Reflexión: La Comunicación Oral

Foreign language classes are the perfect setting to encourage students to think outside of the box.

In our second session with Luz we focussed on oral communication, something which is clearly very important if we hope to apply a communicative approach in our future classrooms and which I also sometimes worry about being able to achieve effectively when teaching large groups. 

For this reason I found the part of the session about how to organise oral activities in the classroom very interesting. I have little experience organising large groups alone and at work in the academy my largest group has only five students, a situation which allows me to organise activities with relative ease as it is feasible to involve everyone at the same time and for me to listen to them all. It was really interesting to hear new ideas for how to organise students into groups and how this can be used in mixed-ability classes to support those who find the work more difficult, either through allowing the teacher to spend more time with them or through the support of their peers who could be given specific roles as leaders or writers within the group. I also think that all of the ideas for roleplay activities sound very fun for the students as well as being a practical way for the teacher to get everyone speaking and engaged at the same time, especially the mingling activity with specified roles as I have often found that students are more willing to speak when they are playing a character rather than having to express their own thoughts and opinions. Finally, something that I found particularly useful was what we learnt about the assessment process as this in another area in which I have previously had very little experience. I liked the reinforcement of the idea that testing should never be on something which is new to the students as this will clearly not give an accurate picture of their level, and I was interested in the idea of structuring the exams so that the higher-level students go first in order to model answers for those at a lower level. In my own classes I often use this technique during oral activities, but I had never previously thought to apply it to assessment situations.

Another interesting aspect of the class was the conversation we had about the definition of the communicative approach and what it means practically in the classroom. I think that this approach is often misinterpreted to mean that the only important thing is that the students speak whilst discounting the importance of grammar. However, it is clear that effective and accurate communication is impossible without a basis in grammar as it is this which allows us to give structure and meaning to our words and to exploit all of their different possibilities. I agree that the main objective of language classes must be communication as this is what our students will need when they take the language out of the classroom and into the ‘real world’, but we must recognise that this communication is built from a number of smaller aspects that range from vocabulary to pronunciation and intonation, whilst also encompassing the grammar necessary to express themselves at the desired level. This implies that grammar activities should try to be implicit rather than explicit, encouraging its use and an understanding at a practical level and realising that a theoretical knowledge does not always equal competent usage, and that the teacher must realise in which situations fluency should be prioritised and in which accuracy should take centre stage.

In order to effectively apply this theory, we also saw a number of different activities that we can use to encourage oral communication in the classroom.  The three key ideas that we focussed on were personalisation, lateral thinking, and memorisation, the first two of which are particularly useful in order to engage students through intrinsic motivation, making them want to speak instead of forcing them to. My favourite activities that we saw were those that required each student to come up with an individual reason for something, making them think outside of the box and be creative, and I plan to use the forgotten homework task with a class next week (where at least one person has always forgotten their homework) to reinforce last week’s work on passive structures by requiring the ideas to be expressed in a specific way. One activity that I was not too sure about was the one which used the video about why women live longer than men, and I would be very interested to see an example of the type of activity which could follow it. I felt that showing videos that reinforce stereotypes such as men as incompetent and women as sensible caregivers might not be healthy with impressionable teenagers, but it could be very interesting if they were afterwards asked to express their own ideas about the truth of these images.

Overall, Wednesday’s session was very interesting in terms of the activities and organisational techniques presented, but the most significant thing that I took away from it was a sense of how to better apply the communicative approach without pushing aside the idea of grammatical accuracy.