How To Teach Speaking Scott Thornbury Pdf

0 views
Skip to first unread message

Lutero Chaloux

unread,
Jun 28, 2024, 9:16:18 PM6/28/24
to conhoulore

A useful reminder to those of us who have to face a large group of beginning students at the start of the week. I like the Reading Aloud activity which will soon be getting jammed into whatever lessons I find myself teaching. Thanks!

Thank you and thanks to Scott and every one who shares teaching ideas. You get some odd topics like ryhming numbers, fractals and homeopathy. I usually ask the student if they are OK with the topic they have drawn from the box or they can just make it up.

This would make sense if learners are following an ELL curriculum in schools, and it can be argued from there that there will be fewer people doing continuous study after the compulsory education stage, ergo higher incidence of lower levels.

Thank you very much, Scott Thornbury for the post and thank you all for the comments and the ideas in them. I like them all, but particularly the one on reading aloud. And thank you for continuing with the blog!

Thank you so very much Scott for this very useful collection of activities for teaching speaking.
I do find them perfect for openings, brainstorming as well as for practice levels. Yet, I believe they are much useful for young beginner learners. I would consider activities of a more complex nature to teach adult intermediate and advanced learners in which the focus is much more on developing conversational skills and communication strategies. So, what do you suggest for this latter end in practice?
With my sincere thanks.
Ahlam

Both read aloud and are fantastic techniques. Another that can utilise ingredients of both is the disappearing dialogue. let students read aloud from a dialogue on the board but teacher removes words with each shift of the carousel.

Not early in the early stages. When I was learning the language at University (English was my major), our teacher often used this method. And Carousel as well. She made us read long sentences from the textbook. We could repeat 15 or more sentences in Carousel )) and we were so angry with her. However now I realise how good her teaching was and thanks to her I could easily remember a lot of words, phrases and even sentences and use them in my speech later.

Thank you so much for this post, I think the most edifying part was the principles of good speaking tasks, it serves as a great guideline for constructing even more games and exercises for English learners.
Thank you again.

I am worried about how the recent pandemic is going to affect our teaching, what should we with activities that promote interaction and speaking such as pairwork or groupwork when the regular schools open now that students may have to be physically distant from each other in class? Any tips? Please help this poor teacher.

How do you convert a seemingly inert knowledge of words and grammar into fluid speech? This is probably the single most perplexing dilemma facing language students, as the following genuine statements attest:

This last comment is astute, and a glance at the speaking component of many coursebooks will confirm that speaking activities are often simply exercises in vocalizing grammar, as if this were all that were needed. Unhappily, it is not, and there are plenty of first-hand accounts that suggest as much. For example, the researcher Andrew Cohen kept a record of his experience studying
Japanese in Hawaii. The teaching programme was very form-focused; that is to say, most of the time was spent studying and manipulating isolated grammar forms. Cohen comments:

So, now we have a rough checklist of the knowledge-base that is required for day-to-day speaking. The next question is: how is this knowledge made available for use? Essentially, to ensure availability for use, there are three processes involved:

To focus on discourse markers: script or improvise a conversation that includes some common discourse markers, such as well, so, oh, I mean, right and anyway. Leave these out of the transcript and ask the learners to restore them, checking with the recording to see if they are right. Alternatively, record two versions of a conversation, one with the discourse markers and one without. Before handing out the transcript, play the conversations and ask the learners if they notice any difference between them. Then play them the two conversations again while they read the transcript.

Having established the difference, ask them to comment on what effect the discourse markers have. Then supply them with the transcript of a dialogue that has no discourse markers, and ask them to insert them where they think they are appropriate.

