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Chapter II The expressive macro skills - Speaking

At the end of the weeks, the pre-service teachers (PST) should be able to:
a.select differentiated learning tasks in teaching speaking to suit learners`
gender, needs, strengths, interests, and experiences;

b.explain how to provide timely, accurate, and constructive feedback to

improve learner performance in different tasks in speaking through simulations;
and
c.craft learning plan according to the English curricula that is developed from
research-based knowledge and principles of speaking and the theoretical bases,
principles, methods, and strategies in teaching these components.

Speech is the most basic means of communication. Bailey and Savage (1994)
said that speaking in a second language or foreign language has often been viewed
as the most demanding and challenging of the four skills. According to Brown
(1994) a number of features of spoken language or foreign language includes
reduced forms such as contractions, vowel reduction, and elision; slang and
idioms; stress, rhythm, and intonation. These make speaking in a second language
or foreign language difficult. Students who are not exposed to reduced speech will
always retain their full forms and it will become a disadvantage as a speaker of a
second language. Speaking is an activity requiring the integration of many
subsystems.

Nature and purposes of speaking

Oral communication is a two-way process between speaker or listener (or
listeners) and invloves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of
understanding (or listening with understanding). Both speaker and listener have a
positive function to perform. In simple terms, the speaker has to encode the
message he wishes to convey in appropriate language, while the listener (no less
actively) has to decode (or interpret) the message.
The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency. Learners
should be able to make themselves understand, using their current proficiency to
the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to faulty
pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary. In addition, they should observe the social
and cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.
To help learners develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors or
teachers can use a balanced activities approach that combines language input,
structured output, and communicative output.

Speech styles and registers

Styles
a. Frozen style is the most formal style used in formal situations and ceremonies.
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Examples are in written form (historical documents, and formal documents). 
b. Formal style is used in formal speech, formal meeting, office correspondence,
lesson books for school, etc.
c. Consultative style refers to ordinary conversation held at school, in meeting or
conversation that leads to result and production. It is the most operational one
between casual and formal.
d. Casual style is used to speak with friends, family or relatives, during the leisure
time, while break or recreation, etc.
e. Intimate style is used with people who have close relationships with the
speaker. By using this style those people do not need to use complete sentences
with clear articulation, they just simply use short words.

Registers
a. Frozen is also referred to as static register. Printed unchanging language, such
as Biblical quotations, often contains archaisms. Examples are the Pledge of
Allegiance of the United States of America and other "static" vocalizations that are
recited in a ritualistic monotone. The wording is the same every time it is spoken.
b. Formal is one-way participation; no interruption; technical vocabulary or exact
definitions are important; includes presentations or introductions between
strangers.
c. Consultative involves two way participation. Background information is
provided prior knowledge is not assumed. Back-channel behavior such as "uh
huh", "I see", etc. is common. Interruptions are allowed. Usual conversations are
between teacher/student, doctor/patient, etc.
d. Casual is within in group friends and acquaintances; no background
information provided ellipsis and slang common, interruptions common. This is
common among friends in a social setting.
e. Intimate is non-public; intonation more important than wording or grammar;
private vocabulary. Also includes non-verbal messages. This is most common
among family members and close friends.

Austin and Searle`s speech acts

1. Utterance act: act of saying something
2. Propositional act: referring to something or expressing a predication about
something
3. Illocutionary act: the function (assertion, warning, request)

Three forces
1. Locutionary force: linguistic form of the utterance
2. Illocutionary force: the meaning of the utterance
3. Perlocutionary force: the effect of a given illocutionary act on the hearer

Example
It`s cold in here.

What type of sentence is it?

What does it mean?
What would be your response if someone said this utterance to you?

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Segmental and Suprasegmental

In speech, suprasegmental refers to a phonological property of more than one
segment. Suprasegmental information applies to several different linguistic
phenomena (such as pitch, duration, and loudness). Suprasegmentals are often
regarded as the 'musical' aspects of speech.
The term suprasegmental (referring to functions that are “over” vowels and
consonants) was coined by American structuralists in the 1940s.

