Personalization as a way of stimulation to developing speaking skills Content: Introduction Chapter I: Teaching English Speaking as a Foreign Language

1.3 Teaching Materials in Teaching Speaking:
This section focuses on the selection and utilization of appropriate teaching materials to enhance students' speaking skills. It discusses the advantages of using authentic materials, technology-based resources, and task-based activities to engage learners in meaningful speaking practice.
Speaking is a productive skill. Theoritically, according to O’Grady (1996) , it is a mental process. This means that it is a psychological process by which a speaker puts a mental concept into some linguistic form, such as word, phrases, and sentences used to convey a message to a listener. So the speech production is the process by which the speakers turn their mental concept into their spoken utterences to convey a message to their listeners in the communicative interaction.
Much recent work on optimal conditions for the teaching of speaking in second and foreign language classrooms has been grounded in educational psycholinguistics or in cognitive and social psychology. Theoretical constructs for language pedagogy have been drawn extensively from empirical studies, underpinned by the central notions of second language acquisition: communicative competence (Canale and Swain 1980); comprehensible input (Krashen 1985), negotiated interaction (Ellis 1990, Gass and Varonis 1994, Long 1983, Pica, et al. 1989), input processing (VanPatten and Cadierno 1993), developmental sequences and routes of acquisition (Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann 1981), and communication strategies (Faerch and Kasper 1983). Such constructs are widely taught in teacher preparation programs in second and foreign language teaching and clearly have relevance to oral language instructional practice.⁵
From a communicative view of the language classroom, listening and speaking skills are closely interwined. ESL. Curricula treat oral communication skills will simply be labelled as “Listening/Speaking” course.
The 4 Language Skills
When we learn a language, there are four skills that we need for complete communication. When we learn our native language, we usually learn to listen first, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. These are called the four “language skills”:
Skill #1: Listening
Skill #2: Speaking
Skill #3: Reading
Skill #4: Writing
Input is sometimes called “reception” and output is sometimes called “production”. Spoken is also known as “oral”.
Note that these four language skills are sometimes called the “macro-skills”. This is in contrast to the “micro-skills”, which are things like grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling.
Why should we teach speaking skills in the classroom?
Motivation
Many students equate being able to speak a language as knowing the language and therefore view learning the language as learning how to speak the language, or as Nunan (1991) wrote, “success is measured in terms of the ability to carry out a conversation in the (target) language.” Therefore, if students do not learn how to speak or do not get any opportunity to speak in the language classroom they may soon get de-motivated and lose interest in learning. On the other hand, if the right activities are taught in the right way, speaking in class can be a lot of fun, raising general learner motivation and making the English language classroom a fun and dynamic place to be.
Speaking is fundamental to human communication
Just think of all the different conversations you have in one day and compare that with how much written communication you do in one day. Which do you do more of? In our daily lives most of us speak more than we write, yet many English teachers still spend the majority of class time on reading and writing practice almost ignoring speaking and listening skills.
Principles for Teaching Speaking
• Focus on fluency and accuracy (depending on lesson/activity objective)
• Use intrinsically motivating techniques based on student goals and interests
• Use authentic language in meaningful contexts
• Provide appropriate feedback and correction
• Optimize the natural link between listening and speaking
• Give students the opportunity to initiate oral communication
• Develop speaking strategies
Oral communication skills in pedagogical research
1. Conversational discourse
• Attention to conversation rules, sociolinguistic appropriateness, speech styles, routines, etc.
2. Teaching pronunciation
• How to teach, yet understanding that accents will remain
3. Accuracy and fluency
• How to address these two elements of language usage and language use
4. Affective factors
• Creating a climate that encourages students to speak and to accept imperfections as part of the process
5. Interaction effect
• Speaking is a collaborative activity which students must learn to negotiate
6. Questions about intelligibility
• Students must learn to be intelligible, not native speakers
7. The growth of spoken corpora
The one of the key development on teaching our production
8. Genres of spoken language
How to teach variations of oral interaction
Types of spoken language
Monologue eg lectures, speeches, recitations.
Dialogue eg conversations, interviews, debates, meetings.
Functions of Spoken Language
Referential : utterances that provide information.
Expressive : utterances that express the speaker’s feelings.
Transactional: utterances where the main purpose is to get something done or acquire something.
Interactional : utterances where the main emphasis is on the social relationship between the participants.
Phatic : utterances devoid ofany serious content ‘small talk’, usually conducted with strangers or people only slightly known.
What makes speaking difficult ?
The main cause of what makes speaking difficult in the second stage the formulation. The smaller lexicón or a lack of vocabulary can cause the problem, a weak gramatical and phonological encoders deteriorate the accuracy and fluency of the speak.⁶
Others cause can be the lack of:
• Clustering: it’s the fluent speech not word by word, learners can organize their output.
• Redundancy: it’s making the meaning of the speech clear
• Reduced forms: it’s necessary to learn the reduced form to sound like a native speaker because the reduced forms are used in the daily speech.
• Performance variables: it’s the process of thinking as you speak.
• Colloquial language: it’s the acquisition of idioms and phrases of colloquial language.
• Rate of delivery: it’s the acceptable fluency and speeds at the moment of speak.
• Stress, rhythm & intonation: it’s the right intonation and pronunciation of patterns to send important messages
• Interaction: it’s the creativity to produce the component waves of language, the creativity to negotiate the conversation.
Tips for the teacher:
– Use the authenthic language in meaningful context.
– Give the feedback and be careful with their corrections
– Teach in conjunction with listening
– Allows to the student initiate communication
– Improve the Motivation using a range of many different techniques.
Tips for the improve of the fluency and Accuracy
Fluency:
– speak at normal speed
– self-correction
– smooth use of speech
Accuracy: Speaking using the correct form of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.
Micro- and Macroskills of oral communication
The implications of those focusing on both the forms of language and the functions of language. The Forms of language include the types of sentences used (declarative, interrogatory, imperative, exclamatory). Meanwhiie, the functions of language include its purpose and its use.These include the following:
1. Informative language function: communicating information, such as facts. 2. Expressive language function: reporting feelings or attitudes or evoking these feelings in the reader/listener.⁷
3. Directive language function: using language to cause or prevent actions, such as in commands or requests
6 TYPES OF SPEAKING PERFORMANCE (THE KINDS OF ORAL PRODUCTION THAT THE STUDENTS ARE EXPECTED TO CARRY OUT IN THE CLASSROOM):
1. IMITATE
A very limited portion of classroom speaking time may legitimately be spent generating “human tape recorder” speech, where, for example, learners practice an intonation contour or try to pinpoint a certain vowel sound. Imitation of this kind is carried out not for the purpose of meaningful interaction, but for focusing on some particular element of language form.
New teachers in the field always want the answer to this question: Is drilling legitimate part of the communicative language classroom? The answer is a qualifed yes. Drills offer students an opportunity to listen and to orally repeat certain string of language that may pose some linguistic difficulty-either phonological or grammatical. Drills are to language teaching what the pitching machine is the baseball. They offer limited practice through repetition. They allow one to focus on one element of language in a controlled activity. They can help to establish certain psychomotor (“to loosen the tongue”) and to associate selected grammatical forms with their appropriate context. Here are some useful guidelines for successful drills:
Keep them short (a few minutes of a class hour only)
Keep them simple(preferably just one point at a time)
Keep them “snappy”
Make sure students know why they are doing the drill.
Limit them to phonology or grammar points
Make sure they ultimately lead to communicative goals
Do not overuse them.
2. INTENSIVE
Intensive speaking goes one step beyond imitative to include any speaking performance that is designed to practice some phonological or grammatical aspect of language. Intensive speaking can be self-initiated, or it can even form part of some pair work activity, where learners are “going over” certain forms of language.
3. RESPONSIVE
A good deal of student speech in the classroom is responsive: short replies to teacher or student initiated questions or comments. These replies are usually sufficient and do not extend into dialogues (#4 and #5). Such speech can be meaningful and authentic:
T: how are you today?
S: pretty good, thanks, and you?
4. TRANSACTIONAL(DIALOGUE)
Transactional language, carried out for the purpose of conveying or exchanging specific information, is an extended form of responsive language. Conversations, for example, may have more of a negotiative nature to them than does responsive speech:
T: What is the main idea in this essay?
S: The United Nations should have more authority
T: More authority than what/
S: Than it does right now
T: What do you mean?
S: Well, for example, the UN should have the power to
force certain countries to destroy its nuclear weapons.
T: You do not think the UN has the power now?
S: Obviously not. Several countries are currently
manufacturing nuclear bombs.⁸
Such conversation could readily be part of group work
activity as well.

