1. SYNTHETIC ESSAY
DEVELOPING SPEAKING SKILLS
HECTOR FABIAN TORRES GIRALDO
SANTIAGO DE CALI UNIVERSITY
ENGLISH TEACHING SPECIALIZATION PROGRAM
ESSAY
SANTIAGO DE CALI
2011
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2. CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION ______________________________PAGE 3
2. THESIS STAMENT ____________________________PAGE 4
3. ESSAY BODY ________________________________PAGE 5
4. ANALYSIS ___________________________________PAGE 10
5. CONCLUSIONS _______________________________PAGE 11
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY_______________________________PAGE 12
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3. SYNTHETIC ESSAY
DEVELOPING SPEAKING SKILLS
1. INTRODUCTION
During my experience as an English teacher I’ve seen that many students have
had difficulties developing speaking. I’ve tried many different activities in class,
change the methodology in order to get to the students more accurately and take
them to a higher level of competence, unfortunately the results haven’t been the
best, so I wondered what else could I do or what was I doing wrong, so I realized
that in this context surrounded by Spanish speakers and having students only few
hours per day in class as the only chance to practice speaking and make them
repeat in class what they hear was not enough to develop speaking skills.
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4. 2. THESIS STATEMENT
According to these kinds of methodologies I found some authors as Bygate (1987)
who “claims that in order to achieve a communicative goal through speaking, there
are two aspects to be considered – knowledge of the language, and skill in using
this knowledge. It is not enough to possess a certain amount of knowledge, but a
speaker of the language should be able to use this knowledge in different
situations”.
We do not merely know how to assemble sentences in the abstract: we have to
produce them and adapt to the circumstances. This means making decisions
rapidly, implementing them smoothly, and adjusting our conversation as
unexpected problems appear in our path.
(Bygate 1987, 3)
Regarding Bygate’s words, it is clearly shown that students need to confront
situations where the time for answering a questions or interacting with others is
important to make decisions quickly in order to be understood by expressing a
message not matter the mistakes they could make during the process.
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5. 3. ESSAY BODY
what a teacher should take into account is the affective one, because no all the
students are open to communicate, they might feel shy, afraid or pressured by
his/her classmates and even by the teacher himself, so in order to avoid these
kinds of situations the students have to work in groups or in pairs, so they feel
more confident by being supported by his/her friends and not feeling like being lost
in a big ocean full of fears. When the students work in groups, they can share
information, confirm the directions given by the teacher. If a student feels that
making a mistake doesn’t affect his grades and feels supported will learn easily
from his/her mistakes and will encourage him/herself to participate in class and talk
several times, all this is possible if the teacher keeps the “affective filter” low, which
is like a curtain that the students move up or down depending on how they feel in
class.
The more panic he feels, the curtain will be up, by the other hand the more relaxed
the student is, the curtain will be down and the student opened to receive
information and apply it to real situations.
Bygate also says that it is completely necessary for the student to correct himself
this includes tools such as substitution, rephrasing, reformulating, self-correction,
false starts, and repetition and hesitation. Bygate concludes that incorporation of
these features, facilitation and compensation, in the teaching-learning process is of
a considerate importance, in order to help students’ oral production and
compensate for the problems they may face.
“All these features [facilitation, compensation] may in fact help
learners
to speak, and hence help them to learn to speak . . . In addition to
helping learners to learn to speak, these features may also help
learners
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6. to sound normal in their use of the foreign language. (Bygate 1987,
20-21)”
The Facilitation and compensation help the students make the oral production
possible or easier, or help them to change, avoid or replace the difficult
expressions, besides these functions also help students to sound more naturally as
speakers of a foreign language.
Another aspect that a teacher should take on account is the psychomotor one,
because interaction also involves coordination of movements where the brain has
to be active in order to function well and let the speaker coordinates what he’s
saying with the movement he’s performing. Psychomotor aspect is so important
that it has been taken by Chris Biffle as the column of his “whole brain teaching”
method that describes some steps and rules to be followed by the student in the
classroom in order to be active all the time and letting the brain be activated to, in
contrast with the regular methodologies where the students should remain in
silence without moving keeping the order, this will get lazy students afraid to talk
and accomplish the program goals or develop an appropriate speaking skill.
In a “whole brain teaching” class the students should move, answer and follow
directions quickly having fun, but always keeping the order. An example of this is,
whenever the teacher says “class” the students should say “yes” and however the
teacher says “class” the students should say “yes”. This will let the student feel
comfortable, active and he will participate in any speaking activity without feeling
pressured.
This also helps to keep the “affective filter” low, the teacher will innovate in the
classroom with activities that might result interesting for the students, will
encourage them to participate and according to Chris Biffle method they will surely
learn and develop any skill.
I had applied this method in many classes getting excellent results; the students
have asked me for more activities like that where they feel encouraged to
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7. accomplish a mission in the class having fun and not feeling like having a boring
homework to do.