Examples and observations

The effect of suprasegmentals is easy to illustrate. In talking to a cat, a dog, or
a baby, you may adopt a particular set of suprasegmentals. Often, when doing this,
people adopt a different voice quality, with high pitch register, and portrude their
lips and adopt a tongue posture where the tongue body is high and in front in the
mouth, making the speech sound `softer’.
Suprasegmentals are important for making all kinds of meanings, in particular
speakers` attitudes or stances to what they are saying (or the person they are
saying it to), and in marking out how one`s utterance relates to another (e.g. a
continuation or a disjunction). Both the forms and functions of suprasegmentals
are less tangible than those of consonants and vowels, and they often do not form
discrete categories. (Richard Ogden, An Introduction to English Phonetics, 2009).

Suprasegmental features
a. Vowels and consonants are considered small segments of the speech, which
together form a syllable and make the utterance.
b. Common suprasegmental features are the stress, tone and duration in the
syllable or word for a continuous speech sequence. Sometimes even harmony and
nasalization are also included under this category.
c. Suprasegmental or prosodic features are often used in the context of speech to
make it more meaningful and effective.
d. Without suprasegmental features superimposed on the segmental features, a
continuous speech can also convey meaning but often loses the effectiveness of the
message being conveyed.

Varieties
- a very obvious suprasegmental is intonation. Less obvious is stress.

Suprasegmental information is signaled in speech with variations in duration,

pitch, and amplitude (loudness). information like this helps the hearer segment the
signal into words, and can even affect lexical searches directly.
We may use the term `suprasegmental’ to refer to a particular formalization in
which a phonological feature can be analyzed.
To give more concrete example, in some theoretical framework features such as
nasality of voice may be treated suprasegmentally, as having extent beyond the
limits of a single segment.

Segmental language are the vowels and the consonants which combine to produce
syllables, words and sentences. In phonetics, the smallest perceptible segment is a
phone. Segmental phonemes of sign formally called “cheremer” are visual
movement of hands, face and body.
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Speech formats
Talk as interaction
This refers to what we normally mean by “conversation” and describes
interaction which serves as primarily social function. When people meet, they
exchange greetings, engage in small talk and chit chat, recount recent experiences
and so on because they wish to be friendly and to establish a comfort zone of
interaction with others. The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to
present themselves to each other than on the message. Such exhanges may be
either casual or more formal depending on the circumstances and their nature has
been well described by Brown and Yule (1983).
The main features of talk as interaction can be summarized as follows:
 has a primarily social function
 rerflects role relationships
 reflects speaker`s identity
 may be formal or casual
 uses conversational conversations
 reflects degrees of politeness
 employs many generic words
 uses conversational register
 is jointly constructed
Example

Two women are asking a third woman about her husband and how they first met.
Jessie: Right. Right. And so when did you- actually meet him?
Brenda: So we didn`t actually meet until that night.
Judy: Oh, hysterical. [laughs]
Brenda: Well, I met him that night. We were all, we all went out to dinner. So I had
champagne and strawberries at the airport.
Jessie: And what was it like when you first saw him? Were you really --- nervous?
Brenda:---Well, I was hanging out of a window wathcing him in his card, and I
thought `oh God what about this!`[laughs]
Brenda: And he`d comb his hair and shaved his eyebrows - and -
Jessie: Had you seen a photo of him?
Brenda: Oh, yeah, I had photos of him, photos … and I`d spoken to him on the
phone.
Jessie: Did you get on well straight away?
Brenda: Uh, well sort of. I`m a sort of nervy person when I first meet people, so it
was sort of … you know … just nice to him.
Jessie: ---[laughs]

The conversation is highly interactive and is in a collaborative conversational style.

The listeners give constant feedback including laughter, to prompt the speaker to
continue, and we see the examples of casual conversational register with “nervy”
and “hanging out of the window”.
Other examples of talk as interaction include chatting to a school friend over
coffee (casual conversation that serves to mark an ongoing friendship); a student
chatting to his or her professor while waiting for an elevator (polite conversation
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that reflects unequal power between two participants); and telling a friend about an
amusing weekend experience, and hearing her or him recount a similar experience
he or she once had (sharing personal recounts).
Some skills involved in using talk as interaction involve knowing how to do the
following things:
 opening and closing conversations
 choosing topics
 making small-talk
 joking
 recounting personal incidents and experiences
 turn-taking
 using adjacency-pairs
 interrupting
 reacting to others
 using an appropriate style of speaking

Talk as transaction
This type of talk refers to situations where the focus is on what is sald or done.
The message is the central focus here and making oneself understood clearly and
accurately, rather than the participants and how they interact socially with each
other. In transactions,
.... talk is associated with other activities. For example, students may be
engaged in hand-on activities (e.g. in a science lesson] to explore concepts
associated with floating and sinking. In this type of spoken language students
and teachers usually focus on meaning or on talking their way to understanding
(Jones 1996, 14).

