UNIT 1: THE NATURE OF ORAL COMMUNICATION

Oral output
Master a language: “How many languages can you speak?” speaking: the peak
of the process of learning.

A communicative act needs 3 conditions to be effective

 A need of information

 The speech must vary in such a way that the speaker can choose different
manners of expression the same idea

 Positive feedback from the counterpart

Any speaker in a spontaneous conversation requests or provides some kind of

information:

 That output can be produced in different ways

 The speaker can choose how to construct the sentence (syntax, vocab…)

 If the counterpart understands and answers the speaker knows the message
was understood

 The flow of messages can continue

 This is the process of any communicative act

Speaking & Writing are ACTIVE SKILLS

*Understanding + creating new speech
*Active skills are a combinations of PERCEPTION AND COGNITION

Differences speak vs write

Chanel:
- Sounds: Momentary
- Texts: permanent
Complexity:
- Write: Preparation, formal, rules…
- Oral: redo message, non-verbal features…
Referential info:
- Text: 0
- Oral: Accent, sex, age, socio-cultural background…
Counterpart:
- Oral: At least one (needs feedback)
- Write: One or a millions (no need of feedback)
2 FUNCTIONS
 Transactional function (The need of conveying ideas and info.)

 Interactional function (Communicative goal)

The process of comprehension

Within oral skills two sub-skills: perception & cognition they also intervene in that
even that is called “comprehension

Comprehension Perception of sounds: (phoneme recognition)

Cognition:
-Analysis:recognises, organises, predicts,infers meaning
-Synthesis: Interpretes meaning

Ideas to become a good listener

 Info. provided by the context, world knowledge, previous experiences with the
language.
 Most of the full meaning can be inferred without understanding everything

 Focus on relevant words / message as a whole

 Gestures & movements

 Slight mistakes are not important

 Assessment environment without pressure

 Speed or accent can blur comprehension, don’t worry!

 Complexity of a text, idioms, slang

 A basic scheme for listening activities
Natural contexts < easy accents & pronunciations < local & demanding accents
3 steps:
 Previous activities

 Activities to be done during the listening

 Activities to be done after the listening

What happens when we speak?

Act of speaking
- Brief & ephemeral

- Short time to react / incomplete

- Grammatically incorrect / change topic quickly

- Reformulate /repeat

Efficient speakers develop minor skills in parallel to the training of the main oral
skill. Perception skills: remember sounds & structures: training & time
learning comes with interaction

If students want to improve their global oral skills, they can first try by training
these subskills:

 Planning
- Practice routines (politeness: “Please”)
- Cultural patterns
 Management of interaction
- Turns to talk
- Dynamic of conversations
- Rules of interaction (polite answers, interruptions, linking elements)
 Negotiation of meaning: express ideas & intentions / mutually recognize them
/ adapt their messages to each other
 Production
- Idioms
- Memorised sentences (gain time to think, remember, reformulate)
Typology of oral input
Monologues
- Highly prepared
- Not so prepared
Difficulties:
- Linguistic requirements (clear sentences, order etc.)
- Inhibition, stress, fear
- Silence for not knowing what to say
Dialogues
- Social
- Transactional
Role plays: goal = info
Real life: something else beyond info social links

Two types of mechanisms can help students speak

1- Those that facilitate the production of the messages
2- Those that compensate the lack of practice of experience

Mechanisms to facilitate output

 Simplification of the structure (coordinate ✔ subordinate ✘)

 Omission

 Idioms

 Time fillers
Mechanisms to compensate a lack of experience
Reformulation

 Self-correction

 False starts

 Repetition

 Rephrasing / paraphrasing
- Approximation

- Word coinage

- Circumlocution

Lack of vocab use L1 as a final resourse strategies: TRANSFERS

 Translation from the L1 “I am agree”

 Language switch – Codeswitching

 Appeal for assistance – Ask the interlocutor

 Mime what you need – Gestures / movements

Achivement strategies

 Substitution

 Generalizations
 Description

 Exemplification
 Word coining

 Restructuring

Avoidance strategies

 Formal avoidance

 Functional avoidance
Codeswitching
Single words 85%, phrases 10%, clauses 5%

- Switching morphemes: “Chatear” chat can be pronounced in Spanish.

“Runner” is used with the Spanish pronunciation /raner/ but not combined with
its morphological requirements “runeador” because /run/ is a distinct English
sound that would require a grapheme that does not exist in Spanish.

- Switching equivalent elements: Substitute phrase or word without violating

the grammar.

“Me he comprador a very cool T-shirt” ✔

“Me he comprador una camiseta very cool” ✔

“Me he comprado una very cool camiseta” ✘

 UNIT 2: LISTENING IN THE EFL CLASSROOM

Intro:

Listening: Interact with the society and satisfy our needs.

Listening & speaking are 2 sides of the same coin (input vs output)

Listening to communicate

McGregor defends collaborative discourse: Group of students working

together to solve problems.

Gerlach collaborative learning is based on the idea that: learning is a

natural social act in which the participants talk among themselves. Through the
talk learning occurs.

