This document discusses strategies for teaching oral language skills. It notes that the four key language skills - writing, reading, speaking and listening - should not be taught separately, as they are often used together in real life. It provides examples of activities teachers can use to integrate all four skills, including texts for preparation, top-down and bottom-up approaches, and ensuring comprehension through vocabulary pre-teaching and appropriate challenge. Suggested activities to develop oral skills include conversations, role plays, storytelling, games, songs and total physical response approaches. Teachers should aim to create a supportive environment where students feel comfortable practicing their emergent spoken language skills.

1. ORAL SKILL
Nathalia
Rodriguez
Maria Fda.
Lenis C.

2. Teaching language skills
The use of language is taken from four skills:
writing, reading, speaking and listening.
However, teachers tend to explain these skills
separately which is wrong. In real life we use
two, three or the four skills, we never use just
one. That’s why teachers should look for
different ways to implement the four skills in
their activities or tasks.

3. Speaking and preparation
stimulus
● Texts as preparation stimulus
● Language skills and language
construction
Top down and Bottom up
Types of skills

4. Language issue
● Pre-teaching vocabulary
● Extensive vs Intensive tasks
● Authenticity
● Comprehension tasks
● Appropriate challenge

5. Learning the Spoken Language:
Discourse and discourse events
Meaning First
Why teachers need to check that
meaning is accessible
Meaning in speaking and listening
Conversation and extended talk

6. Development of conversational skills in childhood
Developing children’s discourse repertoires:
● Narratives
● Description
Effective support for children’s foreign language
discourse skills
Support through task structure
Support at discourse level

7. Learning to Speak in English
• Children expectations: similar mother tongue
• The initial stages: colours, numbers, simple greetings, etc.
• Formulaic language: routines

8. Dealing with Difficulty
Students can:
• Improvise
• Discard
• Foreignize
• Paraphrase
Teachers can:
• Supply key language
• Plan activities in advance

9. Structuring Discourse
Discourse is chaotic--> discourse should be understood
• To take turns
• To use discourse markers
• To use formulaic phrases
• To know sociocultural rules
• Interacting with an audience

10. Activities to teach to speak
Features:
• Activity type: controlled or free
• Fun: games, songs, rhymes, etc.
• Interaction patterns: teacher <->pupil, pupil/pupil
• Response: one word, one sentence, dialogues
• Confidence building: ability
• Accuracy/Fluency: different activities
• Amount of talking time: work in pairs or in groups

11. Comprehension Based Activities
• Conversation with games
• Speaking slowly
• Coupling language
• Dramatic intonation
• Short sentences
• Repeated routines
• Combining language
and movements
• TPR songs and Games
• Gestures approach
Total Physical Response Approach

12. Guided activities
Dialogues and Role plays
● Pupils speak in the first and second person
● Pupils learn to ask as well as answer
● They learn to use short complete bits of
language and to respond appropriately
● They don’t just use words, but also tone of
voice, stress, intonations, facial expression

13. Free activities Storytelling
● They focus attention on the message/content and not on
the language
● They are one step nearer real life and they let us know that
we can communicate in the foreign language
● They will really show that pupils can or cannot use the
language
● They concentrate on meaning more than on correctness.
Fluency is more important that accuracy at this stage.
● The atmosphere should be informal and non competitive
● Teacher control is minimal.

14. Teaching Emergent SLS
• Creating a friendly environment
• Encouraging peer bounding
• Creating a teacher/student bond
• Silent Period

15. Oral Work
Limitations
• To express emotions
• Little opportunities to speak in English
Correction
• In controlled activities
• In free activities