The following example from a literature lesson illustrates this kind of talk in a
classroom setting: T = Teacher S = Student]

T: The other day we were talking about figures of speech. And we have already
inthe past talked about three kinds of figures of speech. Does anybody remember
those three types? Mary?
S: Personification, simile, and metaphor.
T: Good. Let me write those on the board. Now can anybody tell me what
personification is all about again? Juan?
S: Making a non-living thing act like a person.
T: Yes. OK. Good enough. Now what about simile? OK. Cecelia?
S: Comparing two things by making use of the words "like" or "as".
T: OK. Good. I'll write that on the board. The other one - metaphor.
S: It's when we make a comparison between two things, but we compare them
without using the words "like" or as
T: All right. Good. So it's more direct than simile. Now we had a poem a few weeks
ago about personification. Do you remember? Can you recall one line from that
poem where a non-living things acts like a human person?
S: "The moon walks the night"
T: Good. The moon walks he night. Does the moon have feet to walk?
S: No.
T: No. So this is a figure of speech. All right Now our lesson today has something to
do with metaphor. Now we're going to see what they have in common…
[Richards and Lockhart 1994. 116-117] Teaching
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Other examples of talk as transaction are classroom group discussions and

problem solving activities; discussing needed repairs to a computer with a
technician; making a telephone call to obtain flight information; asking someone
for directions on the street; buying something in a shop; and ordering food from a
menu in a restaurant.

There are two different types of talk as transaction. One is situations where the
focus is on giving and receiving information and where the participants focus
primarily on what is said or achieved (e.g. asking someone for directions). Accuracy
may not be a priority as long as information is successfully communicated or
understood.
The second type are transactions which focus on obtaining goods or services, such
as checking into a hotel or ordering food in a restaurant. For example the following
exchange was observed in a café:
Wait person: Hi, what it be today?
Client: Just a cappuccino please. Low fat decaf if you have it. Wait person: Sure.
Nothing to eat today?
Client: No thanks.
Wait person: Not a problem.

The main features of talk as transaction are:

 It has a primarily information focus.
 The main focus is the message and not the participants.
 Participants employ communication strategies to make themselves
understood.
 There may be frequent questions, repetitions, and comprehension checks
as in the example from the classroom lesson above.
 There may be negotiation and direction.
 Linguistic accuracy is not always important.

Some of the skills involved in using talk for transactions are:

 explaining a need or intention
 describing something
 asking questioning
 asking for clarification
 confirming information
 justifying an opinion
 making suggestions
 clarifying understanding
 making comparisons
 agreeing and disagreeing

Talk as performance
The third type of talk which can usefully be distinguished has been called talk
as performance. This refers to public talk, that is, talk which transmits information
before an audience such as morning talks, public announcements, and speeches.
For example here is the opening of a fall welcome speech given by a university
president:
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Good morning. It's not my intention to deliver the customary state of the
university address. There's good reason for that. It would seem to me to be
presumptuous for someone who has been here not quite seven weeks to tell
you what he thinks the state of the university is. You would all be better
prepared for that kind of address than I am. However, I would like to offer you,
based on my experience - which has been pretty intensive these almost seven
weeks - some impressions that I have of this Institution, strengths, or some of
them, and the challenges and opportunities that we face here. I also want to
talk about how I see my role during the short time that I will be with you .

Spoken texts of this kind according to Jones (1996,14),

…often have identifiable generic structures and the language used is more
predictable. …Because of less contextual support, the speaker must include all
necessary information in the text - hence the importance of topic as well as textual
knowledge. And while meaning is still important, there will be more emphasis on
form and accuracy.
Talk as performance tends to be in the form of monolog rather than dialog,
often follows a recognizable format (e.g. a speech of welcome) and is closer to
written language than conversational language. Similarly it is often evaluated
according to its effectiveness or impact on the listener, something which is unlikely
to happen with talk as interaction or transaction.
Examples of talk as performance are giving a class report about a school trip;
conducting a class debate; giving a speech of welcome; making a sales
presentation; and giving a lecture.