In fact, appropriation might best be thought of as practised control. This contrasts with what is commonly known as controlled practice. Controlled practice is repetitive practice of language items in conditions where the possibility of making mistakes is minimized. Typically this takes the form of drilling. Practised control, on the other hand, involves demonstrating progressive control of a skill where the possibility of making mistakes is ever present, but where support is always at hand. To use the analogy of learning to ride a bicycle, it is like being allowed to pedal freely, but with someone running along right behind, just in case. In practised control, control (or self-regulation) is the goal of the practice, whereas in controlled practice, control is simply the condition under which practice takes place.

One way of gaining control over a speaking task is to repeat it, but in conditions where other-regulation is progressively relinquished. One simple but effective way of doing this is through the use of dialogues. For example:

Finally, learners need to be able to marshal their newly-acquired skills and deploy them unassisted and under what are called real operating conditions. That is, they need to achieve autonomy in the skill. Autonomy in speaking requires that the speaker is able to:

With more than 700,000 registered users in over 100 countries around the world, Onestopenglish is the number one resource site for English language teachers, providing access to thousands of resources, including lesson plans, worksheets, audio, video and flashcards.

Great post and thinking, thank you. I use Comprehensible Input method in my classes and I feel it balanced out fluency and accuracy pretty well. For beginning levels, fluency is more focused on but at the same time the correct form is demonstrated by the teachers, instead of correction of errors.

One thing that I think gets lost in the fluency/accuracy discussion is how a student/teacher best goes about promoting both. Fluency, through meaningful input that is at the right level (CI) and accuracy through self correcting and noticing/monitoring. Too often we think of fluency as just speaking lots and accuracy repeating and practicing grammar points/use. This is much too behaviorist but makes the teacher seem like they are teaching and the students seem like they are learning.

In this talk I would like to use the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the IATEFL conference to review some of the major developments in the teaching of EFL since the mid-sixties and in particular the advent of the communicative approach, including the ideological context from which it emerged, its initial promise, its dispersion, its dilution, its normalization and its discontents. I will interweave autobiographical detail throughout in order to illustrate some key landmarks in this narrative, while at the same time I will challenge the notion of progress and evolution, and suggest that the diversity of contexts, needs and traditions that ELT currently embraces repudiates the notion of method, and challenges such established orthodoxies as cookie-cutter pre-service training, global textbooks, uniform examinations and even the notion of a standard English itself. I will argue that one way of making sense of all this diversity is to situate ELT within the wider orbit of education generally, which might mean re-configuring EFL/ELT/ESL/TESOL as simply LE: language education.

Scott Thornbury has an MA (TEFL) from the University of Reading and is currently curriculum coordinator on the MA TESOL program at The New School in New York. His previous experience includes teaching and teacher training in Egypt, UK, Spain, and in his native New Zealand. His writing credits include several award-winning books for teachers on language and methodology, including About Language: Tasks for Teachers of English (Cambridge University Press), a second edition of which is in preparation. He has also authored a number of journal articles and book chapters on such diverse subjects as voice-setting phonology, corpus linguistics, speaking instruction, learner autonomy, ELT materials, educational technology, and embodied learning. He is series editor for the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers.

I realised that she was absolutely right. In the same way that we often try to develop listening skills by practising listening, developing speaking skills is often just seen as giving students an opportunity to speak.

First of all, we need to identify what exactly we mean by speaking. Brown and Yule (1983) distinguish between primarily interactional (conversation) and primarily transactional (transmitting information) functions of speaking. Jack Richards has added a third broad function- talk as performance- which would include such things as presentations and speeches.

So, when teaching speaking, one of the key things that we need to do is to identify what kind of speech we are hoping students will produce, how formal it is likely to be and what kind of exponents* it might be useful to teach them.

Depending on the needs of your students there are literally dozens of different functions that you could focus on. More interactional functions might include expressing likes and dislikes, comparing, agreeing and disagreeing, giving your opinion, expressing surprise. More transactional functions might include asking for directions, ordering food in a restaurant or checking into a hotel. Performance related functions could include summarising what you are going to say, or what you have said, moving onto the next section of your talk, giving an example to support your argument etc.

7fc3f7cf58
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages