in groups and help each other describe their pictures. All the Learner Bs do the same. When they have had enough preparation and practice they form Learner A and B pairs and do the activity.
3. The learners are given topics to talk about. They prepare at home, using dictionaries, reference texts, reading sources, and so forth. Here is an example called Newspaper talks. Each learner has to choose a short and interesting article from an English language newspaper to present to the class. The learner must not read the article aloud to the class but must describe the main points of the article. The class should then ask the presenter questions.
4. Many speaking activities involve some kind of written or picture input in the form of a worksheet. In the Same or different activity this is two sheets of pictures. In a Ranking activity or a Problem Solving activity, the worksheet contains written data about the situation, what to do, and possible choices. In a \from a list of several possible candidates who is to receive the only available heart for transplantation. None of the patients will survive without the new heart. They are a Nobel Prize winner in medical research (a 59 year old male with no family), a homemaker of three (32 year old female), an Olympic athlete (24 year old female, married with no children), an Academy award winning film director (female, 37 years old, two children), and a 45 year old homeless male. The students must rank in order which of these people is most deserving of the heart. Then, each student presents his/her case to the group. Based on these presentations, and the ensuing discussion, the group must choose one candidate for the transplant. Then, each group must present its conclusion to the class as a whole. The worksheets contain vocabulary and phrases that may be new to the learners and which will be necessary or useful in the speaking activity. For example, in the Ranking activity, the vocabulary in the list of items to rank will need to be used by the learners. Those items which generate the most disagreement over the ranking will likely result in the greatest amount of vocabulary learning. According to Joe, Nation and Newton (1996): \noticed and that the learner has a gap in his or her knowledge. Items which [are] negotiated [have] a much greater chance of being learned than items which were not negotiated\careful thought to the placement of new vocabulary in worksheets for speaking activities, there is a very good chance that the vocabulary will be learned during the speaking activity. If the worksheet uses pictures, some of the pictures or parts of pictures can be given labels that can be used in describing the pictures.
5. Some speaking activities encourage learners to ask each other about the meaning of unfamiliar words or constructions. This seeking and giving of explanations is called negotiation. There are similarities between this type of activity and the Same or Different activity in that each learner in a pair or group has different pieces of information for completing the activity. These kinds of activities are given lots of different names including jigsaw tasks, two-way tasks, information gap, and so forth. We have looked at five different ways of making meaning-focused speaking tasks contribute to a learner's knowledge of language items. Language can be learned through production (speaking and writing) as well as through reception (listening and reading), but this learning needs to be planned. 5) Development of Speaking Fluency
Fluency in speaking is the aim of many language learners. Signs of fluency include a reasonably fast speed of speaking and only a small number of pauses and \the speaker does not have to spend a lot of time searching for the language items needed to express the message.
4/3/2 is a useful technique for developing fluency and includes the features that are needed in fluency development activities. First the learners choose a topic or are given a topic with which they are very familiar. The first time that learners use this technique it may be best if the topic involves recounting something that happened to them. This is because the chronological order of the events will make it easier to recall and repeat because the time sequence provides a clear structure for the talk. The learners work in pairs. Learner A tells a story to Learner B and has a time limit of four minutes to do this. B just listens and does not interrupt or question Learner A. When the four minutes are up, the teacher says, \and Learner A tells exactly the same story to the new partner but this time has only three minutes to tell it. When the three minutes are up, the teacher says \Learner A now has two minutes to tell the story. During the three deliveries of the same story, the B learners do not talk and each listens to three different people. When the A learners have given their talk three times, the B learners can now go through the same sequence, this time as speakers. Research on this activity shows that the learners' speed of speaking increased during the talks (as measured by the number of words per minute), the hesitations they make decrease (as measured by hesitations per 100 words), and surprisingly their grammatical errors in the repeated parts of the talk
decrease and they tend to use several, more complex grammatical constructions in the last of the three talks than they did in the first talk (Nation, 1989, p. 381).
The features in 4/3/2 that help the development of fluency are the same features that occur in activities to develop listening fluency.
1. The activity involves known vocabulary, grammar, and discourse.
2. The learners have a high chance of performing successfully at a higher than normal speed. 3. There are repeated opportunities to do the same thing.
Here are other techniques to develop speaking fluency that involve the same features.
