LA COMUNICACIÓN ORAL.

ELEMENTOS Y NORMAS QUE RIGEN EL DISCURSO ORAL. RUTINAS Y FORMULAS HABITUALES. ESTRATEGIAS PROPIAS DE LA COMUNICACIÓN ORAL

Introduction

1. Introduction

The topic content of this theme is an important part of the FL Curriculum at the level of contents. Listening; speaking, are essential conversational capacities that support the process of any act of communication. Our current legislation emphasizes oral processes of communication and for the secondary productive processes (speaking).; A general knowledge of how the language works communicatively – either because of linguistic signs or because non lingusitic signs- – is  a Must for teachers at a Secondary stage nowadays. Speech functions and functional language in use to acquire/learn in the secondary classroom  are key issues in any academic programmme.  We need to avoid the idea that teaching a language is teaching its linguistic but teaching a language deals nowadays with making our students competent in linguistic communication (LOE

In this topic we are going to introduce an epistemological  view to the concept of COMMUNICATION; ElEMENTS IN AN ACT OF COMMUNICATION AND BASIC ORAL SPEECH FUCTIONS AND ROUTINES IN AN ORAL DISCOURSE., To conclude,   paying a special attention to STRATEGIES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION as essential procedures that take place in any act of oral communication.

2. Language and Communication: Oral Communication

2.1Language VERSUS Communication

Communication: the exchange of meaning between individuals through a common system of signals. This “exchange” is an essential characteristic of human and animal societies, by way of which individuals can transmit information, express feelings and emotions,etc. Some basic examples of this so called “communication process” may be the crying of a baby asking for food, the barking of a dog or traffic lights announcing free way with its green or stop with its red. All of them are considered acts of communication between members of a society.

Communication VERSUS LANGUAGE: Although human beings are not the only ones to communicate, they are the only ones to have some concrete features such as “arbitrariness” –significance opposite to significant-; cultural transmission; duality of patterning –isolated sounds or graphic signs do not transmit meaning but the combination of them conform a meaning or different meanings-; etc.(C.F. Hocket 1916)

Language consists of pre-set patterns which are syntax, phonetics, semantics and discourse. These patterns are related closely with each other and are used and understood by speakers of the language. Language is seen as a unit that maintains and presents an ethnic identity. It separates one group of people from another and shares roots as well as traditions within one single group.

A definition of the concept of communication must take into account the different elements that are part of the process. Following Canale (1983) “Communication is understood as the exchange and negotiation of information between at least two individuals through the use of verbal & non verbal symbols, oral & written/visual modes and production and comprehension processes.

Authentic learning for beginning learners of a second language is a process of developing therefore primarily oral communicative language competence using a code –either linguistic or paralinguistic-. This process requires comprehensible input – a process of negotiation of meaning- in oral  form that students store, in varying amounts, in their developing language systems and that they access in real-world communicative tasks. The process of accessing language from the developing system improves accuracy as well as speed of communication.  A simplified model of that process is shown below.

 Input --------> Intake --------> Developing Language Competence --------> Output

 (Adapted from Lee and VanPatten, 1995)

One of the most important goals of second language study is the development of oral communicative competence. When individuals have developed communicative oral competence in a language, they are able to convey and receive messages of many different types successfully. They are under a psicholinguistic process of encoding-decoding- encoding; . These individuals use language to participate in everyday social or work interactions and to establish relationships with others. They converse, argue, criticize, request, convince, and explain effectively, taking into account the age, background, education, and familiarity of the individuals with whom they are engaged in conversation. They also use the language to produce coherent & cohesive discourses –speech acts- in contextualizec different speech events . In essence, communicatively competent individual combines knowledge of the language system with knowledge of cultural conventions, norms of politeness, discourse conventions, and the like, and is able to transmit and receive meaningful messages successfully.

Students bring the insights that they have obtained from having developed communicative competence in their first language to the study of a second one. They already know how to request personal information from others, how to describe, how to argue, and how to explain in their first language. When they learn a second language they must learn how to do these things by using a different language system and by following what may be very different rules of interpersonal interaction.

Oral COMMUNICATING Express and interpret information and ideas orally.

Although Communication could take place through oral and written interaction in oral languages –much more non grapho-phonological ones the process of conveyin meaning should be in the first step intaken through an oral interaction. Communication involve receptive skills (Listening and Reading) and productive skills (Speaking and Writing), understanding and expressing oral and written messages in a meaningful context. Tasks and activities in the English classroom should integrate skills as they take place in real life (dialogue{L/S}; Answer a Q {R/W}; etc.)

Receptive skills, particularly Listening, usually take place before productive skills (S / W), although we must also allow opportunities for productive skills to be practised. In the same way, oral skills (L / S) are recommended to be introduced in Primary Ed. before written skills (R/ W). For secondary education Oral skills are promoted during the first courses of Secondary Education and accurately supervised during the Bachillerato with a more indeep analysis of phonological connotations.

