12. I Have Never...: All students in the class should start this activity holding five fingers in the air (you can use less fingers to do this more quickly). The student who goes first tells the class one thing that they have never done. The students who have done that activity should put a finger down, and tell the class a story about this activity. A student is out of the game when all of their fingers are down.
This table shows these levels in Spoken Interaction and Spoken Production. 6
For most people, the ability to speak a language is synonymous with knowing that
language. Nevertheless, “speaking in a second or foreign language has often been
viewed as the most demanding of the four skills” What
specifically makes speaking in a second or foreign language difficult?
Brown labels speaking as the most challenging skill for students because of the set
of features that characterize oral discourse:
- Contractions, vowel reductions and elision;
- The use of slang and idioms:
- Stress, rhythm and intonation;
- The need to interact with at least one other speaker.
According to Thornburythe process of developing speaking skills consists of three stages:
• awareness – learners are made aware of features of target language knowledge,
• appropriation – these features are integrated into their existing knowledge-base,
• autonomy – learners develop the capacity to mobilize these features under real-time conditions without assistance.
It seems that at the advanced level of foreign language proficiency students and teachers’ efforts should be focused on the stage of appropriation and its effective movement towards autonomy in target language use. For that purpose they need a range of speaking tasks that encourage a considerable degree of independence by relying on extensive oral practice (treated as a source of meaningful input and feedback) mainly in the form of student interactions. The speaking activities presented below take into account the above assumptions.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
