Teaching Speaking
Strategies for
Developing Speaking Skills
Students often think that the ability to speak a
language is the product of language learning, but speaking is also a crucial
part of the language learning process. Effective instructors teach students
speaking strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using
language to talk about language -- that they can use to help themselves expand
their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it.
These
instructors help students learn to speak so that the students can use speaking
to learn.
1. Using minimal responses
Language learners who lack confidence in their ability
to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while
others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to
participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can
use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful
for beginners.
Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic
phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding,
agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having
a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other
participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.
2. Recognizing scripts
Some communication situations are associated with a
predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings, apologies,
compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and
cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges
involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In
these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that
follows it can often be anticipated.
Instructors can help students develop speaking ability
by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can
predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through
interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and
varying the language that different scripts contain.
3. Using language to talk about language
Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to
say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize
that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help
students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the
need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the
participants' language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies
and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.
By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in
class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do,
instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom
itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students
will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication
situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.
Goals and Techniques
for Teaching Speaking
The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative
efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves understood, using their
current proficiency to the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the
message due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the
social and cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.
To help students develop communicative efficiency in
speaking, instructors can use a balanced activities approach that combines
language input, structured output, and communicative output.
Language input comes in the form of teacher talk, listening
activities, reading passages, and the language heard and read outside of class.
It gives learners the material they need to begin producing language
themselves.
Language input may be content oriented or form oriented.
- Content-oriented input focuses on information,
whether it is a simple weather report or an extended lecture on an
academic topic. Content-oriented input may also include descriptions of
learning strategies and examples of their use.
- Form-oriented input focuses on ways of using the
language: guidance from the teacher or another source on vocabulary,
pronunciation, and grammar (linguistic competence); appropriate things to
say in specific contexts (discourse competence); expectations for rate of speech,
pause length, turn-taking, and other social aspects of language use
(sociolinguistic competence); and explicit instruction in phrases to use
to ask for clarification and repair miscommunication (strategic
competence).
In the presentation part of a lesson, an instructor
combines content-oriented and form-oriented input. The amount of input that is
actually provided in the target language depends on students' listening
proficiency and also on the situation. For students at lower levels, or in
situations where a quick explanation on a grammar topic is needed, an
explanation in English may be more appropriate than one in the target language.
Structured output focuses on correct form. In structured output, students
may have options for responses, but all of the options require them to use the
specific form or structure that the teacher has just introduced.
Structured output is designed to make learners
comfortable producing specific language items recently introduced, sometimes in
combination with previously learned items. Instructors often use structured
output exercises as a transition between the presentation stage and the
practice stage of a lesson plan. textbook exercises also often make good
structured output practice activities.
In communicative output, the learners' main
purpose is to complete a task, such as obtaining information, developing a
travel plan, or creating a video. To complete the task, they may use the
language that the instructor has just presented, but they also may draw on any
other vocabulary, grammar, and communication strategies that they know. In
communicative output activities, the criterion of success is whether the
learner gets the message across. Accuracy is not a consideration unless the
lack of it interferes with the message.
In everyday communication, spoken exchanges take place
because there is some sort of information gap between the participants.
Communicative output activities involve a similar real information gap. In
order to complete the task, students must reduce or eliminate the information
gap. In these activities, language is a tool, not an end in itself.
In a balanced activities approach, the teacher uses a
variety of activities from these different categories of input and output.
Learners at all proficiency levels, including beginners, benefit from this
variety; it is more motivating, and it is also more likely to result in
effective language learning.
Developing Speaking
Activities
Traditional classroom speaking practice often takes the
form of drills in which one person asks a question and another gives an answer.
The question and the answer are structured and predictable, and often there is
only one correct, predetermined answer. The purpose of asking and answering the
question is to demonstrate the ability to ask and answer the question.
In contrast, the purpose of real communication is to
accomplish a task, such as conveying a telephone message, obtaining
information, or expressing an opinion. In real communication, participants must
manage uncertainty about what the other person will say. Authentic
communication involves an information gap; each participant has information
that the other does not have. In addition, to achieve their purpose,
participants may have to clarify their meaning or ask for confirmation of their
own understanding.