1. 
   INTERPERSONAL(DIALOGUE)
   

The other form of conversation mentioned in the
previous chapter was interpersonal dialogue, carried out more for the purpose
of maintaining social relationships than for the transmission of facts and
information. These conversation are a little trickier for learners because they
can involve some or all of the following factors:
·A casual register
·Colloquial language
·Emotionally charged language
·Slang
·Ellipsis
·Sarcasm
·A covert “agenda”
For example:
Amy: Hi, Bob. How is it going?
Bob: Oh, so-so
Amy: Not a great weekend, huh?
Bob: Well, far be it from me to criticize, but I am pretty miffed about last week
Amy: What are you talking about?
Bob; I think you know perfectly well what I am talking about.
Amy: Oh, that …. How come you get so bent out of shape over something like that?
Bob: Well, whose fault was it, huh?
Amy: Oh, wow, this is great. Wonderful. Back to square one. For crying out loud, Bob, I thought we’d settled this before. Well, what more can I say?
Learners would need to learn how such features as the relationship between interlocutors, casual style, and sarcasm are coded linguistically in this conversation.
2. EXTENSIVE (MONOLOGUE)
Finally, students at intermediate to advanced levels
are called on to give extended monologues in the form of oral reports,
summaries, or perhaps short speeches. Here the register is more formal
deliberative. These monologue can be planned or impromptu.

Chapter II: Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation