that teachers should strive for “optimal feedback” which shows that learner contributes are
valued in their own right rather than representing imperfect native speaker speech that need
remediation.