All these methods and methodologies are similar to “Benjamin S Bloom’s
taxonomy learning domains” which focuses on three main domains.
1. Cognitive domain (intellectual capability, ie., knowledge, or 'think')
2. Affective domain (feelings, emotions and behaviour, ie., attitude, or 'feel')
3. Psychomotor domain (manual and physical skills, ie., skills, or 'do')
Bloom describes taxonomy as 'a set of classification principles', or 'structure', and
Domain simply means 'category'.
I agree with Bloom’s work because he claims that for developing an excellent
teaching and learning process, the teacher should be conscious about these
categories which let the students learn easier.
Bloom’s work is similar to what I have said above, about developing speaking
skills, but providing an excellent structure for planning, designing, assessing and
evaluating training and learning effectiveness. This model also serves as a sort of
checklist, which you can ensure that training is planned to deliver all the
necessary development for students, trainees or learners, and a template by which
you can assess the validity and coverage of any existing training.
Here there is a more detailed explanation of Bloom’s taxonomy:
Cognitive Affective Psychomotor
knowledge attitude skills
1. Recall data 1. Receive 1. Imitation
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8. (awareness) (copy)
2. Manipulation
2. Respond
2. Understand (follow
(react)
instructions)
3. Value
3. Develop
3. Apply (use) (understand
Precision
and act)
4. Articulation
4. Organise
4. Analyse (combine,
personal
(structure/elements) integrate related
value system
skills)
5. Internalize
5. Naturalization
5. Synthesize value system
(automate,
(create/build) (adopt
become expert)
behaviour)
6. Evaluate (assess,
judge in relational
terms)
According to Bloom’s method it is important to have an organization of the process
to know the student development and performance along the period or school year;
he also says that all the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) should
be complementary of each other, the student should understand and react, follow
directions and apply the topics learned in class.
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9. It is also important for Bloom to work with the affective aspect of the students in
order to have a better attitude facing the class, and not feeling shy.
Bloom also talks about the importance of coordinate the psychomotor aspect of
every student with the brain which will let them learn easier.
For developing speaking skills there is more than giving knowledge to the students
without any relevance, but make them move, participate, encourage them to feel
confident about themselves and not panic. Take the student to new things,
participate in real situations will be more useful to develop speaking skills
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10. 4. ANALYSIS
It could also be argued that not only repetition of verbs, words and new vocabulary
and all the methodologies mentioned before would be enough for developing
speaking skills accurately because another important aspect is pronunciation that
should be taken into account by teachers when they face classes with first level
students who are not related with the language, the intonation, rhythm and vowel
sounds that are wider than in Spanish due to their combinations. This sometimes is
confusing for this kind of students because at these levels they are always learning
in contrast with Spanish and looking for similar words in Spanish, so they base the
vowels’ pronunciation on their mother tongue, on this way they will get bad habits
that need to be corrected by the teacher every time and every class otherwise the
students will continue making mistakes in pronunciation until higher levels.
An example of this is the vowel /o/ when is used in words like hot, word, cool, no,
not, pound, etc. the students will try to say all these words like the mother tongue
/o/, when this happens the teacher should have the tools to explain and correct
mistakes and this is what teachers should know in order to make pronunciation
activities counting on phonetics, giving different examples and making the students
practice a lot without lacking the strategies and methodologies that I started talking
at the beginning of this essay.
All these aspects are well supported by Magister Macarthur Gomez Obregon in his
book “Semantico-Structural Paradigm” where he mentions the phonetic aspects of
the language that are sometimes not taken into account by some teachers. He also
describes how the phonemes that are unknown by the students are replaced by
Spanish ones. As I mentioned before is not a matter of repeating but articulation of
consonants and vowels which is problematic for students and what he calls
“interferences” to acquire a good pronunciation.
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11. 5. CONCLUSIONS
Developing speaking skills is not as easy as students think because is not a matter
of repetition done by the student, but also it requires an assimilation of the
intonation different than the mother tongue, practice at any times outside the class
and be conscious that they are learning a complete different language.
The methodology used in classes is also very important to develop speaking skills
in order to have the student in a real communication situation applied to his/her life
or real life example where students have to interact, in that way students will be
willing to learn, will be more active and conscious of what they say and how they
say it.
However speaking skills are directly related to the social environment, accent and
intonation an specific region may have, the teacher should work with that and try to
have accent reduce activities and the student should be put under a lot of listening
activities in order to get used to intonation and pronunciation which is very
important due to the fact that someone is recognized as a well speaker according
to the fluency and correct pronunciation, that is why I conclude that the teacher
should use a lot of different methods according to the kind of student he has and
the social cultural environment, it is not a matter of repetition but a process of
developing tongue use, vocalization and intonation.
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12. 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bygate,M. 1987. Speaking. Oxford: Oxford University Press (121 pp).
http://unleashthemonster.net/images/Resources/bloomstaxonomy_whitepaper1109
.pdf
Macarthur Gomez, Semantico-Structural Paradigm, Editorial Universidad Santiago
de Cali
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