To create classroom speaking activities that will
develop communicative competence, instructors need to incorporate a purpose and
an information gap and allow for multiple forms of expression. However,
quantity alone will not necessarily produce competent speakers. Instructors
need to combine structured output activities, which allow for error correction
and increased accuracy, with communicative output activities that give students
opportunities to practice language use more freely.
Structured Output Activities
Two common kinds of structured output activities are information
gap and jigsaw activities. In both these types of activities,
students complete a task by obtaining missing information, a feature the
activities have in common with real communication. However, information gap and
jigsaw activities also set up practice on specific items of language. In this
respect they are more like drills than like communication.
Information Gap Activities
- Filling the gaps in a schedule or timetable:
Partner A holds an airline timetable with some of the arrival and
departure times missing. Partner B has the same timetable but with
different blank spaces. The two partners are not permitted to see each
other's timetables and must fill in the blanks by asking each other
appropriate questions. The features of language that are practiced would
include questions beginning with "when" or "at what
time." Answers would be limited mostly to time expressions like
"at 8:15" or "at ten in the evening."
- Completing the picture: The two partners have
similar pictures, each with different missing details, and they cooperate
to find all the missing details. In another variation, no items are
missing, but similar items differ in appearance. For example, in one
picture, a man walking along the street may be wearing an overcoat, while
in the other the man is wearing a jacket. The features of grammar and
vocabulary that are practiced are determined by the content of the
pictures and the items that are missing or different. Differences in the
activities depicted lead to practice of different verbs. Differences in
number, size, and shape lead to adjective practice. Differing locations
would probably be described with prepositional phrases.
These activities may be set up so that the partners must
practice more than just grammatical and lexical features. For example, the
timetable activity gains a social dimension when one partner assumes the role
of a student trying to make an appointment with a partner who takes the role of
a professor. Each partner has pages from an appointment book in which certain
dates and times are already filled in and other times are still available for
an appointment. Of course, the open times don't match exactly, so there must be
some polite negotiation to arrive at a mutually convenient time for a meeting
or a conference.
Jigsaw Activities
Jigsaw activities are more elaborate information gap
activities that can be done with several partners. In a jigsaw activity, each
partner has one or a few pieces of the "puzzle," and the partners
must cooperate to fit all the pieces into a whole picture. The puzzle piece may
take one of several forms. It may be one panel from a comic strip or one photo
from a set that tells a story. It may be one sentence from a written narrative.
It may be a tape recording of a conversation, in which case no two partners
hear exactly the same conversation.
- In one fairly simple jigsaw activity, students work
in groups of four. Each student in the group receives one panel from a
comic strip. Partners may not show each other their panels. Together the
four panels present this narrative: a man takes a container of ice cream
from the freezer; he serves himself several scoops of ice cream; he sits
in front of the TV eating his ice cream; he returns with the empty bowl to
the kitchen and finds that he left the container of ice cream, now
melting, on the kitchen counter. These pictures have a clear narrative
line and the partners are not likely to disagree about the appropriate
sequencing. You can make the task more demanding, however, by using
pictures that lend themselves to alternative sequences, so that the
partners have to negotiate among themselves to agree on a satisfactory
sequence.
- More elaborate jigsaws may proceed in two stages.
Students first work in input groups (groups A, B, C, and D) to receive
information. Each group receives a different part of the total information
for the task. Students then reorganize into groups of four with one
student each from A, B, C, and D, and use the information they received to
complete the task. Such an organization could be used, for example, when
the input is given in the form of a tape recording. Groups A, B, C, and D
each hear a different recording of a short news bulletin. The four
recordings all contain the same general information, but each has one or
more details that the others do not. In the second stage, students
reconstruct the complete story by comparing the four versions.
With information gap and jigsaw activities, instructors
need to be conscious of the language demands they place on their students. If
an activity calls for language your students have not already practiced, you
can brainstorm with them when setting up the activity to preview the language
they will need, eliciting what they already know and supplementing what they
are able to produce themselves.