3.      Elements in Oral Communication and the oral discourse structure

"Language proficiency is not a one-dimensional construct but a multifaceted modality, consisting of various levels of abilities and domains (Carrasquillo 1994:65). Hymes (1971) also assumes that L2 learners need to know not only the linguistic knowledge but also the culturally acceptable ways of interacting with others in different situations and relationships. His theory of communicative competence (1971) consists of the interaction of grammatical, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and probabilistic language components. Built on Hymes' theory, Canale and Swain (1980) propose that communicative competence includes grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence, which reflect the use of the linguistic system and the functional aspects of communication respectively. In the framework of Canale and Swain (1980), we can show graphically the abilities underlying speaking proficiency.

• Grammatical competence. "Grammatical competence is an umbrella concept that includes increasing expertise in grammar (morphology, syntax), vocabulary, and mechanics. With regards to speaking, the term mechanics refers to basic sounds of letters and syllables, pronunciation of words, intonation, and stress" (Scarcella and Oxford 1992:141). In order to convey meaning –listening- EFL learners must have the knowledge of words and sentences; that is, they must understand how words are segmented into various sounds, and how sentences are stressed in particular ways. Thus, grammatical competence enables speakers to use and understand English language structures accurately and unhesitatingly, which contributes to their fluency.
• Discourse competence. In addition to grammatical competence, EFL learners must develop discourse competence, which is concerned with intersentential relationships. In discourse, whether formal or informal, the rules of cohesion and coherence apply, which aid in holding the communication together in a meaningful way. In communication, both the production and comprehension of a language require one's ability to perceive and process stretches of discourse, and to formulate representations of meaning from referents in both previous sentences and following sentences. Therefore, effective speakers should acquire a large repertoire of structures and discourse markers to express ideas, show relationships of time, and indicate cause, contrast, and emphasis (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). With these, learners can manage turn- taking in conversation.
• Sociolinguistic competence. Knowledge of language alone does not adequately prepare learners for effective and appropriate use of the target language. Learners must have competence, which involves knowing what is expected socially and culturally by users of the target language; that is, learners must acquire the rules and norms governing the appropriate timing and realization of speech acts. Understanding the sociolinguistic side of language helps learners know what comments are appropriate, know how to ask questions during interaction, and know how to respond nonverbally according to the purpose of the talk. Therefore, "adult second language learners must acquire stylistic adaptability in order to be able to encode and decode the discourse around them correctly" (Brown 1994:238).
• Strategic competence. Strategic competence, which is "the way learners manipulate language in order to meet communicative goals" (Brown 1994:228), is perhaps the most important of all the communicative competence elements. Simply put, it is the ability to compensate for imperfect knowledge of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and discourse rules (Berns 1990). With reference to speaking, strategic competence refers to the ability to know when and how to take the floor, how to keep a conversation going, how to terminate the conversation, and how to clear up communication breakdown as well as comprehension problems.

3.1       Differences between Oral/Written Communication

Oral                                                    VERSUS                    written communication

Short time for an answer Immediate answer. No time for thinking	No immediate answer. Time for thinking
Affective factors may produce a lack of fluency	Affective factors are not that important
Grammatically simple	Grammatically complex
Dynamic	Static
Based on negotiation of meaning	Non-negotiation of meaning
Relies on verbs	Relies on nominalization
Spontaneous language ·         Context-dependent ·         Nextness. In spontaneous language, phrases are produced one after another ·         Parallelism: repetition is mostly used ·         Repair: echoing; corrections and hesitation markers to produce utterances and organize thoughts simultaneously ·         Conjoined clauses: and; then; so...	Planned language ·         Content-dependent ·         Non-nextness: Syntactic structure and explicit cohesive elements to draw the connection between the clauses ·         Parallelism: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration is mainly used ·         Repair: Subordinate clauses or special syntactic measures are used to substitute the effects of repair in spontaneous talk ·         Embedded clauses Sentence organisation must always adjust to grammar rules
Contextualized language Oral discourse do usually focus on interaction and consequently do show features on interpersonal involvement: ·         Overlap showing encouragement ·         Examples demonstrating understanding ·         Collaborative completions ·         Clarifying questions ·         Mimicking voices Actions and agents emphasized more than states and objects ·         Feedback signals and repairs used where needed ·         Personal quality (1st/2nd person pronouns)	Decontextualized language Written texts do not occur on interaction and do not show features of personal involvement; on the contrary they take the so-called features of detachment (some morpho-syntactic forms). They show the importance of complex syntax in integration of ideas ·         Relative clauses ·         Complement clauses ·         Sequences of prepositional phrases ·         Nominalizations ·         Atributive adjectives ·         Passive voice ·         Subordinate conjunctions ·         Complex morphosyntax

           

