SOME PEDAGOGIC ASPECTS OF TEACHING THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

Spoken language production, learning to talk in the foreign language, is often considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of language learning for the teacher to help the student with. The practical problems are obvious. In written production, each writer can get on by himself, without disturbing the rest of the class, at his own speed. In the production of speech, however, each speaker needs to speak individually and, ideally, he needs someone to listen to him speaking and to respond to him. When he speaks, he makes a noise which will disturb other students unless they are saying the same thing at the same time, or unless they are listening to what he says. The possible ways of coping with this seem to be limited. In courses which are conducted on the basis of large-group teaching or language lab practice, there must necessarily be a premium on 'correctness' in spoken language production. The student is frequently expected to 'reply in complete sentences' when the teacher asks him a question in class, since, if he simply says yes or no, he gets so little practice in producing the spoken form. The language he produces is, typically, evaluated by the teacher for its correctness, either with respect to pronunciation or to grammar or both. In the language lab, the pre-ordained correct response frequently takes the form of a short, complete, sentence. Again, if this is evaluated at all, it is likely to be evaluated in terms of correctness of pronunciation or grammar.

Perhaps the most widespread assumption in teaching the spoken language is that the sentence is the appropriate unit of planning and performance. Yet native speakers typically produce bursts of speech which are much more readily relateable to the phrase — typically shorter than sentences, and only loosely strung together. If native speakers typically produce short, phrase-sized chunks, it seems perverse to demand that foreign learners should be expected to produce complete sentences. Indeed it may demand of them, in the foreign language, a capacity for forward-planning and storage which they rarely manifest in speaking their own native language. 'Correctness', in terms of complete sentences, seems an inappropriate notion in spoken language.

Used well, language learning experience based on notions of 'correct responses' may enable the student to improve his pronunciation and to improve his ability to produce short structured responses in familiar dialogue slots. What it obviously cannot prepare him to do is produce an extended response, to take a 'long turn', since it gives him no practice in producing extended responses. Neither does it prepare the student to make the spoken foreign language 'work' for him, by working out what he wants to say by saying it and then modifying it, which is how many of us use spoken language much of the time. Curiously, the assessment which follows a course composed of short, structured 'correct' responses, often demands that the student should produce an extended stretch of speech in a 'prepared talk' on some topic — a type of activity which the course has in no way prepared him for.

What should a course in spoken English production prepare a student to do? The intention is, often, that the student should be able to 'express himself in the target language, to cope with basic interactive skills like exchanging greetings and thanks and apologies, and to express his 'needs' — request information, services etc. The syllabus which results from a 'needs' or 'notions' approach will prepare a student to produce short turns of a transactional and/or interactional type. It will be largely unstructured, because there is no obvious way in which the ability to express an apology builds upon the ability to express thanks, or in which the ability to express a request builds upon the ability to express a warning. Such a syllabus will consist, essentially, of a list of forms which may be used to perform a range of social/cognitive functions. The forms will tend to be 'sentence types' and the functions will tend to be identified as 'act types', speech acts which are performed by uttering a short sentence, taking a short turn. However, the syllabus which results from taking seriously an expression like “enabling the speaker to express himself” must surely go beyond short turns and consider what it would mean for a speaker to be responsible for the structure of a long turn. If there are 'easier' types of long turn, and if there are helpful strategies, then a teacher might be able to construct a structured course where a student could learn a simple skill before building on that to achieve a more complex skill. In such a course, it would be clear that a student could “make progress” rather than simply “learn another set of things to say”. The teacher would be in the position of controlling a set of strategies which would help the student improve his performance. If a student had difficulty in expressing himself in conversation classes, the teacher might be able to diagnose his problem and give him practice in helpful strategies, rather than simply attributing the student's problems to his inability to learn what his peers have learnt. The teacher needs to be in the confident position of possessing analytic tools which enable him to determine where the difficulty lies and to help the student with it.

There is a difficulty in perceiving a principled order in which to introduce

interactional short turns but, in many ways, it seems natural to teach the beginning learner appropriate language for participating in simple conversations. It is possible to perceive some, somewhat shadowy, principles of ordering. One might, for instance, suggest that there is less 'communicative stress' on a beginning student if he takes the part in a conversation of the person who responds to what somebody else says, who reacts to someone else's topic and can, therefore, use the first speaker's language to build his own response on. This is of course the basis for many audio-visual materials and of the large-class, teacher-dominated method where the materials, or the teacher, constantly take the initiative and the student is simply required to respond.

The study of 'authentic' conversations which are to be used as conversational models should not be extended for very long at a time. The attention of the students should be focused only on those elements that they are supposed to be paying attention to. They should be led to observe particularly important features and, as soon as possible, put these observations to use.

Thus, the problems which confront the teacher who wants to teach his students to participate in primarily interactive conversation is, without doubt, one of the most difficult skills to teach students in anything remotely like a naturalistic setting.