Structured output activities can form an effective
bridge between instructor modeling and communicative output because they are
partly authentic and partly artificial. Like authentic communication, they
feature information gaps that must be bridged for successful completion of the
task. However, where authentic communication allows speakers to use all of the
language they know, structured output activities lead students to practice
specific features of language and to practice only in brief sentences, not in
extended discourse. Also, structured output situations are contrived and more
like games than real communication, and the participants' social roles are
irrelevant to the performance of the activity. This structure controls the
number of variables that students must deal with when they are first exposed to
new material. As they become comfortable, they can move on to true
communicative output activities.
Communicative Output Activities
Communicative output activities allow students to
practice using all of the language they know in situations that resemble real
settings. In these activities, students must work together to develop a plan,
resolve a problem, or complete a task. The most common types of communicative
output activity are role plays and discussions .
In role plays, students are assigned roles and put into
situations that they may eventually encounter outside the classroom. Because
role plays imitate life, the range of language functions that may be used
expands considerably. Also, the role relationships among the students as they
play their parts call for them to practice and develop their sociolinguistic
competence. They have to use language that is appropriate to the situation and
to the characters.
Students usually find role playing enjoyable, but students
who lack self-confidence or have lower proficiency levels may find them
intimidating at first. To succeed with role plays:
- Prepare carefully: Introduce the activity by
describing the situation and making sure that all of the students
understand it
- Set a goal or outcome: Be sure the students
understand what the product of the role play should be, whether a plan, a
schedule, a group opinion, or some other product
- Use role cards: Give each student a card that
describes the person or role to be played. For lower-level students, the
cards can include words or expressions that that person might use.
- Brainstorm: Before you start the role play, have
students brainstorm as a class to predict what vocabulary, grammar, and
idiomatic expressions they might use.
- Keep groups small: Less-confident students will
feel more able to participate if they do not have to compete with many
voices.
- Give students time to prepare: Let them work
individually to outline their ideas and the language they will need to
express them.
- Be present as a resource, not a monitor: Stay in
communicative mode to answer students' questions. Do not correct their
pronunciation or grammar unless they specifically ask you about it.
- Allow students to work at their own levels: Each
student has individual language skills, an individual approach to working
in groups, and a specific role to play in the activity. Do not expect all
students to contribute equally to the discussion, or to use every grammar
point you have taught.
- Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the
class on the outcome of their role plays.
- Do linguistic follow-up: After the role play is
over, give feedback on grammar or pronunciation problems you have heard.
This can wait until another class period when you plan to review
pronunciation or grammar anyway.
Discussions, like role plays, succeed when the
instructor prepares students first, and then gets out of the way. To succeed
with discussions:
- Prepare the students: Give them input (both topical
information and language forms) so that they will have something to say
and the language with which to say it.
- Offer choices: Let students suggest the topic for
discussion or choose from several options. Discussion does not always have
to be about serious issues. Students are likely to be more motivated to
participate if the topic is television programs, plans for a vacation, or
news about mutual friends. Weighty topics like how to combat pollution are
not as engaging and place heavy demands on students' linguistic
competence.
- Set a goal or outcome: This can be a group product,
such as a letter to the editor, or individual reports on the views of
others in the group.
- Use small groups instead of whole-class discussion:
Large groups can make participation difficult.
- Keep it short: Give students a defined period of
time, not more than 8-10 minutes, for discussion. Allow them to stop
sooner if they run out of things to say.
- Allow students to participate in their own way: Not
every student will feel comfortable talking about every topic. Do not
expect all of them to contribute equally to the conversation.
- Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the
class on the results of their discussion.
- Do linguistic follow-up: After the discussion is
over, give feedback on grammar or pronunciation problems you have heard.
This can wait until another class period when you plan to review
pronunciation or grammar anyway.
Through well-prepared communicative output activities
such as role plays and discussions, you can encourage students to experiment
and innovate with the language, and create a supportive atmosphere that allows
them to make mistakes without fear of embarrassment. This will contribute to their
self-confidence as speakers and to their motivation to learn more.
