英语教学法6
Unit 10 Teaching Speaking
Welcome
Aims of the unit: Through learning and discussion ,students will get to know:
1.The purpose of learning speaking;
2.Two main factors affect the improvement of speaking ability;
3. the main characteristics of spoken language
4. principles for teaching speaking
5. Group work in speaking activities;
6. Common types of speaking activities.
Characteristics of spoken language
Spontaneity
Time-constraint
Spontaneity
In most situations, people do not plan ahead of time what they are going to say.
The fact that speech is spontaneous means that it is full of false starts, repetitions, incomplete sentences, and short phrases.
Teachers may be requiring their students to do more forward-thinking and planning than native speakers do in real life!(Bygate,1987)
Time-constraint
The students must be able to produce unplanned utterances in real time; otherwise people will not have the patience to listen to them.
IV. Designing speaking tasks
One important consideration: Proficiency level of the students (challenging but not too difficult.) If the task is too easy or too difficult, the students may be demotivated. Other factors which are common in successful speaking tasks:
Maximum foreign talk
Even participation
High motivation
Right language level
Maximum foreign talk
Try to avoid students’ talking in the mother tongue, and avoid too much Teacher Talk.
Even participation
Try to avoid outstanding students’ dominating discussions. Try to guarantee equal opportunities for students of different levels.
High motivation
Interesting topic, and clear objective. Make sure that the task is in line with the students’ ability.
Right language level
The task must be designed so that the students can complete the task successfully with the language that they have. Otherwise the task will become frustrating and the students are likely to give up or revert to the native language.
VI. Types of speaking tasks
It is important to provide the students with a variety of speaking activities because: A variety of speaking activities will enable students to cope with different situations in reality.
Variety helps keep motivation high.
Variety may suit students of different learning styles.
There are two major purposes for listening. One is to get information and the other is for social reasons.
Since speaking is reciprocal of listening, the same is true of speaking.
According to Littlewood, communicative speaking activities can be divided into two types: functional communication activities, and social interaction activities:
For beginning students, pre-communicative activities are also necessary, which are more structural and allow the learner to practise the forms of the language. However, we should make speaking tasks as communicative as possible.
Some types of speaking activities
Information-gap activities
Dialogues and role-plays
Activities using pictures
Problem-solving activities
Other speaking activities
Information-gap activities
One excellent way to make speaking tasks communicative is to use information-gap activities, in which the students have different information and they need to obtain information from each other in order to finish a task.
Dialogues and role-plays
Two problems with most dialogues in textbooks:
Not authentic or natural. The natural speech of native speakers is often phrases or sentence fragments full of pauses, false starts, and repetitions.
The way most dialogues are taught. Teachers ask students to memorize dialogues by heart. Activities using pictures
Pictures are invaluable in speaking activities. Appropriate pictures provide cues, prompts, situations and non-verbal aid for communication. Students from elementary level to advanced level can all benefit from using pictures in speaking activities.
Problem-solving activities
You are on a committee that is in charge of deciding what to do with a small amount of money that has been donated to improve your school. You have a list of things to do, but you only have enough money for 5 of the items. You must reach a consensus (agreement) in your group on which 5 items you will spend the money. Here is the list:
Problem solving activities require a higher level of language proficiency, but the difficulty levels can be controlled somewhat by the topic.
In problem-solving activities, “participants tend to become personally involved; they begin to
relate the problem as an emotional issue as well as an intellectual and moral one” (Ur 1996:128).
Other speaking activities
Find someone who …
e.g. Sand up and walk around the room. Ask your classmates what they like to do. Remember, you must speak in English only!
Bingo activities
(This seems to be practising listening rather than speaking if the words are called out by the teacher.)
Change the story
Step 1: Form groups of 3-5;
Step 2: The group together makes a list of about 20 random verbs.
e.g. go, sleep, teach, learn, jump, fall, look (at), hear, laugh, sing, etc. Step 3: Each one writes a short story, and underlines all the verbs in the story;
e.g.
Step 4: Each one read his/her story, but pauses at every verb. The group then supplies one of the random verbs into that slot.
The results can be very funny.
A possible version may be:
No specific responses
The teacher calls out a verb and students hold up a letter card each and rush to spell a word. (This seems to be practising listening rather than speaking.)
VII. Organising speaking tasks
Advantages of using group work:
More opportunities. As compared with activities for the whole class, group work enables students to talk a lot because it increases the time for each student to practise speaking in one lesson. More motivation. Group work helps students avoid losing their face in front of a whole class, and thus it makes students courageous to speak.
More authenticity. Speaking in a small group is more natural than speaking in a large group, because the latter is usually more formal and requires preparation.
Different levels. Students can naturally perform to their abilities more readily in small groups than in a whole class, i.e. students of different levels can participate.
More cooperation. Small group work helps students learn to work cooperatively and it helps develop interpersonal skill – fostering development of tolerance, mutual respect and harmony.