Different roles of a listener

 Participant

 Addressee

 Auditor
 Overhearer

 Judge

Hierarchical summury of the listening process

1- The type of interactional act or speech event is determined
2- Scripts relevant to the particular situation are recalled
3- The goals of the speaker are inferred through reference to the situation, the
script and the sequential position of the utterance
4- The propositional meaning of the utterance is determined
5- An illocutionary meaning is assigned to the message
6- This info is retained and acted upon, and the form in which it was originally
received is deleted
*Learner differ not only in ability but in individual preferences or subjects / topics too
and this may be an influential determinant underlying the success or failure of the
activity idea linked with “humanistic” / “affective” approaches to learning

*Another aspect of the listening skill Authenticity

- Real-life listening allows acces to environmental clues
- Listening segments come in short chunks
- Listening requires some show of reciprocity and frequent listener response

The process of listening

3 levels of interaction in L2 listening

 Congnitive interaction: between “knowledge sources such as content and

formarl schemata, context and L2 lexical knowledge
 Behavioural interaction: “With the other 3 traditional L2 skills”

 Social interaction: “In face to face interation”

Regardering reception 2 levels of cognitive processing

 Bottom-up processing: making as much use as you can of low level clues.
Individual sounds, then words, the texts or conversations.

Activity: Fill in the gaps, to recognise different sounds, divisions between

words etc.

 Top-down processing: make as much use as they can of the previous

knowledge and the situation.

Activity: involve students predicting the content beforehand.

 The response

Enables communication, it builds respect and enables the participants to

release their emotions and opinions. 4 domains of use of the interactive
nature of listening:

 Public domain
 Personal domain

 Occupational domain

 Educational domain

Teaching listening comprehension

We divide the listening comprehension activities in 3 groups
- Pre-listening
- Listening
- Post-listening
Pre-listening

 Useful to:
- Anticipate difficult vocabulary
- Set a context
- Create motivation
 We try to contextualize emulating the real world

 Shouldn’t take longer than 5 mins

 Pre-listening activities:
- Defining words /expressions in pairs

- Brainstorms

- Word webs

- Mime activities etc

Listening
Lund (1990) 9 ways of approaching a listening activity, depending on listeners’ skills
and responses. Lund’s Taxonomy

Listener function (pag41)

1- Identification
2- Orientation
3- Main idea comprehension
4- Full comprehension
5- Replication

Listener response

1- Doing
2- Choosing
3- Transferring
4- Answering
5- Condensing
6- Extending
7- Duplicating
8- Modeling
9- Conversing

*5 elements to take into consideration when designing a listening task:

- Function
- Response
- Text
- Topic
- Method of representation
Post listening
Types of classroom listening performances:
 Reacting activities: Listen and repeat (improve pronunciation)
 Responsive activities: Teacher speaks, responses are expected (asking
question, giving commands, seeking clarification…)
 Selective activities: Scan for details (names, events, ideas…)

 Extensive activities: Understand globally what is spoken

 Interactive activities: Where learners actively participate, discussions etc.

Evaluating listening comprehension

A listening activity cannot be evaluated as a whole as it does not show development
and the student’s evolution in the listening skill
First set the purpose of the activity
Second select the best choice for assessment

*Diagnostic test (at the beginning) plus a summative evaluation (at the end) is seen
as the best way to see the progress made by the student

Integration of listening comprehension with phonological aspects

In this section, we will analyse both the suprasegmental aspects (stress, intonation
and pitch) and the segmental level (sounds and phonemes)

Suprasegmental level

Pitch: gives info., mood, atmosphere, emotions etc. The use of the pitch in termination
varies depending on the variety of English heard.
Intonation: Rises and falls in the sound of your voice when you speak without it, it
might be impossible to understand the expressions and thoughts that go with words.
Types of intonation:
- Grammatical: The rules yes/no questions, generally end with a rising tone
whereas wh- questions end with a falling tone
- Attitudinal: We mean that when intonation rises on a question, the speaker is
expressing their feelings, not expecting an answer.
Stress: It only falls on the content words in a sentence. Unpredictable. Important for
the pronunciation. It makes words easy to understand.
*Gradation and the shwa
Complaints words difficult to hear unstressed grammatical words (prepositions,
pronouns, modal verbs…) Teachers explain students: words have 2 pronunciations,
the strong form and the weak form: can /kaen/ or /kən

*Connected speech rules

English words are sometimes pronounced differently in isolation than in combination.
This is due to different factors such as:
Elision: omission of sounds, syllables or words in speech. I don’t know – I duno
Connected speech and linking: What are you going to do? – whaddya gonna do?

Segmental level. Problems for Spanish speaker

 Many sounds do not exist in Spanish: /ae/, /ə/, /^/…

 Commonly confused are the phonemes /ae/ and /^/

 Speakers of Spanish do not distinguish between long and short sounds

 Words ending in “r” are not often pronounced

 A particular problem is that English is stress-timed as opposed to syllable-timed

 The most important thing a teacher must teach to their students is to not to try to
understand every world

Integration with speaking

Activities

 Jigsaw listening

 Use of computers

 Video clips, lyrics, and songs

 Board games


* Conclusions pag 50