Teaching Productive Skills

Speaking
Writing and Speaking as Productive Skills

The productive skills of speaking and writing play equally important roles
in ESL/EFL; however, speaking tends to be the most desired skill by
learners almost to the exclusion of writing in some schools. Why is this?
After all, in the traditional language classroom employing the grammar-
translation approach, the reverse may actually be true.
But think about how often you actually write nowadays. Its importance in
the modern world may be diminishing, yet e-mail is a primary tool of
international business. However we rank these skills in importance,
though, they are both in fact important and have a role to play in a
student's language development.
 Teaching Speaking

Major aspects of the techniques we use in teaching

speaking are the same ones used in teaching all of
the skills. These are eliciting, correcting errors,
engaging students in presentation, restricted practice,
and then production work through a logical approach
like PPP.
 Sub-skills included in the Teaching of
Speaking
Included in the teaching of speaking are the sub-skills that are used to
help evaluate and/or, to give a focus to your students for
improvement. These are: pronunciation, vocabulary, fluency, grammar
and communicative competence.
For example, a student may speak grammatically well, but he/she
speaks so slowly to be correct that the listener's interest is lost. This
learner could focus on developing fluency rather than accuracy. You
could advise your student to elect a time everyday when his/her goal
is to practice speaking faster, not pausing so much, or deleting 'ums'
and to not worry about accuracy.
Some students rely on a set of phrases they know accurately and
always use them so they aren't actively expanding their oral
vocabulary. You could encourage those students to use a new word
or new phrase every day.
Pronunciation issues also have to be addressed for students to
develop fluency.
How can Teachers Develop Students’ Oral
Fluency?
Oral fluency development following these techniques is based upon a carefully
planned approach in the classroom whether we are dealing with beginners or
advanced level students. A teacher simply cannot walk into the classroom and ask
, "Well, what do you want to talk about today?" Even if you bring in a topic but fail to
plan how to introduce the ideas, structure, and vocabulary, you're going to get
stares, a few sincere efforts from a student or two but limited success.
Your students simply don't have enough information to proceed with speaking
about the topic. You, the teacher, will end up lecturing on the topic because none of
the students are able to participate!
How can we avoid failures like this in a conversation class? Preparation is the key!
Preparation is the Key!

Before you try to conduct a conversation class, you need to think about some issues
that will affect the outcome of your class:
Have you kept the level of your class in mind when choosing the topic?
Have you chosen a topic that will appeal to your students' ages and interests?
Is the topic culturally appropriate?
How about the timing? Will it require more than one class?
Have you thought about the problems your students will have with pronunciation,
grammar, vocabulary, etc.?
Presentation
Depending on the level, this can involve different techniques. Basically the function of all the
presentation techniques below is the same: we are doing a "warm-up". We've already seen how
eliciting, and giving examples to show what we're talking about (the context) can help your
students understand what the topic will be. There are other techniques we use in presentation, but
in most cases the interaction is teacher to student:
Pre-teach the material. Cover critical vocabulary, grammar or structures that may be new to your
students.
You can also introduce the topic itself in a different form, in a survey or on a worksheet that gets
your students thinking about the topic. This could be effectively done in pair-work with the pairs
reporting their results to the group as a whole.
Introduce pictures, graphs, realia, use the freeze-frame on a video, etc. that will stimulate interest
in the topic.
Bring in newspapers and magazines with headlines or photos related to the topic.
Relate the topic to your students' lives. One of the most effective techniques in the ESL/EFL
classroom is to personalize the topic. What do people enjoy talking about more than themselves?
This is one of the most natural and effective techniques that you can use in the ESL/EFL
classroom and should be a standard technique.

Practice

This stage allows students to work on exercises, for example on handouts

from the teacher. The exercise contains the introduced vocabulary and
grammar/structure to allow the student to become familiar with these
before going on to the next stage.
The work could be done in pairs but there still may be a lot of teacher to
student interaction. Another example could be listening to an audio. The
class has to respond using the target language from the presentation. For
instance, the speaker on the audio asks, "I'm thirsty, how about you?" The
student(s) has to respond, and the teacher would correct if necessary.
 Production

Information-gap activities
Finally the interaction becomes either student-to-student or between groups of
students. The teacher will assign activities which will emphasize communication
between students where there is much less direction from the teacher.
These activities could include any of the following:
Information-gap activities: This is one of the most important techniques used in the
ESL/EFL classroom. This is based on the idea that in real communication one
speaker has certain information to transmit to another who does not have the
same information.
In the classroom, we create these information gaps by allowing one student to
have certain information and his/her partner to have additional or different
information. (Therefore these are usually done in pair work) The students have to
exchange ideas by speaking in order to exchange this information.
 Production

Examples of information-gap activities
Examples include:
Comparison of similar pictures or drawings that differ by 5 to 10 items. Each student in
a pair has a picture. Sitting back-to-back, or with a barrier between them so the
partners can't see each other's picture, the students have to describe their picture to
their partner discovering the differences by describing, asking questions, etc. (See
Teacher Resources for an example)
One student acts as a travel agent with costs of hotels, airfares, etc. His/her partner
wants to take a vacation and has some possible destinations listed down. The student
who wants to take a vacation asks the travel agent about the costs of hotels,
accommodations, airfares, etc.
One student wants to sell his/her car. His/her partner asks questions to find out its
condition, whether it has ever been in an accident, mileage, etc.

 Production

Role-play- Interviews, and Surveys
Role-play: Another commonly used technique, this gives the students a chance to
improvise based on what they've learned in the presentation stage. You can give
the students roles, characters, situations, etc., either verbally or on cards. Be ready
to assist those who may be shy and feel awkward in the activity.
Interviews: Come up with lists of questions the students have to ask each other in
pair work or in a mingle where the students move about the room interviewing
many or all of the other students in class. To make this more challenging, have the
students come up with the list of questions themselves, and exchange their lists
with other students.
Surveys: Like interviews but these can be scored to see what 'category' the
students fit into. Afterwards the students can discuss whether they agree or
disagree with the results.
 Production

Conversation Games
Games: There are a variety of these that focus on conversation. Students often
forget their inhibitions speaking English because they are having so much fun.
In addition, students can be called on to discuss the results of these activities. After
completing interviews, for example, the students could discuss their findings. Or,
after completing the surveys, students could discuss whether they agreed with the
results and why or why not.
Remember to structure the discussion carefully so that students can participate
fully. Don't just say "Let's discuss the results." For example, for a student interview
activity you might say, "After the interview, be ready to tell us two things your
partner told you that surprised you."
 Teaching Conversation with PPP

Task (Conversation Lesson Plan)
Design a lesson plan to teach a conversation topic. You can
do this for any level of students and with any appropriate
topic. Explain why you feel the topic is appropriate for this
level. Make sure you include each of the stages of a PPP
lesson. You can research similar lessons on the Internet. Try
Dave's ESL Café or the Linguistic Funland and see if there are
some ideas at those sites (or another you prefer) in the lesson
plan areas that you can use.
 Teaching Conversation with PPP

Presentation, Practice and Production
Presentation
How are you going to introduce this? Include any anticipated problems
you might think the students would have (vocabulary,
grammar/structure, topic information, etc.) How would you deal with
these?
Practice
What kind of practice will you ask your students to do? Design the
complete exercise or handout that you would actually use to give the
students a chance to practice with vocabulary, etc., before going on to
the next stage.
Production
Design an information gap or a role play activity to allow for student-to
-student interaction.