The main features of talk as performance are:

 There is a focus on both message and audience.
 It reflects predictable organization and sequencing.
 Form and accuracy is important.
 Language is more like written language.
 It is often monologic.

Some of the skills involved in using talk as performance are:

 using an appropriate format
 presenting information in an appropriate sequence
 maintaining audience engagement
 using correct pronunciation and grammar
 creating an effect on the audience
 using appropriate vocabulary
 using appropriate opening and closing

Teachers sometimes describe interesting differences between how learners manage

these three different kinds of talk, as the following anecdotes illustrate.

I sometimes find with my students at a university in Hong Kong, that they are good
at talk as transaction and performance but not with talk as interaction. For example
the other day one of my students did an excellent class presentation in a course for
computer science majors, and described very effectively a new piece of computer
software. However a few days later when I met the same student going home on the

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subway and tried to engage her in social chat, she was at a complete loss for words.

Another teacher describes a second language user with just the opposite
difficulties. He is more comfortable with talk as interaction than as performance.
One of my colleagues in my university in China is quite comfortable using talk
socially. If we have lunch together with other native speakers he is quite comfortable
joking and chatting in English. However recently we did a presentation together at a
conference and his performance was very different. His pronunciation became much
more “Chinese” and he made quite a few grammatical and other errors that I hadn't
heard him make before.

Implications for teaching

Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an

oral English course. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the
course will focus on. Is it all three of the genres described above or will some
receive greater attention than others? Informal needs analysis is the starting point
here. Procedures for determining needs indude observation of learners carrying out
different kinds of communicative tasks, questionnaires, interviews, and diagnostic
testing (e.g. Tsang and Wong 2002). The second issue is identifying teaching
strategies to “teach” (i.e. provide opportunities for leamers to acquire) each kind of
talk. The third issue involved in planning speaking activities is determining the
expected level of performance on a speaking task and the criteria that will be used
to assess student performance. For any activity we use in class, whether it be one
that seeks to develop proficiency in using talk as interaction, transaction or
performance, we need to consider what successful completion of the activity
involves. Is accuracy of pronunciation and grammar inportant? Is each participant
expected to speak for about the same amount of time? Is it accepted if a speaker
uses many long pauses or repetitions?

Teaching talk as interaction

Talk as interaction is perhaps the most difficult skill to teach since interactional
talk is a very complex as well as subtle phenomena that takes place under the
control of "unspoken" rules. In my experience these are best taught thought
providing examples embedded in naturalistic dialogs that can serve to model
features such as opening and closing conversations, making small talk, recounting
personal incidents and experiences, and reacting to what others say. The rules for
making small talk" are that such interactions are often initiated by a comment
concering something in the immediate vicinity or that both participants have
knowledge of, and that the comment will elicit agreement, since agreement is face-
preserving and non-threatening. Hence safe topics must be chosen such as the
weather, the traffic and so on. Students can be given models to practice, such as
the following:

A. Nice weather today.

B. Yes it is.
A. I hope the weather is nice for the weekend.
B. Me too.
A. The buses to school are always so crowded.
B. Yes they are.
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Later they can be given situations to consider in which small talk might be
appropriate (e.g. meeting someone at a movie, running into a friend in the cafeteria,
waiting at a bus stop) and asked to think of small topic comment and responses.

Giving feedback (back channelling) is another important aspect of talk as

interaction and involves responding to a conversational partner with expressions
such as “That's interesting”, “yeah”, “really”, and so on, that indicate interest and a
wish for the speaker to continue. To practice using back channelling in this way
students can examine dialogs in which feedback expressions have been omitted.
They can consider suitable ways of providing them, then practice them. For
example they can consider different responses they could use on the following
dialog:

A. I'm going to Hawaii for my next vacation.

B._____________
A. Yeah, my parents are taking me there as a graduation present.
B. ____________And what do you plan to do there?
A. Well I guess I'll spend a lot of time on the beach.
B. ___________
A. But I also want to do some snorkelling.
B. ___________

Another technique to practice the use of conversation starters and personal

recounts involves giving conversation starters which students have to respond to
by asking one or two follow-up questions. The teacher prepares a handout
containing a list of conversational starters (the expressions one uses to start a
conversation or to introduce a topic into a conversation such as, “I didn't sleep very
well last night”. “Look what I bought on Sunday. How do you like it?” “Did that
thunderstorm last night wake you?”) Students move around the dass. One student
read out a starter from the list, and his or her partner responds by giving feedback
or asking follow-up questions to keep the conversation going.