In the Headlines activity, students create newspaper \speaking activity. The learners all think of an interesting or exciting thing that has happened to them. Using a felt-tipped pen -- so that the writing is easily seen -- each learner writes a newspaper headline referring to that event. The teacher should give some examples to help the learners, such as \Bed Brings Joy\the rest of the class to see. Those not holding up a headline go to hear a story behind the headline that interests them. Each story can be told to no more than two people at a time. When the story is done, the listeners should circulate to a second headline that interests them. The tellers will thus have to repeat their story several times. After there has been plenty of opportunity to tell the stories, the other half of the class hold up their headlines and, in similar fashion, tell their stories.
4/3/2 and Headlines rely on repetition of the same story to develop fluency. This kind of fluency is useful for predictable topics that learners may need to speak about. For example, when meeting other people learners may need to talk about themselves, about their country, about the kind of food they eat, about their travels, about their interests and hobbies, and about their experiences. Speaking fluency also needs to be developed for less predictable topics and the Say it! activity is a useful way of doing this.
In Say it!, learners work in groups of about four people. First they read a Say it! text carefully until they have reached a good understanding of it. They discuss their understanding of the text to make sure everything is fairly clear. Then they do the tasks in the Say it! grid, which is a collection of simple verbal tasks related to the reading (see the following example). One learner chooses a square for the
next learner to perform, for example square B2. The learner does this task while the others observe and, when the student has finished, s/he calls a square, for example, A3, for the next learner. This continues with some learners doing the same task several times and with some tasks being done several times by different learners. Often the tasks are like role plays and require the learners to use the vocabulary that was in the reading text, but to use it in a different way. This helps the development of fluency by providing lots of associations with the vocabulary used in the task, that is the associations from the reading text and its discussion, and the associations from the Say it! role play. Although the Say it! activity does not involve large amounts of repetition, it involves preparation by the learners. That is, the learners prepare for the spoken task by studying the written text. This preparation should increase the fluency with which learners do the spoken task.
The following is an example of a Say It! activity (Joe, Nation, & Newton, 1996, p. 6). The story is called \
Three fishermen who drifted on the Pacific for four months told how they drank shark's blood to survive. The fishermen from Kiribati told their story through an interpreter in the American Samoa capital of Pago Pago after being rescued by the ship Sakaria. Kautea Teatoa, Veaieta Toanuea, and Tebwai Aretana drifted 400 kilometers from home after their outboard motor failed on February 8. They said four ships had refused to help during their ordeal. When they were picked up on June 4 they had eaten the last of a one meter shark four days before and drunk all of its blood. \
A B C 1. You are Kautea. Say what helped you survive. You are Tebwai Aretana. How You are a sailor on the did you feel when the ships Sakaria. What did you do to refused to help you? help the fishermen? You are Tebwai. Explain why you You are Kautea. How did you 2. were in the boat and what feel when you caught the happened after it broke down. shark? You are the captain. Explain why you stopped. 3. You are Veaieta. Explain what caused the problem. You are the interpreter. Describe the appearance of the three men. The journey was called an ordeal. Why? 6) Error Correction
Some learners may experience difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds and groups of sounds in another language. Some Chinese and Japanese speakers of English, for example, have trouble with /l/ and /r/. Some learners have trouble with the beginning sounds in the words \too much attention to the correction of pronunciation in the early stages of language learning can make learners worried and reluctant to speak because of fear of making errors.
It is worth thinking about why errors occur, because this can help teachers decide what to do about them. The study of errors and their causes is called error analysis.
For each cause listed below, suggestions for the teacher are given in square brackets.
1. The learner makes an error because the learner has not had sufficient chance to observe the correct form or to develop sufficient knowledge of the language system. [Don't correct the learner but give more models and opportunities to observe.]
2. The learner makes an error because the learner has not observed the form correctly. [Give a little correction by showing the learner the difference between the correct form and the learner's error.] 3. The learner makes an error because of nervousness. [Don't correct. Use less threatening activities -- or, if and when appropriate, joke with the person/class/yourself to lighten the mood.]
4. The learner makes an error because the activity is difficult, that is, there are many things the learner has to think about during the activity. This is sometimes called cognitive overload. [Don't correct. Make the activity easier or give several chances to repeat the activity.]
5. The learner makes an error because the activity is confusing. Use of tongue twisters, for instance, for pronunciation can be confusing. [Don't correct. Improve the activity.]
英语教学法教程教案
