Developing Speaking Skills: Taking a Closer Look.

 

Marcin Kleban, Lublin

 

The main topic of this article seems to me quite a challenging task. Teaching with the goal of improving students’ speaking skills at the advanced level is quite an arduous and time-consuming task, while the results are not easily seen over a short period of time. Especially when what you have is two or three hours of teaching time a week.

 

On the other hand, mastering oral language skills may be very rewarding for students since a good command of oral communicative proficiency helps them express their feelings, thoughts and ideas. Speaking seems to be the most handy, immediate and “most obvious” form of communication. In fact, when teaching the beginning methodology course, I noticed that when students hear the word “communication” many of them associate it, quite wrongly but significantly, with speaking.

In this article I would like to present a few suggestions as to how students may develop their productive skills through the use of the language analysis strategies. I would also like to emphasise the importance of the evaluation, conducted both by the teacher and the students themselves.  My teaching practice tells me that while teaching students the tools and giving them guidance in the art of autonomous learning is obviously indispensable, in order not to lose the benefits of the learning, to further consolidate and reinforce the gains it is extremely important that they are given practical, concrete and clear feedback.

 

Hence the important role of the various language learning strategies; both cognitive, concerned with manipulating language material, and metacognitive (cf. Oxford 1990), that is those which help students organise the process of learning and focus their attention on problem areas which need to be worked on.

I noticed that apart from the teaching and learning that should be taking place in any language classroom, it is of the utmost importance to remember about monitoring the students’ performance and about the need to provide them with constant feedback on their progress. The observation, though hardly revealing, is so often not put into practice.

By “feedback and monitoring” – as far as the skill of speaking is concerned - I mean not the odd comment given to students while they engage in speaking activities but a structured and specific analysis of a learner’s speech samples.

 

Of course a teacher would inevitably be faced with many practical and technical obstacles in the attempt to provide such detailed and frequent monitoring. Here is the problem of lack of time, the size of the group making it not practically possible to devote due attention to each individual, the need to concentrate on the development of other skills and areas of the language. However, there seems to be a way of dealing with the technical problems. If students could be actively involved in the process of monitoring (the process should rather be called self-monitoring here) then teachers would overcome many of the difficulties connected with it.

Naturally, it is not possible to motivate all students so that they actively take over part of the responsibility for monitoring their performance, nor are they always able to cope on their own. There is a great role for the language teacher to assist and help their students as they work towards improving their speaking skills. However, ‘pushing‘ students towards greater autonomy in this area of language learning too may be potentially rewarding for their learning and quite practical for the teacher at the same time.

 

Putting the ideas into practice I decided to do an activity with my first year college students in which they practised and reflected upon their speaking skills. The students were eighteen/nineteen upper-intermediate/advanced level learners. At the end of their academic year they have a practical English exam which they take both in the written and the oral form. So this means that apart from the knowledge and skills necessary for passing the written part they will also need speaking skills.

The class activity consisted in asking them to do two tasks and recording their speech samples on the tape.

Task One:

- answer the question: what kind of clothes do you like wearing and which would you never wear?

Task Two:

- tell a story or report on an accident that happened to you.

Seven students were asked the questions immediately before the recording so they had no time for preparation. The first of the two was comparatively easy and the vocabulary they needed to use here was definitely within their level of linguistic proficiency. Bu the point was rather not to check how much vocabulary they have stored in their memories but rather how well they use it in speech and how they get across what they have to say.

The second task was more open-ended since the students had a chance to say whatever they wanted, using whatever vocabulary or structures they chose. 

Having recorded and transcribed the answers, I gave the students the transcripts and asked them to think about them and evaluate their efforts, with the view of making them focus on those features of their speech that need to be improved upon and also to making them realise how proficient they are in using the linguistic knowledge that they have.

 

The student’s reaction was almost uniform; most of them were quite unhappy with what they had said; some were even embarrassed. I must stress at the this point that I did not give any evaluative feedback nor was their performance graded in any way. It was the students who evaluated their own work and commented on their own performance.

The main problem areas were the lack of cohesion, the minimal use of linking phrases that could render their speeches more fluent and, in many cases, the pervasive use of the phrase “you know”. The general feeling was that they knew they could do much better but somehow they could not bring out the whole potential of their skills.

 

After the feedback session I asked the group to do the task again.  This time the students demonstrated a much better performance. They deliberately tried to avoid the mistakes or the imperfections of their previous recording. The speeches were considerably more fluent and contained fewer mistakes. Although this may be partly due to the fact that the task was more familiar to them this time and they were in a way prepared, it seems that the better performance the second time can be ascribed to the fact that they had a chance to closely analyse their speeches. The analysis was an 'eye-opening‘ experience which led them to be conscious of a number of features of their speech.

The students when asked to report on the experience said that it was certainly stressful to be recorded and quite difficult to answer the questions straight away and make up stories on the spot but it definitely made them think about how they formulate their thoughts in English, how they get their ideas across and what language resources they use.

Another way in which they will benefit from the activity is that with the oral practical English exam ahead they will be more aware of how they might be assessed by examiners and what to focus on when preparing for it. This, at the end of the day, may bring quite practical advantages in the form of passing their exam and getting good grades.

 

Although the activity was carried out with almost adult, advanced students of English the same idea of recording and analysing learners' speech performance can be used with younger learners. In this case, however, it would probably require more attention and help from the teacher. But the more the students get used to the idea of monitoring and analysing their speech the more autonomous they will become and the less they will need the intervention of the teacher.

 

 Marcin Kleban, 7.05.2002