Two simple activities I use to practice topic management are “in the hot seat” and
“question time”. In the first activity, a student sits on a chair in front of the class
and makes a statement about something he or she did recently (e.g. “I saw a good
movie on Sunday”). The other members of the class have to ask three or more
questions about the topic which the student has to answer quickly. Then another
student takes the hot seat. With the activity called question time, before students
begin a lesson on a new theme, I prepare up to 15 questions related to the theme
and put them on a handout. For example if the next unit is on the theme of sports,
on the students handout there will be questions such as “What sports do you
play?”, “How often do you play sports?”, “What sports are popular in your
country?”, “What sport have you never tried?” etc. I first ask students around the
class to answer the questions quickly. Then students practice asking and
answering the questions in pairs.

Teaching talks as transaction

Talk as transaction is more easily planned since current communicative
materials are a rich resource of group activities, information-gap activities and role
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0 and
plays that can provide a source for practicing how to use talk for sharing
obtaining information as well as for carrying out real-world transactions. These
activities include ranking activities, values clarification activities, brainstorming,
and simulations. Group discussion activities can be initiated by having students
work in groups to prepare a short list of controversial statements for others to
think about. Groups exchange statements and discuss them. For example:
“Schools should do away with exams”. “Vegetarianism is the only healthy life style”.
“The Olympic games are a waste of money”. Role-play activities are another familiar
technique for practicing real world transactions and typically involve the following
sequence of activities:
 Preparing: reviewing vocabulary, real world knowledge related to the content
and context of the role play (e.g. returning a faulty item to a store)
 Modeling and eliciting: demonstrating the stages that are typically involved in
the transaction, eliciting suggestions for how each stage can be carried out, and
teaching the functional language need for each stage
 Practicing and reviewing: students are assigned roles and practice a role play
using cue cards or realia to provide language and other support

However an issue that arises in relation to practicing talk as transaction using

different kinds of communicative tasks, is the level of linguistic accuracy that
students achieve when carrying out these tasks. One assumption is that form will
largely look after itself with incidental support from the teacher. From this
perspective grammar has a mediating role, rather than serving as an end in itself
(Thornbury 1998,112). It is a resource that the learner calls upon to make meaning
but the focus is on task accomplishment rather than grammatical practice. “The
teacher and the learner have a remarkable degree of flexibility, for they are
presented with a set of general learning objectives and problem-solving tasks”
(Kumaravadivelu 1991,99). As students carry out communicative tasks, the
assumption is that they engage in the process of negotiation meaning, employing
strategies such as comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification
requests. These are believed to lead to a gradual modification of their language
output, which over time takes on more and more target-like forms.

Despite these optimistic claims others have reported that communication tasks
often develop fluency at the expense of accuracy. Higgs and Clifford (1982,78), for
example, reporting experience with foreign language teaching programs in the US,
observed:
In programs that have as curricular goals an early emphasis on
unstructured communication activities - minimising, or excluding entirely,
considerations of grammatical accuracy - it is possible in a fairly short time to
provide students with a relatively large vocabulary and a high degree of fluency.
These same data suggest that the premature immersion of a student into an
unstructured or "free" conversational setting before certain linguistic structures
are more or less in place is not done without cost.There appear to be a real
danger of leading students too rapidly into the creative aspects of language use, in
that if successful communication is encouraged and rewarded for its own sake,
the effect seems to be one of rewarding at the same time the incorrect strategies
seized upon in attempting to deal with the communication strategies presented.

An example of the quality of language that is sometimes produces as students

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practice transactional functions of language is seen in the following example,
observed during a role play task in a Spanish secondary school English lesson
One student is playing the role of a doctor and the other a patient, and they are
discussing a health problem.

S1: You how old?

