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.
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