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Transformative Teachers

Webinar 17 - Speaking - Purpose, Means and Opportunity

 

Summary notes

Thank you for participating in the Trinity College London teacher support webinar series.  We are delighted to have over 1000 teachers from 70 countries participate in the series.

In this webinar, Trinity's Voula Kanistra, Head of Validation, is interviewed by Anthea Wilson, Head of Test Production. They discuss speaking in relation to purpose, means and opportunity.

If you were unable to attend the webinar, you can watch it again via the following link:

Webinar 17 - Speaking - Purpose, Means and Opportunity

 

Summary of questions and responses

Interview: Voula Kanistra and Anthea Wilson

 

What are the characteristics of a good speaker?

 Speaking is a tool used primarily to promote and facilitate effective communication. Therefore, I think, one can be a good speaker only if he’s a good listener as well. Even when a professor is giving a lecture they still need to be able to allow their students to ask questions and to actively listen and respond to their questions. Additionally, this same professor needs to also be able to passively listen to their students by reading their body language and respond to it by further elaborating on the topic, clarifying a point or by providing further examples to get the message across effectively.

 

ISE context: When candidates are talking about their topic of interest in an ISE speaking exam they need to be responsive to examiners’ verbal and non-verbal cues. They need to listen to the examiner both actively and passively and to be prepared to amend, tweak, modify, elaborate, paraphrase their content and above all they need to be ready when challenged on their views. Students need to learn to listen to their audience when they’re talking and not just because they need to do so during the ISE speaking exam, but because being a good listener is one of the ingredients that can turn you into a good speaker. So, for example, when candidates at the end of the Topic phase need to ask the examiner a question, candidates should not forget that this question needs to be about the topic they have been discussing and not about the examiner’s age, or colour of hair or anything else which could be grammatically and lexically accurate but not pragmatically correct.

 

Teaching someone to be a good speaker is challenging, but possible. For example, when students are expressing their views in class on any topic use your body language to show to them that you find it difficult to follow their line of reasoning or ask them to elaborate on their ideas. Preferably not by saying can you please elaborate on this, but by simulating a more natural conversation and perhaps saying something like: “I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say.”  or “What makes you say that?” or “And why is this important?” or even a simple “And?” or “So?” can do the trick sometimes.

 

Robin Walker emphasised in the video the role ‘purpose’ plays in the act of speaking. Do you think that we provide students with enough ‘purpose’ when we contextualise a task? In other words, is it enough to contextualise a task?

 

 From personal experience both as an EFL teacher and as an English language student myself, I would say that task contextualisation helps, but is not enough. As a student you still find it strange and awkward to be talking to your classmate in another language when you can easily do it in your mother tongue. I still remember the nervous laughter in my classroom amongst students, both as a teacher and as an EFL student myself. I think it’s very important that a teacher finds the right tools to motivate their students to talk.  Motivational studies make a clear distinction between the two types of motivation that can facilitate language learning in the classroom, that is ‘integrative’ and ‘instrumental’ motivation. Students that are ‘integratively motivated’ are the foreign language learners who learn a foreign language through their desire to learn more about a culture, its language and its people. Such students want to integrate more within the target-language society.

‘Instrumental motivation’ involves learning in order to achieve some other goal, to get a better job, to pass an examination to acquire a certificate. ‘Instrumental motivation’ can be very powerful as well. Preparing students for the right examination can be very motivating and convincing at the same time. Because when preparing for an exam, students know not only that they need to speak, but that they will also be assessed not on what they say, but on how they express their views. As a teacher it was enough to tell my students that we would devote part of the lesson to prepare for the speaking component of the exam. This introduction was always enough to give them the purpose they needed to switch from Greek to English.

ISE context: Preparing students for topic phase of the ISE speaking examination, for example, can give them a real purpose to start using the target language more authentic or semi authentic situations.

Role plays in class in which one student assumes the role of the examiner and the other the role of the candidate can create a conducive environment for learners to practice their English language skills. The purpose is clear and highly motivating, the unscripted nature of the ISE examinations allows fellow students to assume the role of the examiner.  Debates could also be another effective way of encouraging students to use the target language in the classroom. A group of students would be in favour of a debatable issue and as such would need to bring forward arguments that would be compelling enough to sway their classmates’ opinion. The other group would be against, so they would need to bring forward arguments to refute their opponents’ arguments.  If the school setting allows, the different groups could be from different classrooms or even different schools to make the activity a bit more authentic. Activities such as these would force the teacher to become the moderator of the classroom activity and to minimise their active talk time. Teacher talk time is important as it offer valuable input of the target language, but it’s important that students are also given a fair amount of time to practice what they have been passively receiving from their teachers.

 

Pronunciation, vocabulary, structures have been described as communication enabling tools. What are your views?

Linguistic competences such as pronunciation, vocabulary and structures do play an important role in speaking. However, we should never lose track of the complexity of communication. The CEFR Companion Volume offers teachers, educators and language testers with the theoretical underpinning around effective communication and suggests tasks which could facilitate effective communication. The CEFR CV encourages us all to first consider why there is a need to talk. We usually talk and communicate to complete a task. So, in any situation in which two or more people need to communicate to do a task, they need to employ apart from the linguistic competencies mentioned above, general competences (such as knowledge of the world, socio-cultural competence and professional experience), communicative language competencies (linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competencies) as well as strategies either general strategies or communicative language strategies to complete a task. Tasks often require some collaboration with others – hence the need for language. Some tasks demand greater sophistication of communication, such as agreeing on the preferred solution to an ethical problem or holding a project meeting and such collaborative tasks focus more on the task outcomes rather than the language used to achieve them. The authors of the CEFR CV suggest that it is essential that collaborative tasks be included in the language classroom. Collaborative tasks are included in the ISE Speaking section and will be covered in detail in another webinar.

