ESCOLA SUPERIOR BATISTA DO AMAZONAS CURSO DE PS-GRADUAO EM DOCNCIA EM LNGUA INGLESA PRTICA ESCRITA EM LNGUA INGLESA

KARLA REBECCA DE CASTRO CAMPOS

Oral Strategies for Efficient Speaking Proficiency

MANAUS/AMAZONAS DEZEMBRO/2013

ESCOLA SUPERIOR BATISTA DO AMAZONAS CURSO DE PS-GRADUAO EM DOCNCIA EM LNGUA INGLESA PRTICA ESCRITA EM LNGUA INGLESA

KARLA REBECCA DE CASTRO CAMPOS

Controlled Oral Strategies for Efficient Speaking Proficiency

Resumo feito para obteno de nota parcial na matria Prtica Oral em Lngua Inglesa ministrada pelo Prof. Dr. Paulo Renan.

MANAUS/AMAZONAS DEZEMBRO/2013

SUMMARY BROWN, H.D.; Teaching by Principles: an Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy . 3.ed. USA: Pearson, 2007. People with at least a year of experience in English teaching - Language Institutes are to be considered in this particular case will find it easy to notice that the number of students who seek for an English course are mostly interested in speaking the language rather than understanding it, reading it or writing it. Producing oral speech is, however, one of the trickiest parts of learning a language once it may provide the student with the greatest motivation or demotivate them completely at the first five minutes of trial. Oral production involves a series of features that are inherent to some people who tend to find it easy and natural -. On the other hand, speaking could get as difficult as lefthanded writing for right-handed people. According to SCRIVENER (2005):

Very often, when people study a language, they accumulate a lot of up-in-the-head knowledge (i.e. they may know rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary items), but then find that they cant actually use this language to communicate when they want to. There seems to be some difficulty in moving language from up-there knowledge to actively usable language. For many learners, their passive knowledge is much larger than their active language. (SCRIVENER, 2008, p. 147)

Based on what Scrivener said, and as a consequence of this up-there knowledge not being able to turn into active knowledge, the teacher in role has to come up with different strategies that would work as tickets to the so wanted oral proficiency. On his book Teaching by Principles An interactive approach to Language Pedagogy, Brown dedicates an entire chapter to the use of different skills to achieve proficiency somehow. This chapter in entitled Teaching Speaking and it embeds the issues in oral communication, the types of spoken language, the skills of oral communication, the types of classroom speaking performance and the principles for teaching speaking skills. On the first topic, Brown provides the reader with some perspective on the current issues teachers may face while planning and delivering speaking lessons. Some of the most important issues he mentions are, for instance, the problem with conversational discourse. Rare are the teachers who can actually grasp what a conversation class really is. As Richards (1990, p. 67) mentions, the conversation class is something of an enigma in language teaching. Conversation classes are as dynamic as they can get and teachers have to bear in mind that diverse features of language teaching may be present depending on their audience and what they are looking for as they aim. Examples of these features may be teaching

appropriateness, styles of speech, using different topics, maintaining a conversation, turntaking, interruption and termination. Not only conversation classes are mentioned. Another important issue to be talked about when analyzing oral skills is teaching pronunciation. Brown says that it is controversial to teach phonetics or how accurate phonemes are being used in a context where communication and the conveyance of message are considered vital. This discussion also leads us to the use of criteria such as accuracy and fluency and the fact that acknowledging that one is better than the other in language teaching could mean students lacking on grammar or lacking on knowing how to deliver a message. However, the issue that is considerably heard from students who are not willing to speak is the affective one. According to KRASHEN (1988), learners with high levels of motivation and confidence will be more prone to learning a language than others who feel anxious or who suffer direct influence or pressure from the teacher or other related factors. His theory of second language acquisition concerning the affective filter ends up showing what happens very frequently in class. These levels of anxiety prevent students from performing their speaking task, mainly because among all of the other skills, this is the one with more exposure. Brown also mentions that among all of the issues to be considered while thinking of strategies to provide students with techniques to enhance their oral skill the interaction effect, intelligibility and genres of the language should also be taken into consideration. Later on in this chapter, the author also mentions that skills of communication or the skills to be considered for oral proficiency should focus on both form and the functions of a language that students should pay attention to both the whole of the language as well as its bits and pieces. The skills are divided into micro and macroskills. They are as follows:
Microskills 1. 2. 3. Produce chunks of language of different lengths. Orally produce differences among the English phonemes and allophonic variants., Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonational countours., Produce reduced forms of words and phrases. Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) in order to accomplish pragmatic purposes. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.

4. 5. 6.

Macroskills 1. 2. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse. Accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to situations, participants and goals.

3.

4.

Use appropriate registers, implicature, pragmatic conventions, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations., Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization and exemplification (...) (BROWN, 2007, p.328)

Bearing in mind that these micro and macro skills are potentially what teachers are aiming at with students oral performances, it is also important to notice that some principles are to be followed within the skill. Brown mentions a few of these, for instance: providing students with motivating techniques; encouraging the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts; giving feedback and correcting; giving them opportunities to initiate oral conversation and encouraging the development of speaking strategies. Analyzing each one of the aforementioned issues towards oral proficiency, it will be noticed that they become part of the oral strategies teachers should aim for when teaching EFL/ESL students. The first strategy Brown mentions is teaching conversation. The two different approaches towards this technique the indirect one in which students are kind of free to engage in conversation; and the direct one in which a conversational program is planned towards a group are nowadays recognized in different methods (such as TBL) in which learners are engaged in both conscious conversation (focus on form at times) and simply interacting and playing around with the language. Activities that may provide students contact with this technique are: consciousness-raising strategies with students making a plan of what they are going to present and having to come to a consensus; Direct conversation with given chunks of language; transactional conversation and information gap activities. Other techniques include interviews, guessing games, ranking, discussions and role plays. Other than teaching conversation, the author also mentions that it is vital to teach students pronunciation. The problem is that whenever one thinks about teaching pronunciation, the focus goes inevitably to the accuracy of pronouncing words. Pronunciation in the context of proficiency tends to swerve a bit to other features of phonology which are intrinsically connected to the way native speakers convey the message, which is through the means of analyzing intonation, stress and rhythm. Some techniques which can be used to teach pronunciation and enhance oral communication are as follows: listening for pitch changes and analyzing the meaning behind it; focusing on stress of words/syllables with words, they can also practice emphasis and which part of the message they want to convey; games with minimal pairs. Of course, these two items above play an important role on the communicative aspect of learning a language. Lets not forget that it is also vital that teachers consider that giving feedback and assessing are also strategies to be used to reach a proficiency level. Only through the means of feedback will a student be able to notice their mistakes and correct them and

only through the means of assessment will the teacher be able to notice eventually where students can improve. Even though Brown covered most of the important issues on oral skills, some other characteristics which will potentially cover different aspects (not only speaking) of learning a language should also be considered. Teachers shall not forget that taking the students needs and learning styles into consideration is the first and main strategy to bear in mind. Going from there, any other strategy can be considered successful while teaching a language and more successful results can be seen.

REFERENCES

BROWN, Douglas H. Teaching by Principles An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. 3. ed. New York: Longman, 2007.

KRASHEN, Stephen D. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. PrenticeHall International, 1988.,

SCRIVENER, Jim. Learning Teaching The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching. 2.ed. Oxford: Macmillan, 2008.

RICHARDS, J. & NUNAN, D. Second Language Teacher Education. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.