Chapter II elt methods: a basic Appraisal 1 Humanistic Approaches

Phase
Contents
 Pre-speaking
 While-speaking
 Post-speaking
Schemata and language activation. Speaker motivation. Idea preparation.
Role-playing, problem-solving, story-telling, game-playing, socializing.
Reflection on the activity. Focus on language. Focus on ideas. Integrated skills. Further tasks.
Pre-speaking activity is to prepare the participants for the main speaking activity. Schemata activation is recalling prior world-knowledge of the participants that is relevant to the speaking situation. Questions, pictures and texts can be used to these ends. Brainstorming is an activity used to generate ideas in small groups before the main speaking activity. The purpose is to generate as many ideas as possible within a specified time period. The ideas are not evaluated until the end of activity time. (Brown, H. 1994.Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Prentice Hall). Motivation of participants can be enhanced when they clearly see the communicative problem and the ways to resolve it.
While-speaking the participants actually resolve the communicative problem and produce its resolution as a result of the role-play, problem-solving, socialization or communication game.
Post-speaking can provide opportunities for the learners to re-visit the language and ideas produced and to think of the ways to make communication more effective. An important part of the post-speaking activity is the development of integrated communicative skills, i.e. reading-and-speaking task, listening-and-speaking task, speaking-and-writing task etc. (Sheils, J. 1988. Communication in the Modern Language Classroom. Strasbourg)
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12. Below are 3 ways teachers can use to correct students’ speaking mistakes? Which one would you adopt most? Why?
The constant dilemma: to correct and encourage accuracy or not to correct and encourage fluency. Interrupting your students when they make mistakes risks making them nervous and hesitant speakers. Not doing so may deprive them of a valuable learning opportunity.
In general, it is often worth avoiding interrupting students as much as you can. Immediate correction can be useful when you are interacting with the class but when students are involved in pair or group activities, delayed correction is better. Listen while the students are working and make mental notes of the most important mistakes. Let them complete the activity. Then you draw attention to the mistake and invite the student to correct it. Most mistakes in speaking are what we call 'slips'. Slips are mistakes which the student can correct if you draw attention to the mistake.