Teaching Speaking Workshop November/December 2018

Workshop Title:  How to Teach Speaking

 

Common questions teachers have about teaching speaking:

Concerns/issues that students have:

  • Discussion question: What are some concerns your students have voiced about their speaking skills?
  • Students having the opportunity to practice interactive speaking is key.
    • Speaking should be looked at a skill in itself, rather than just practicing grammar.
  • Speaking activities are often simply ways of rehearsing pre-selected grammar items, which don’t teach patterns of real interaction. This makes students feel that they are insufficiently prepared for speaking in the word beyond the classroom.
  • The problem for a lot of students is that the process of retrieving the word or arranging the grammar is not yet automatic.
  • Students have a tendency to formulate the utterance first in the L1 and then translate it into L2.
  • There is also pressure for students to be accurate. Fluency vs. accuracy (one sometimes comes at the other’s expense).
  • Speakers produce speech through the following process:
    • conceptualizing
    • formulating
    • articulating
  • Students have trouble distributing their attentional capacity between planning and articulation.
  • Some students overuse the little language they have learned instead of constructing their own sentences.
  • If students start relying on strategies to fake fluency too much, they may stop trying to build their skills.

What does speaking entail?

  • Speaking is more than just knowing grammar patterns, some vocabulary and then being able to pronounce it all.

  • Spoken fluency requires the person to recall previously learned lexical chunks in real time.

  • Grammar used in spoken language differs from written grammar structures.

  • Automaticity: this is partly achieved through the use of prefabricated chunks that the student has already learned and can use in real time. In this sense, speaking is like any other skill, like playing a musical instrument.

  • Fluency:

    • Speed is a factor, but not the only.

    • Pausing:

      • The frequency of pausing is more significant than the length of the pauses.

        The - speaker - says - one - word - at - a - time (this person will not be deemed very fluent).

      • The speaker says a chunk and then takes a pause (this person will appear more fluent).

      • The correct placement of pauses:

        • Pauses that take place at the intersection of clauses sound more natural. Unnatural pausing:

          • Unnatural / pauses, on the / other hand, occur / midway between related / groups of / words.

        • The length of the run is another significant factor - how many syllables can the person say in a chunk without pausing.

    • To appear more fluent, speakers can use a number of tricks or production strategies.

      • Pause fillers

      • Vague expressions (“sort of,” “something like that,” etc.)

      • Repeats

What do speakers need to know?

  • It depends on the student. For example:
    • Students learning English for academic purposes often need to focus more on accuracy than fluency (for written exams).
    • Learners who are learning English as an international language, and who therefore will be communicating primarily with other non-native speakers, should prioritize intelligibility over accuracy, especially with regard to pronunciation.
  • The learner’s needs will help determine the best balance between accuracy and fluency.

 

The speaker needs to know the following:

Linguistic knowledge (grammar, vocabulary, etc.)

Grammar:

  • Core grammar for speaking:
    • A command of present and past simple.
    • Familiarity with the use of the continuous and perfect aspect forms of verbs.
    • Knowledge of the most frequently occurring modal verbs.
    • The ability to formulate questions.
    • Some basic conjunctions in order to string together sequences.
    • One or two all-purpose quoting expressions (he said...and then I said...)
  • Grammar used in speech is not identical to the grammar of written texts. Because speaking often takes place face to face and in a shared context, there is generally less need to be as explicit as one might normally be in writing. If your interlocutor doesn’t understand, they can just ask. This is why speaking tends to be more elliptic by nature. Example:

A: What’s the matter?
 

B: Got an awful cold. (ellipsis: I’ve)

  • The following list summarizes facts about the distribution and frequency of verb forms in spoken language:
    • Present tense forms outnumber past tense forms by 2:1.
    • Simple forms outnumber progressive/continuous and perfect forms by over 10:1.
    • The past perfect and present perfect continuous are rare.
    • Passive verbs account for only 2% of all finite verb forms in speech.
    • Will, would, and can are extremely common in speech.
    • Other characteristics of spoken language:
      • High frequency of personal pronouns (especially you and I ).
      • Use of substitute forms (using did instead of repeating the verb again).
      • The use of deictic language: relating to or denoting a word or expression whose meaning is dependent on the context in which it is used (such as here, you, me, that one there, or next Tuesday).

Vocabulary:

  • Based on corpora of transcribed speech, the fifty most frequent words in spoken English make up nearly 50% of all talk. (Yeah, well, I know, but, etc.).
  • Native speakers employ over 2,500 words to cover 95% of their needs. Learners can get by on a lot fewer.
  • Which words should students study? This should be based on frequency. A working knowledge of the 1,500 most frequent words in English would stand a learner in good stead. Even the top 200 most common words will provide the learner with a lot of conversational mileage, since they include:
    • All the common question forming words, such as where, why, when, how, whose...?
    • All the modal auxiliary verbs: would, will, can, may, might, should, etc.
    • All the pronouns such as it, I, me, you, they, us, and the possessive forms such as my, your, hers, their.
    • Demonstrative pronouns and other common deictic devices, such as this, that, here, there, now, then.
    • All the common prepositions, such as in, on, near, from, after, between.
    • The full range of spoken discourse markers, such as well, oh, so, but, right, and, now.
    • Common backchannel expressions, such as really, no, what, and how... as in how awful! how wonderful!
    • Common sequencing and linking words, such as then, first, next, etc.
    • Common ways of adding emphasis, such as really, very, just, so.
    • Common ways of hedging (reducing assertiveness), such as actually, quite, rather, sort (of).
    • All-purpose words, such as thing, things, place, time, way, make and do.
  • Productive vocabulary vs. receptive vocabulary:  the former is only half the size of the latter.
  • The number of words used in speaking is lower than the number used in writing.
    • In speech, fewer words go further. A vocabulary of just 2,500 words covers nearly 95% of spoken text (compared to 80% of written text).