S2: 1'm thirty-four.. thirty five.
S1: Thirty five?
S 2: Five.
S 1: Problem?
S2:1 have… a pain in my throat.
S 1: [In Spanish, What do you have?]
S 2: A pain.
S 1: [In Spanish. What's that?]
S2: [In Spanish: A pain) A pain.
S 1. Ah, pain.
S2: Yes, and it makes problem to me when I…swallow.
S1: When do you have…?
S1: Since yesterday morning.
S 1: [In Spanish. No,I mean, where do you have the pain?] It has a
pain in ...?
S 2. In my throat.
S1: Ah. Let it .. getting, er .. worse. It can be, er…very serious
problem and you are, you will go to New York to operate, so …
operation .. the 7th, the 27th er May. And treatment, you can't eat,
er, big meal.
S2: Big meal. I er ... I don't know? Fish?
S1: Fiish, you have to eat, er, fish, for example.
This example shows how low-level students when carrying out communication
tasks, often rely on a lexicalised system of communication that is heavily
dependent upon on vocabulary and memorized chunks of language as well as both
verbal and non-verbal communication strategies to get meaning across. Several
ways can be used to address the issue of language accuracy when students are
practicing transactional use of language:

1. By pre-teaching certain linguistic forms that can be used while completing a

task
2. By reducing the complexity of the task, e.g. by familiarizing students with the
demands of the activity by showing them a similar activity on video or as a dialog
3. By giving time to plan the task
4. By repeated performance of the task

Willis [1966) suggests using a cycle of activities with task-work using a sequence of
activities in a lesson. These create interaction mediated by a task and then build
language awareness and language development around task performance. She
proposes the following sequence of activities:

Pretask activities
*T stands for teacher and Ss stands for student
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Introduction to topic and task 2
 T helps Ss to understand the theme and objectives of the task, for
example, brainstorming ideas with the class, using pictures, mime or personal
experience to introduce the topic
 Ss may do a pre task, for example, topic-based odd-word-out games. T
may highlight useful words and phrases, but would not pre-teach new
structures.
 Ss can be given preparation time to think about how to do the task.
 Ss can hear a recording of a parallel task being done (so long as this
does not give away the solution to the problem).
 If the task is based on a text, Ss read a part of it.

The task cycle

Task
 The task is done by Ss (in pairs or groups) and gives Ss a chance to use
whatever language they already have to express themselves and say whatever
they want to say. This may be in response to reading a text or hearing a
recording.
 T walks round and monitors, encouraging in a supportive way everyone's
attempt at communication in the target language.
 T helps Ss to formulate what they want to say, but will not intervene to
correct errors of form.
 The emphasis is on spontaneous, exploratory talk and confidence
building, within the privacy of the small group.
 Success in achieving the goals of the tasks help Ss motivation.

Planning
 Planning prepares for the next stage where Ss are asked to report briefly to
the whole class how they did the task and what the outcome was.
 Ss draft and rehearse what they want to say or write.
 T goes round to advise students on language, suggesting phrases and
helping Ss to pollsh and correct their language. O If the reports are in writing,
T can encourage pour editing and use of dictionaries.
 The emphasis is on clarity, organization, and accuracy, as appropriate
for a public presentation.
 Individual students often take this chance to ask questions about
specific language items.

Report
 T asks some pairs to report briefly to the whole dass so everyone can
compare findings, or begin a survey. (N.B: There must be purpose for others
to listen). Sometimes only one or two groups report in full others comment
and add extra points. The dass may take notes.
 T chairs, comments on the content of their reports, rephrases perhaps,
but gives no overt public correction

Language focus
Analysis

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 3
T sets some language focussed tasks, based on the texts student read or
on the transcripts of they recordings they heard. Examples include the
following:
 Find words and phrases related top the topic or text.
 Read the transcript, find words ending in "s" and say what the s
means.
 Find all the words in the simple past form. Say which refer to past
time and which do not.
 Underline and dassify the questions in the transcript.
 T starts Ss off, then students continue, often in pairs.
 T goes round to help; Ss can ask individual questions
 In plenary, then reviews the analysis, possibly writing relevant language
up on the board in list form: Ss may make notes.

Practice
 T conducts practice activities as needed, based on the language analysis
work already on the board, or using examples from the text or transcript.

Practice activities can indude choral repetition of the phrases identified and
dassified; memory challenge games based on partially erased examples or using
lists already on blackboard for progressive deletion; sentence completion (set by
one team for another); matching the past tense verbs (jumbled) with the subject or
objects they had in the text; and dictionary reference with words from text or
transcript.

