Teaching oral communication

Andrés Guevara Piñeros
I.D. 445114
November 11,2009
English Didactics 1
Department of Foreign Languages
Universidad Nacional de Colombia

IS IT REALLY DIFFICULT TEACHING ORAL COMMUNICATION TO CHILDREN BETWEEN 9 TO 10?

The intention of this essay is to demonstrate, based on different theories of some authors, what problems are related to teach of speaking of a foreign language, thoseproblems are related to motivation, variety in materials, pronunciation and the continuity use of the language.

Nunan (1993) has found that the biggest problem in the EFL classroom is the lack of motivation and the reiterative use of the mother tongue. “Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction, often listen in silence while others aretalking. One way to encourage learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges” (p.110). Such responses can be especially useful for beginners, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having astock of those responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.
According to Marianne Celce-Murcia (2001), “EFL teachers need to be particularly adept at organizing class activities that are authentic and varied. The use of authentic, engaging materials should be the basis for in-class activities.” Instructors can helpstudents develop the speaking ability by making students aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response. Through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.

There are different systems that give to the professors a usefulmethod to represent the pronunciation in teaching English language to foreign learners. There are based on the linguistic theories that began 50 years ago. At the same time as linguistics introduced a number of priceless techniques into language teaching and linguistics changed its emphasis from the written to the spoken language, its restriction to single accents and its exclusion of the writtenlanguage do not supply the needs of practical language teaching well. Furthermore, linguistics has now abandoned the phonemic theory that serves as the basis on which pronunciation is represented. .

The conventional system of long and short vowels is used, but it has been expanded with 4 more unit vowels, giving increase to asystem that applies to most accents with minor union. An English accent can consequently be almost precisely described by a characteristic set of diaphonic combinations, plus some distinctive preferences in word choice. A general plan of the linguistic examination of this diaphonic system provides a unexpectedly simple account of vowel features that works across accents, suggesting that these are thefeatures that an Foreign English speaker actually learns to identify when reunion speakers of varying accents.

According to Brown (2001) “With trivial additions such as a circumflex accent to mark ‘continental’ vowel-values, this system is found to be consistent with everyday orthography. This allows a language learner to learn only one system of representation, ‘spelling plus’, that specifiesboth the spelling and the sound. Being equivalent to a phonetic representation with some extra marks, it can serve both the foreign learner and the native-speaking child learning to read, as well as supporting the teaching or learning of English spelling”. It is found to be clearly superior to the traditional systems of phonemic representation used in English language teaching.
The goal of…