Teaching oral skills - Anne Lazarton

Teaching oral skills

Anne Lazarton

Prof. Patricia Calixto

You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live a only one (Czech proverb)

Teaching oral skills

- Speaking a foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding of the four skills (Bailey and Sabage, 1994)

- Speaking is an activity requiring the integration of many subsystems… all these factors combine to make speaking a foreign language a task for language learners” (Bailey and Sabage, 1994)

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Communicative competence Hymes theory

- The ability to communicate in a language relies on four dimensions

1. Grammatical competence

- Grammar rules

- Phonology

- Orthography

- Vocabulary/lexis

- Word formation

- Sentence formation

2. Sociolinguistic competence

- Rules for expression and understanding of appropriate social meanings in different contexts

3. Discourse competence:

- Rules of cohesion-how sentence elements are tied together

- Coherence- how texts are constructed

4. Strategic competence

- Repertoire of strategies that help with a variety of communication difficulties

- Teaching oral skills is mainly focused on:

Accuracy Fluency

- Fluency has two meanings:

- (hedge – 1993)

1. The ability to link units of the speech together with facility and without strain, or inappropriate slowness and undue hesitation

2. Natural language use

The oral skills

Questions to be considered

- Who are the students ?

- Why are they there ?

- What do they except to learn?

- What am I expected to teach?

1. Level of the students

- It is determined by a placement test or by a diagnostic test

2. Students needs

- Learners needs can be obtained by the students themselves