Oral communication: speaking and talking (8/11)

Oral communication: speaking and talking

1. Speaking in the classroom.

• The knowledge children have of the language they know has essentially been acquired through its use.
• Therefore, this is the way it should be followed in the foreign language.
• For that reason, the didactic approach should be focused on the use of the target language in the class.
• A passport is a good way to observe the objectives that are reached.
• The essential condition to facilitate this process is to focus the didactic intervention on a real and continuous use of the language, which acquires more importance if we consider that, in most of cases, our boys and girls do not have more possibilities of contact with the foreign language than the one they have within the school framework.
• The fact of starting from a very limited linguistic competence in most pupils, makes necessary to guide the educational practice more to the establishment of this competence then to its development and improvement.
• At the same time, the communicative context should be used as a support for the verification of the hypotheses formulated through the use of the expressions and the positive or negative feedback that the context can provide.
• Pupils should be given the opportunity to put unto practice what they have been exposed to.
• How can they learn a foreign language if they are not given the opportunity of practice it?
• As a general rule, we can say that, at the beginning, most of the class time should be devoted to listening to an intelligible input and speaking (by repeating, asking and answering questions, drilling, etc.).
• Once they gain confidence in speaking and understanding messages in the foreign language, they can begin the process of reading and writing in that foreign language with vocabulary, set phrases… they are familiar with in the FL and also in their mother tongue.
• Summing up, following a Communicative Language Teaching approach, the time the teacher is speaking, explaining… should be reduced and, the time the student are producing the foreign language increased.