  • “Prefabricated” chunks:

    • Sequences of speech that should be retrievable as speech units. These chunks are: collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms, sayings, etc

    • The most common chunks in US English: kind of, sort of, of course, in terms of, in fact, deal with, at all, as well, make sure, go through, first of all, in other words

Pronunciation:

  • Words are stored along with their pronunciation and should not need to be reconstituted from scratch each time they are used (muscle memory!).
  • In English, there is a fundamental association between high pitch and new information. Information that is being added to the discourse is made prominent through the use of a step up in pitch.
    • Because sentence stress and intonation are used to signal new or important information, it is likely that these two things are decided during the initial planning of an utterance. Students need to be thinking about these things before they even start a sentence!
  • Paratone - it is very perceptible when news readers, for example, move from one story to the next (“dying fall” intonation).
  • Native speakers frequently identify the non-native-like use of stress, rhythm, and intonation as being a greater bar to intelligibility and a stronger marker of accent, than the way individual vowel and consonant sounds are pronounced.

Extralinguistic knowledge 

  • Topic and cultural knowledge.
    • Sociocultural knowledge: the culturally embedded rules of sociable behavior. This is debatable as many of these so-called rules are based on flimsy, often hearsay, evidence. They can reinforce stereotypes. Simply knowing how to ask: How do you do that here? may be more useful for students than a list of dos and don’ts.
  • Knowledge of the context.
  • Familiarity with the other speakers.

Student awareness:

  • Discussion question: How can you help students become aware of their language gaps?
  • We have to help students uncover the gaps in their knowledge, which leads to them speaking haltingly, through awareness activities.
  • One way to raise learners’ awareness of features of spoken language is to expose them to real instances of speaking (not scripted) and to have them study the transcripts.
  • It is important for learners to hear things like hesitations, repetitions and false starts as even native speakers do these things. Showing learners that even proficient speakers have to make real-time adjustments and showing them how they can make these adjustments, are essential.

  • Draw students’ attention to certain things in the recording, like register, language features, etc. to get them to notice things about it.

  • Awareness can be enhanced when learners notice the gap between what they can do and what a skilled practitioner can do. One way of engineering this is to adopt a task-based instructional cycle:

    • Students perform a speaking task to the best of their current ability.

    • They then observe skilled practitioners performing the same task, and they note features they would like to incorporate.

    • They re-perform the original task, attempting to incorporate the targeted features.

Helping students become more independent with their speaking:

  • Appropriation. The support needs to be gradually reduced so as to encourage a degree of student independence, which in turn will require a degree of appropriation. This support reduction may take the form of, for example:
    • Removing the model, so that learners have to rely on memory. After going over the section in the book, for example, you can ask students to close their books and to use the new language relying solely on memory, for example.
    • Withdrawing teacher support.
    • Moving from the written mode to the spoken one.
    • Reducing planning time (the time the student has to prepare their answer).
    • Performing the task under more exacting conditions, e.g. to a time limit, or in public.
  • Working towards autonomy: If possible, try to get the student to perform under more realistic conditions (conditions that involve the kinds of urgency, unpredictability, and spontaneity that often characterize real-life speech events). It is one thing, for example, to deliver fluidly a prepared speech, but it is quite another to respond to questions from the audience at the end.

  • Activities that require a degree of autonomy include:

    • Giving presentations and talks. For homework, assign the student a topic. The student must prepare and present a short talk in the next lesson.

    • Telling stories, jokes and anecdotes.

    • Drama activities, including role-plays and simulations.

    • Discussions and debates.

    • Conversation and chat.

Feedback and correction:

  • Discussion question: How and when do you give feedback and correction?
  • If the teacher is constantly intervening to correct and give feedback, it may have a counterproductive effect of inhibiting fluency by forcing learners’ attention on to accuracy. There are other ways to give corrections, like using gestures (i.e. point behind you to indicate that the student should use the past tense).
  • The difference between mistakes and errors.
    • Mistake: the learner’s momentary failure to apply what they already know. Mistakes can usually be self-corrected.
      • Discussion question: How else can you get students to self-correct?
    • Error: a gap in the speaker’s knowledge of the system. Errors cannot be self-corrected.

  • It is important that teachers give students language with which to initiate repair, such as:

    • “Sorry, could you say that again?”

    • “I didn’t get that.”

    • “What do you mean, X?”

 

Sources:

How to Teach Speaking (Pearson - Longman) by Scott Thornbury

Exploring Spoken English (Cambridge) by Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy

Teaching Speaking Skills 1 (Teaching English - British Council)