Elements of speaking

Different speaking events

Ditinction between transactional and interpersonal

functions.Transactional function has as its main purpose conveying
information and facilitating the exchange of goods and services, whereas
the interpersonal function is all about maintaining and sustaining good
relations between people.

Whatever the purpose of the speaking event, we can characterise it

as interactive or noninteractive. The conversation that takes place when
we buy a newspaper at a news kiosk is interactive, whereas leaing
message on an answer phone is non interactive.

We might make a difference between speaking that is planned(such

as a lecture or wedding speech) and speaking that is unplanned, such as a
conversation that takes place spontaneously when we bump into someone
on the street.
Conversational strategies

Conversational rules and structure:

Survival repair strategies: students need to be able to use repair

strategies when listening in interactive situations.

Real talk: if students are to be able to be involved in spontaneous face-

to-face conversation outside the classroom with competent English
language speakers, they probably beed to be exposed to more than just
the kind if questions that are commonly found in cousebooks.

Functional language, adjacency pairs and fixed phrases

When teaching speaking, we need to make students aware of fixed

phrases, fucntional sequences and adjacency pairs. We can do this by
teaching functional exchanges. We can have students look at transcripts
of typical exchanges and we can let them watch film clips of this kind
language use.

Students and speaking

Reluctant students

Preaparation:

Wilson: is describing the value of planning abd rehearsal for speaking

success, and students too, will perform much better if they have the
chance to think about what they are going to say and how to say it.

Marc Helgesen: suggests making a feature of this thinking in our heads

( that is trying out a conversation in our minds)
Paul Mennim: how students record presentations they are going to
make, treanscribe what they have said, correct it and then hand it over to
the teacher for further commentbefore finally making the presentation.

The value of repetition: each new encounter with a word phrase helps
to fix it in the students’ memory. Repetition has other beneficial too: it
allwos students to improve on what they did before.

Big groups, small groups: a major reason for the reluctance of the
some students in speaking activities is that they find themselves having to
talk in front of big group. A way of counteracting this is by making sure if
that they get chances to speak and interract in smaller groups,too.

Mandatory participation:

The roles of the teacher

Propmter: as teacher we may be able to help them and the activity to

progress by offering discrete sugesstions.
Participant: teachers should be good animators when asking students to
produce language.

Feedback provider: the vexed question of when and how to give

feedback in speaking activities is answered by considering carefully the
effect of possible different approaches.

Classroom speaking activities

Acting from script: It is important that when students are working on

plays or playlists, they should treat is as ‘real’. This means that the lines
they speak will have the real meaning.

Acting out dialogues: when choosing who should come out to the front
of the class, we should be careful not to choose the shyest student first.
We must give them time to work on their dialogues so thatthey will gain
much more from the whole experience.