Topic 7

Question 1

1. Oral communication in the foreign language

Answer 1

5 key components by MOATS

• Phonological awareness: Understanding the sounds of the English language (phonems) and knowing the symbols or letters that represent that sounds (graphemes)
• Pragmatics: Understanding of the social rules of communication. Ex.Persuading someone| Talking with mum VS friend
• Syntax: Understanding of word order and grammatical rules. Ex.Children eat bananas=> Bananas eats children
• Morphology: Study of words, how they’re formed and their relationship with other words in the same language. Ex.Inflection and derivation
• Vocabulary/Semantics: Understanding the meaning of words and phrases and using it to communicate properly.

Jakobson

• Referential
• Emotive
• conative
• Phatic
• Metalingual
• Poetic

Characteristics of the oral communication

Oral communication is the expression of an idea through spoken words

• Clear oral expression: so the receiver can understand the message.
• Better understanding: misunderstandings can be checked and clarified instantly
• Flexibility: it may be changed depending on the situation.
• Direct exchange of message: sensible an adabt to the topic
• Media used: face to face, meetings, conference, by telephone, video call…
• Preservation of the message: Cannot be preserved if it is not recorded.
• Save time: requires a shorter period of time and lesser amount of cost.
• Immediate feedback.
• Degree of formality: is still mostly informal. Teachers can connect with students using slangs for example ASAP as soon as possible

Question 2

2.The complexity of understanding the gist in oral interaction: from passive to active, selective listening.

Answer 2

Hearing is naturally and involuntary while listening is deliberated effort to comprehend sound.

Teachers become one of the language sources at class, but students needs
other voices to be heard: recorders and videos.

Early stages uses songs, rhymes, games…

The meaning purpose in listening has been studied by Harmer. Students must be either interested in what they’re going to listen to or they must find it useful.

• We must consider our pupils psychological characteristics and level of English. The Krashen theory called the input hypothesis attempted to explain how the learner improves and progresses following a natural order when he or she receives 2L input that is one step beyond his/her current stage of linguistic competence
• We must build up their confidence, it’s ok not to understand everything, we’ve to tell them what we expected them to do

Strategies for listening

• Predicting: is one of the main functions of the leading stage, we must encourage them to predict what they think might come next in a spoken message
• Extracting specific information: and getting a general picture
• Inferring opinions and attitudes: stress intonation, body language…
• Deducing meaning from context
• Recognizing discourse patterns and markers: first, but, and, or…

Listening activities: extensive listening
Extensive listening (EL) is a way to improve children’s fluency in the FL
Te main purpose is to either get information os just listen for pleasure (or both) listen to songs, stories, films…suitable to their age and interests
If they understand almost all of the text they’re listening to, they can build up their word recognition speed, they’ll notice more uses of grammar structures, collocations, and generally their brains’ll be working more effectively.

• Student at the begging level something with very few unknown words and the simplest grammar structures
• Intermediate level, wider range of vocabulary and grammar but stay quite easy for them to understand

Activities

• Listen to a poem
• Listen and watch a how to video
• Listen to a chant, song, audio books…

Listening activities: intensive listening
The goal of intensive listening is to focus os specific details.

• Pre listening: will create expectation and will give them a purpose. Ex. Brainstorming, predicting what’s coming…
• while listening: task break the ice and help our students to establish some basic facts. Ex. true or false, multiple choice questions, putting pictures in order…
• post listening: followup work. Ex. summarizing, role play, jigsaw puzzles…

Question 3

3.Learning to speak: from imitative reproduction to autonomous production

Answer 3

Talking to infants using both adult speech and baby talk can be specially interesting to little ones. Baby talks is something called Parentese , a type of speech where an adult talk in a exaggerated and repetitive way.
Imitation and repetition play and important role in the initial steps of language learning.

IMITATIVE REPRODUCTION
Teachers can introduce single words, indicating objects and actions while using mime and facial expressions. This followed up by using those words in simple utterances
Examples

• Clapping games and songs: helps to follow the rhythm and the syllables. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fas as you can
• Syllable song Months of the year syllable song
• Animal walks: we practice imitation skills and modelling pronunciation encourage the children to do the action and repeat at the same time. Fly like a bird, hop like a bunny, stamp like an elephant…
• Action songs: They practice stress, intonation and rhythm. Body parts song, baby shark song, inch wicy spider, head shoulders, knees and toes…
• Simon say or do what I say but not what I do
• Follow the leader: promotes imitation.

Formulatic language
With this activities they learn formulatic language which are short phrases attached to particular kinds situation. This language consist of:

• Simple greetings: Good morning, How are you?, Hello, Goodbye…
• Social English: Happy birthday, Would you like…?, Yes, please/No, thanks
• Routines, asking for permission and classroom language: Can I go to the toilet, please?, How do you say…?

We must not forget the silent period . Varies from a children to another, it could be one week or one month, for example.We don’t may urged them to produce at all after the teacher, but as soon as we notice they’re able to participate, we’ve to encourage them to repeat.

AUTONOMOUS REPRODUCTION
One of the main aims of FL in primary education is to motivate or pupils to learn English. We can use English words that we use in Spanish to show them how they already know some English vocabulary. Parking, sandwich, camping…
The use of stories is very motivating factor and provide them a sense of real communication.

To deal with oral production, we use 3 stages:

• Presentation (can be carried out with activities, songs and games shown in the previous section)
• Practice
• Production

This’ll lead our students to achieve the main aim of the FL subject (LOMLOE article 17.f develop basic communicative competence in at least one FL so that students…
Practice stage

• The teacher uses activities to practice new language orally
• Models and correct when mistakes occur
• Encourage lots of pair and group work
• Students speak up to 60% of the time and the teacher up to 40%

EXAMPLES OF ACTIVITIES

• Drills
• Chain games
• Karaoke version of songs
• Bingo
• Find someone who…
• Picture dictation…

Production stage

• Teachers monitors but don’t correct until the end
• Fluency rather than accuracy
• Students speak up to 90% teacher up to 10%
• They use the languyin a natural way

EXAMPLES OF ACTIVITIES

• Creation of dialogues
• Role plays
• Debates
• Discussion
• Simulations
• Interviews
• Projects…