Speaking

Teaching and acquisition

Cynthia Olivares
Daniela Melipilln F.
WHAT IS SPEAKING?
Productive skill

Interactive
process


Speaking situations
Interactive Partially Interactive Non-interactive
Stages of acquisition
Pre-Production
Early Production
Speech- Emergence
Intermediate
Fluency
Advanced Fluency
Difficulties
Clustering
Redundancy
Reduced
Forms
Performance
variables
Colloquial
language
Rate of
Delivery
Stress, Rhythm,
intonation
Interaction
How should acquisition be done
Meaning



Interest








New language
How should acquisition be done

Understanding





Stress- free




In-class speaking task
Six possible task categories:

- Imitative :
- Intensive
- Responsive
- Transactional
- Interpersonal
- Extensive


Depending on learners needs
Principles for teaching speaking skills
1- Focus on both fluency and accuracy.

2- Provide intrinsically motivating techniques.

3- Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful
contexts.

4- Provide appropriate feedback and correction.
5- Capitalize on the natural link between
speaking and listening.

6- Give students opportunities to initiate oral
communication.

7- Encourage the development of speaking
strategies.
Teaching Conversation
Indirect approach
Direct
approach

It implies that one does not actually
teach conversation, but rather that
students acquire conversational
competence, peripherally, by
engaging in meaningful tasks.
It involves planning a conversation
program around the specific
microskills, strategies, and
processes that are involved in fluent
conversation.

Conversation - Indirect (strategy
consciousness-raising
Conversation - Direct
(gambits)
Conversation-Transactional
(ordering from a catalog)
Meaningful oral grammar
practice (modal auxiliary
would)
Individual Practice: Oral
dialogue journals
Other interactive techniques
Example of activity
Find someone who
Excuse me
Do you like sushi?
Do you work and study?
Do you sing/ dance/ act/ perform any extracurricular
activity?
etc...

Teaching Pronunciation
What are the factors within learners that
affect pronunciation, and how can you deal
with each of them?

Motivation &
concern for
good
pronunciatio
n
Identity
and
language
ego
Innate
phonetic
ability
Native
Language
Age
Exposure Variables
When and how should I correct the speech
errors of learners in my classroom?
The role of feedback
affective feedback cognitive feedback
When and how to treat errors.
Local errors: are errors that
affect single elements in a
sentence.
For example: errors in the use
of inflections or grammatical
factors.

-There is a french widow in every
bedroom.
-There is a french window in every
bedroom
Global errors: are errors that
affect overall sentence
organization.There are likely to
have a market effect on
comprehension.
For example: wrong word order

- I entered to house red and see cat
black walk me in front.
-I came into the red house and I saw
a black cat walking in front of me.
Evaluating and Scoring Speaking tasks
- Pronunciation
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
- Discourse features (cohesion, sociolinguistic
appropriateness, etc.)
- Task (accomplishing the objective of the task)
DRILLS are to language teaching what
the pitching machine is to baseball.
- Asking for clarification (what?)
- Asking someone to repeat something (huh? Excuse me? )
- Using fillers (uh, I mean, well) in order to gain time to process
- Using conversation maintenance cues (uh-huh, right, yeah,
okay, hm)
- Using paraphrases for structures one cant produce
- Using formulaic expressions (at the survival stage)
(how much does___ cost?
How do you get to the____?
- Using mime and nonverbal
expressions to convey meaning.

Nation, I.S.P., & Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL. Listening and
Speaking. New york: Routledge.

Brown, H.D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to
language pedagogy. New york: Longman
REFERENCES