Speak Up! Fostering Oral Communication in the English Classroom Through Dialogic Musical Meetings

Sino-US English Teaching, April 2019, Vol. 16, No. 4, 143-151 doi:10.17265/1539-8072/2019.04.002

D DAVID PUBLISHING Speak Up! Fostering Oral Communication in the English

Classroom Through Dialogic Musical Meetings

Judit Palencia Gutiérrez?

University of California, Riverside, United States

This study, carried out in Spain in 2016, proposes new dialogical pedagogy techniques based on deeply rooted in constructivism to improve the level of English education in Spanish high schools. Spain is the second worst country in the European Union when it comes to English command, especially with regards to oral output, as a consequence of several factors, such as the deficient preparation of teachers, cuts in the education budget or dubbed films. This paper will present the outcomes of a Second Language Acquisition innovation project carried out in the North of Spain. After analyzing data collected to study their low command of the language, the participants, more than 20 students from the Spanish equivalent for US high school 10th grade, performed tasks that prepared them with insight and training to then participate in a musical meeting, where they, without the intervention of the teacher, listened to English music and discussed in the targeted language about some songs and their lyrics. These meetings were recorded to posteriori analysis with the students.

Keywords: Second Language Acquisition, oral competence, English instruction, dialogic learning

This innovation proposal was designed out of my experience as a student-teacher, part of an internship,

teaching English in the bilingual track (Spanish-English) at a high school in Asturias, North of Spain. It was a 10th grade class with 18 Spanish students that had English five hours a week. Taking into account that compulsory English education in Spain starts in 1st grade—six years old, by the time students reach 10th grade they should have a pretty strong command of the language. However, this is not the case, as a vast amount of literature as shown.

One of the most important studies regarding the proficiency of English in Europe was carried out by the European Commission in 2012 in their study “Europeans and Their Languages” (2012), which was carried out between February and March 2012 in 27 different countries of the European Union. It had almost 27,000 participants, of different ages, professions, and origin. The first section of the study deals with multilingualism in Europe, trying to calculate how many Europeans can speak one or more languages apart from their mother tongue. The second section focuses on the most widely spoken foreign languages in the European Union and the domain level. The results are quite interesting. According to the study, more than half of Europeans (54%) are comfortable in a conversation in a foreign language, being Luxembourg (98%), Latvia (95%), Holland (94%), and Malta (93%) the countries with the higher number of citizens that are able to speak another language. However, there are some countries where the majority of citizens are unable to speak a foreign language, Judit Palencia Gutiérrez, Ph.D. student and Grad Instructor, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside, United States.

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