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Building the Speaking Skill Ben Goldstein. LABCI, Asunción, 2011. A learner speaks out….
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Building the Speaking SkillBen Goldstein LABCI, Asunción, 2011
“So, right now I’ve been learning English for… what 15 years? It’s most of my life going to class and it’s reached a point when the class has just become this thing that is repeated again and again: you go to class, you sit at a desk, you open the book, the teacher comes and ...and... and more or less everything is the same. It’s like that task at the beginning of the unit that I really hate when the teacher comes and tells… shows you a photo and asks you: “Who’s this people?”, and “What do you think are they going to?” and the answer is these people are models and they’ve been posing for this photo, this is the real answer but the teacher... what they want us to invent is a certain story that only the teacher knows the answer, so it becomes… It ends up being more a role model game than an English class. And I’m not proficient enough to give up I still have to learn, because I haven’t reached the perfection yet, but the only moment I enjoy in class it’s when there’s a certain link with reality when what’s happening outside comes into the class and when I can connect what I learn with what I do when I know the answers, when I’m not treated like a stupid teenager because I’m not.”
What can Dani do well? • Construct a narrative and situate himself and the listener in it • Use subordinate clauses (complex relative clauses) & cleft sentences (‘the only moment I enjoy, it’s when…’) • Use quotations and questions (‘and he asks you…) to relate events as they happened • Use examples to support argument (‘it’s like that task…’)
WHAT CAN DANI DO WELL? • Express opinion and use appropriate intonation (‘this is the real answer’ / ‘because I’m not’) • Engage and involve the listener directly (‘you sit at a desk’) • Use vague language (‘more or less’, ‘this thing’) • Rephrase and repair after false starts (‘it becomes…it ends up being…’)
Criteria for speaking tasks 1 Productivity 2 Purposefulness 3 Interactivity 4 Challenge 5 Safety 6 Authenticity (Scott Thornbury: HowtoTeachSpeaking)
Threeprocesses 1 Learners need to become aware of this knowledge base. (awareness-raising) 2 They need to integrate these features into their existing interlanguage. (appropriation) 3 They need to develop the capacity to mobilise these features themselves under real-time conditions. (autonomy)
A dialogicpedagogy “The language I learn in the classroom is a communal product derived through a jointly constructed process”. Breen, M. The social context for language learning
A dialogicpedagogy “Arguably, speaking skills are best developed when learners learn eventually to take control of their own performance from an insider perspective rather than being constantly dictated to by outsider manipulation”. Bao Dat
www.bengoldstein.esben@bengoldstein.estwitter:GoldsteinBen Thanks! ¡Gracias! ¡Obrigado!