 

ISE context: All of the competencies and strategies mentioned before are reflected in the Trinity Speaking descriptors which are used to assess candidate performance: 1) Communicative effectiveness assesses the appropriacy of candidates’ responses to the overall interaction generated in the exam and the strategies employed to initiate and maintain the conversation. 2) Interactive listening assesses candidates’ understanding of other speakers or examiners in our case. 3) Language control assesses candidate range and accuracy of language use – and by language use we mean grammar and vocabulary as well as functional language. 4) Delivery assesses pronunciation as well as stress and intonation. I would like at this point to take the opportunity to demystify pronunciation a bit. At Trinity, our view of pronunciation has always been in line with the more recent reflections on the aspects of phonology in second language acquisition and we’ve always been more in line with what is now in the CEFR Companion Volume. We never expected our candidates to exhibit the phonological control of an idealised native speaker model. Our focus has always been on intelligibility and not on the accuracy of the pronunciation or on the presence or absence of accent.

 

When teaching our students how to articulate certain phonemes and sounds we need to bear in mind that our focus should be on intelligibility and on how much effort is required from the interlocutor to decode the speaker’s message. It’s also important to teach our students to use and control rhythm, stress and intonation to highlight the important aspects of their conversation or to portray emotions. These activities, need not be long or complex. We can for example, easily give our students a simple word, the word “really” or “very” for example, and ask them to repeat it in such a way so as to show surprise, disappointment, frustration etc.

 

How can we help our students build their vocabulary?

Surely not by asking them to memorise lists of topic related vocabulary. Certain students may be good at memorising, but this will not guarantee that they will be able to draw from this vocabulary and actively use it appropriately when needed. Students need to be encouraged to become autonomous learners.

 ISE context:    Allowing students in the classroom to propose and prepare for and research their own topics can be a very beneficial experience. In principle, preparation for the Topic phase of the ISE speaking exam should encompass both active and passive learning. Initially, when students are reading or listening to podcasts about a certain topic, they passively acquire the vocabulary, the structures and functions needed to deal with this topic. And when they need to present their topic to their classmate or the teacher they start using these linguistic resources actively.

 In a classroom setting, teaching to the test may not be such a bad idea provided teachers exploit the theoretical principles underpinning the test to help their students enrich their linguistic, pragmatic and strategic competencies. For example, encourage students to research and prepare more than one topic. Ask the student to prepare a different topic every two or three weeks or ask students to work in pairs to suggest topics to each other. Alternatively, assign topics to your students which would target specific world knowledge and linguistic knowledge areas.

 

 How can we help our students build communicative language strategies?

 I am not a great believer of ‘integrative motivation’ especially when you do not live, or you do not intend to relocate to the target language country or if you don’t work in a context in which you will need to use the target language. I think ‘instrumental motivation’ worked better for me both as an EFL teacher and as an EFL language learner. It is important for students to understand that in the examination room they still need to transfer skills that they use naturally in their everyday interactions with their peers, colleagues and even with complete strangers. As teachers we should avoid using any metalanguage and instead try to make our students relate to real life experiences in their mother tongue. For example, ask students to recall or imagine a situation where a stranger initiated and tried to maintain conversations while they were waiting at the bus stop, for example and how depending on our mood, we either fully engaged in that conversation or manoeuvred our way out of it. Even young learners are not foreign to such communicative language strategies and they can relate to functions such as negotiating, persuading etc. As teachers we can ask them to remember a time when they were trying, for example, to convince their parents to buy them a toy or to allow them to play a bit more on their computers, or to persuade their parents why a certain toy or game was actually good for them. I think once learners realise that the fundamental aspects of communication are the same in any language and that they should be using these, either in their real-life conversation or throughout the various stages of the ISE speaking examination, they will start actively building their communication exercises language strategies. Of course, teachers need to help them to select the appropriate functions and to use the appropriate language, rhythm and intonation, for example, to make a recommendation or a suggestion or to manoeuvre their way out of an area of discussion when they don’t feel comfortable or confident talking about it. This way we’re also giving them the psychological tools they need to cope with the stress on the actual exam day. It is important for students to realise that talking to the examiner should in principle be no different than talking to their peers, colleagues, or acquaintances. 

 

ISE context: Preparing your students for the right examination can help learners improve their general and communicative language competencies. The different stages of the ISE speaking examination [Topic task, Collaborative task (higher levels), and Conversation task] have been carefully designed and mapped to facilitate and promote the use of not only linguistic competencies but also of general competences, communicative language competencies and strategies (general or communicative language strategies) that we would use in the real world to complete a task.

Research has proven that the students that are more familiar with the examination they are preparing for usually perform to the best of their abilities. Familiarise your students not only with the format of the exam, but also with the skills each speaking phase or reading question is trying to elicit. Turn each practice test as a teaching tool in which you first ask for example to identify what skills they would need to use to answer a question successfully and what type of information they would need to look for in a reading passage, or what information they would need to find  out from the examiner to successfully tackle the interactive task.

 

 

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