Teaching speaking

 Hi guys 🤩 hope you had a great week, we continue with our blog, this day we will learn about teaching speaking. 🗣

We will start with the Dimensions of speaking which we have.

1. Transactional or Interpersonal

2. Interactive or non-interactive

3. Planned or Unplanned

Now we have some conversation strategies.

Conversation rules and structures, Zoltan Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell add more discourse categories such as starting conversations, (How are you? What a nice dog! Finally some sunshine!), Interrupting (Sorry to interrupt, but...), changing the subject ( Oh, by the way, that reminds me...) and closings (It's been nice talking to you...) (Dörnyei and Sarah Thurrell). Well, I don't want to keep you from your work... we should meet sometime) (Dörnyei and Thurrell 1994: 42-43).

Survival and repair strategies, learners should be able to ask for repetition by using formulaic expressions, repeating to the point of conversation breakdown, we can add the ability to be able to paraphrase i.e. to be able to ask about a word you don't know using another type of word without implying that you don't know it.

Real talk, when having a conversation with proficient English speakers must know that the conversation goes beyond the questions in the books, Helen Basturkmen examined the transcripts of the conversations of master students and found that they used, among other things, rephrasing questions.

Functional language, adjacency pairs and fixed phrases

A lot of speaking is made of up of fixed phrases or lexical chunks, such as Catch you later, Back in a sec, Can I call you back in a couple of minutes?.

Fixed and semi-fixed phrases crop up a lot in functional exchanges. Thus, for example, we can offer people things, such as a drink, a coffee, etc., by saying D'you fancy a ...? Would you like a ...? Shall I get you a...?

Many functional exchanges work well because they follow a set pattern. One such pattern is the adjacency pair (Cook 1989: 53-57). If someone approaches you and says Nice day isn't it? they expect a paired response, such as Yes, isn't it. If we say D'you fancy a coffee? the adjacency pair is either Yes, please or No, thank you.

When teaching speaking, we need to make students aware of fixed phrases, functional 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 of language use.

The roles of the teacher in a Speaking Lesson

·      Prompter

·      Participant

·      Feedback Provider