Teaching talk as performance

Teaching talk as performance requires a different teaching strategy. Jones
(1996, 17) comments:
Initially talk as performance needs to be prepared for and scaffolded in much
the same way as written text, and many of the teaching strategies used to make
understandings of written text accessible can be applied to the formal uses of
spoken language

This involves providing examples or models of speeches, oral presentations, stories,

etc. through video or audio recordings or written examples. These are then
analyzed or deconstructed in order to understand how such texts work and what
their linguistic and other organizational features are. Questions such as the
following guide this process:
 What is the speaker's purpose?
 Who is the audience?
 What kind of information do the audience expect?
 How does the talk begin, develop, and end? What moves or stages are
involved?
 Is any special language used?

Students then work jointly on planning their own texts, which are then presented
to the dass.

Feez and Joyce's approach to text-based instruction provides a good model of how
talk as performance can be taught (1998,v). This approach involves:
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 teaching explicitly about the structures and grammatical 4
features of
spoken and written texts
 linking spoken and written texts to the cultural context of their use
 designing units of work which focus on developing skills in relation to
whole texts
 providing students with guided practice as they develop language skills for
meaningful communication through whole texts.

Feez and Joyce (1998, 28-31) give the following description of how a text-based
lesson proceeds.

Phase l. Building the context

In this stage students:
 Are introduced to the social context of an authentic model of the text-
type being studied
 Explore features of the general cultural context in which the text-type is
used and the social purposes the text-type achieves Explore the immediate
context of situation by investigating the register of a model text which has
been selected on the basis of the course objectives and learner need
 An exploration of register involves:
 Building knowledge of the topic of the model text and knowledge of the
social activity in which the text is used, e.g. such as job seeking
 Understanding the roles and relationships of the people using the text
and how these are established and maintained, e.g. the relationship
between a job seeker and a prospective employer
 Understanding the channel of communication being used. e.g. using the
telephone, speaking face-to-face with members of an interview panel

Context building activities indude:

 Presenting the context through pictures, audiovisual materials, realla,

excursions, field-trips, guest speakers etc
 Establishing the social purpose through discussions or surveys etc
 Cross cultural activities such as comparing differences in the use of the
text in two cultures
 Comparing the model text with other texts of the same or contrasting
type e.g comparing a job interview with a complex spoken exchange
involving close friends, a work colleague or a stranger in a service encounter.

Phase 2 Modelling and deconstructing the text

In this stage students:

 Investigate the structural pattern and language features of the model
 Compare the model with other examples of the same text-type

Feez and Joyce (1998,29) comment that “modelling and deconstruction are
undertaken at both the whole text, clause and expression levels. It is at this stage
that many traditional ESL language teaching activities come into their own”.

Phase 3 Joint construction of the text

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In this stage: 5
 Students begin to contribute to the construction of whole examples of the
text type
 The teacher gradually reduces the contribution to text construction, as
the students move closer to being able to control text-type independently

Joint construction activities include:

 teacher questioning, discussing and editing whole class onto board or
over head projector
 skeleton texts
 jigsaw and information gap activities
 small group construction of tests
 dictogloss
 self-assessment and peer assessment activities

Phase 4 Independent construction of the text

In this stage:
 Students work independently with the text
 Learner performances are used for achievement assessment

Independent construction activities include:

 Listening tasks, e... comprehension activities in response to live or
recorded material such as performing a task, sequencing pictures, numbering,
ticking or underlining material on a worksheet, answering questions
 Listening and speaking tasks, e.g role plays, simulated or authentic
dialogues
 Speaking tasks e.g. spoken presentation to class, community
organization, workplace
 Reading tasks e.g. comprehension activities in response to written
material such as performing a task, s sequencing pictures, numbering, ticking
or underlining material on a worksheet, answering questions
 Writing tasks which demand that students draft and present whole texts

Phase 5 Linking to related texts

In this stage students investigate how what they have learnt in this
teaching/learning cycle can be related to:
 Other texts in the same or similar context
 Future or past cycles of teaching and learning

Activities which link the text-type to related texts indude:

 Comparing the use of the text-type across different fields
 Researching other text-types used in the same field
 Role-playing what happens if the same text-type is sued by people with
different roles and relationships
 Comparing spleen and written modes of the same text-type
 Researching how a key language feature used in this text-type is used in
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other text-types 6

You reached the end of Chapter II. Thank you for

your patience.

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Chapter II