TEACHING PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE SKILLS

WHY? WHAT? HOW?

Associate Professor Titela Vilceanu, PhD

Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching S skills

1. Behaviorism - Audiolingualism
Within behaviorism, language is mainly spoken in nature. Thus, developing S
skills is similar to any other type of learning, based on a stimulus-response-reinforcement
pattern which involves constant practice and the formation of good habits. Therefore,
speakers are first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external stimulus and their
response consists of imitating and repeating such input. If this is performed correctly,
they received a positive reinforcement by other language users within their same
environment. The techniques used refer to learners carrying out repetition and
substitution drills, practising grammatical structures and patterns (pronunciation in focus)
through intense aural-oral practice.
2. Cognitivism
In this type of approach, learners are provided with opportunities to use the
language more creatively and innovatively after having been taught the relevant
grammatical rules. There is recognition of the dynamic nature of learning: speakers
mentally construct the language system in order to use it, yet speaking still occurs in
isolation, it is not part of a communicative event.
3. The Interactionist Approach (The Socio-Cultural Turn): CLT, The Post-
Communicative Turn
Speech production is context-embedded and presupposes interaction as well as the
capacity to integrate different interpersonal and psychomotor aspects. Levelt (1989)
endorses an automatic 4-stage model of speech production: 1) conceptualization, i.e.
selection of the message content on the basis of the situational context and the particular
purpose to be achieved; 2) formulation, i.e. accessing, sequencing and choosing words
and phrases to express the intended message appropriately; 3) articulation, which
concerns the motor control of the articulatory organs to execute the planned message; and

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4) monitoring, which allows speakers to actively identify and correct mistakes if
necessary.
In the CLT, speaking ranks topmost and learners are trained so as to cope with real
life situations. They are concerned with form, i.e. how to produce linguistically
acceptable utterances in point of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and with
accommodation / appropriacy, i.e. selection of content and form given particular socio-
cultural settings and norms. Additionally, they need to be strategically competent so that
they can make adjustments during the ongoing process of speaking (since in most cases
there is immediate feedback) and carry the message across.
The interactive, social and contextualized perspective of language learning
focuses on connected speech (discourse) rather than on isolated pieces. There is also a
shift from centering on formal aspects of language to content and meaning, to
communicative intent (purposeful speaking). Speaking development underpins
constructivism: they actively use language according to their own purposes for speaking
as well as their own prior knowledge (linguistic knowledge and extra-linguistic /
encyclopaedic knowledge) and protocol of experience. Prior knowledge is identified to
schemata, further subdivided into content schemata (topic familiarity, cultural knowledge
and previous experience with a particular field) and formal schemata (features of the oral
mode of communication: discourse, structures, and phonological and prosodic systems of
speaking).

Speaking skills and intercultural communicative competence

Activity
Classify all culture-related materials brought in by all learners (i.e., written
passages, audio extracts, video scenes) according to the particular cultural topic covered
(e.g., family, law and order, power and politics, etc.) and use them as resources for further
prasticing the speaking skill. Arrange learners in groups of three or four members and ask
them to select the materials that deal with a given cultural topic they are interested in.
After reading or listening to the material they have chosen, they are asked to discuss the
topic by giving their own personal point of view and to record their discussion.

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 The transcripts from these oral discussions can then be used in the classroom as a
starting point to deal with the cultural topic with the rest of the class, as well as to analyze
the oral features employed by each particular group of learners (i.e., pauses, repetition,
pronunciation, turn-taking mechanisms, etc.).
(Source: Uso-Juan, Martnez-Flor, Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of
the Four Language Skills, 2006: 152-153)

Controlling factors in teaching S skills (principles)

1. Features of oral discourse: the recurrence of speech events brings with it the
repetition of words and phrases (the feature is called regularity); connections between
context and utterance - for example, opening and closing utterances tend to be standardized (the
feature is known as patterning).
2. Sociolinguistic dimensions of talk: linguistic markers of in-group membership,
distance.
3. Psycholinguistics of speech processing and language development: the triad
conceptualization - formulation output.

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 SPOKEN vs. WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Oral production is characterized by exclamations (geez), repetitions (andand),

false starts (hedhe came), fillers (hmm, uh, yeah), etc.
The sentences in the written text are longer and more complex than in the spoken
text. The clauses making up the sentences tend to be in an embedded (hypotactic)
relationship (complex sentences), whereas in the spoken text the speakers string complete
clauses together using simple conjunctions such as and and but (paratactic relationship)
(compound sentences).
The contracted forms (youve, hed, didnt) and elliptical forms (if necessary) are
rare if ever in written texts, where they are fully spelled out. Also, the references to
people and things in spoken discourse rely on the immediate context and are implied or
assumed to be understood (what happened here). They are explicitly named as referents
in the written text, which must stand apart from the physical context and be understood in
contexts distant in time and place from the actual events.
The spoken text is highly interactive and thus the participants make personal
references to each other (I, you, he), features which are less prominent in the written text.
There are also direct questions and responses, which do not feature in the written text
because of its general rather than specific purpose and audience.
Similarly, the spoken text is much more interpersonally focused, with speakers
making direct references to their thoughts, emotions and judgments relating to the events.
The tone of the written text is impersonal and factual with no evaluations concerning the
rights or wrongs of the situation. Grammatically, this is displayed by the use of the Active
Voice in the spoken production whereas the Passive Voice is preferred in written
production.
Furthermore, the Present Perfect Tense is said to typify spoken texts and the
Present Simple Tense occurs frequently in written texts. There is heavy use of modals and
phrasal verbs in speech while these are less intensively used in the written mode.
With respect to lexical choices, words of Anglo-Saxon origin are encountered in speaking
much more often than in writing, where words of Latin and French origin prevail for
example, help vs. assistance, way vs. manner, together with vs. in conjunction with, etc.