4.      Oral communication: Definition and skills

Listening + Speaking = Conversation

Processing strategies:

listen …. process …..note ….. organise …..speak

Factors affecting EFL learners' oral communication

Age or maturational constraints. The interactive behaviour of EFL learners is influenced by a number of factors. Perhaps age is one of the most commonly cited determinant factors of success or failure in L2 or foreign language learning. Krashen, Long, and Scarcella (1982) argue that acquirers who begin learning a second language in early childhood through natural exposure achieve higher proficiency than those beginning as adults. Adults` progress seems to level off at a certain stage, a phenomenon that is usually called "fossilization"-the permanent cessation of second language development. This shows that the aging process itself may affect or limit adult learners' ability to pronounce the target language fluently with native- like pronunciation (Scarcella and Oxford 1992). Even if they can utter words and sentences with perfect pronunciation, problems with prosodic features such as intonation, stress, and other phonological nuances still cause misunderstandings or lead to communication breakdown. Adult learners do not seem to have the same innate language-specific endowment or propensity as children for acquiring fluency and naturalness in spoken language.

Aural medium. The central role of listening comprehension in the L2 or foreign language acquisition process is now largely accepted. And there is little doubt that listening plays an extremely important role in the development of speaking abilities. Speaking feeds on listening, which precedes it. Usually, one person speaks, and the other responds through attending by means of the listening process –L2 negotiation of meaning; oral interaction -. In fact, during interaction, every speaker plays a double role-both as a listener and a speaker. "While listening, learners must comprehend the text by retaining information in memory, integrate it with what follows, and continually adjust their understanding of what they hear in the light of prior knowledge and of incoming information" (Mendlsohn and Rubin 1995:35). If one cannot understand what is said, one is certainly unable to respond. So, speaking is closely related or interwoven with listening, which is the basic mechanism through which the rules of language are internalised. The fleetingness of speech, together with the features of spoken English-loosely organized syntax, incomplete forms, false starts, and the use of fillers, undoubtedly hinders EFL learners' comprehension and affects the development of their speaking abilities, as well.

Sociocultural factors. Many cultural characteristics of a language also affect L2 or foreign language learning. From a pragmatic perspective, language is a form of social action because linguistic communication occurs in the context of structured interpersonal exchange, and meaning is thus socially regulated (Dimitracopoulou 1990). In other words, "shared values and beliefs create the traditions and social structures that bind a community together and are expressed in their language" (Carrasquillo 1994:55). Thus, to speak a language, one must know how the language is used in a social context. It is well known that each language has its own rules of usage as to when, how, and to what degree a speaker may impose a given verbal behaviour on his/her conversational partner (Berns 1990). Due to the influence or interference of their own cultural norms, it is hard for non-native speakers to choose the forms appropriate to certain situations. For instance, in Chinese culture, paying a compliment to someone obligates that person to give a negative answer such as "No. It is not so good," and so on in order to show "modesty," whereas in North American culture such a response might be both inappropriate and embarrassing.

Affective factors. The affective side of the learner is probably one of the most important influences on language learning success or failure. The affective factors related to L2 or foreign language learning are emotions, self-esteem, empathy, anxiety, attitude, and motivation. L2 or foreign language learning is a complex task that is susceptible to human anxiety (Brown 1994), which is associated with feelings of uneasiness, frustration, self-doubt, and apprehension. Speaking a foreign language in public, especially in front of native speakers, is often anxiety-provoking. Sometimes, extreme anxiety occurs when EFL learners become tongue-tied or lost for words in an unexpected situation, which often leads to discouragement and a general sense of failure. Adults, unlike children, are concerned with how they are judged by others. They are very cautious about making errors in what they say, for making errors would be a public display of ignorance, which would be an obvious occasion of "losing face" in some cultures such as in China. Clearly, the sensitivity of adult learners to making mistakes, or fear of "losing face," has been the explanation for their inability to speak English without hesitation.

Characteristic of orality

1.      Used to regulate social interactions        

2.      Topic usually here and now

3.      Familiar words; repetitive syntax and ideas

4.      Intonation and non-verbal cues important for cohesion and conveying meaning

5.      Usually has fragmented quality

6.      Rapid rate contributes to dysfluencies

7.      Usual lack of permanence        

8.      Listeners often give immediate feedback

As shown in above, characteristics of orality include its use in regulating social interactions and the opportunity for the listeners/ communication partners to give immediate feedback to the speaker. Clarification and rephrasing can occur "on-line."

            4.1        Listening: A mental active receptive oral skill whose main aim is to comprehend the oral message delivered by an addresser.           

   It is extremely important to remember that listening involves looking whenever the speech is delivered “live” or through a visual medium. Paralanguage communicates not only through tone of the voice, pitch, loudness versus softness etc., but also by means of visual signals, such as hand movements, gesture and stance, facial expressions like smiling, sneering and frowning. All are significant indicators of meaning and an important aid to understanding the message as it is being delivered.

    The audio, non-visual media like the radio, tape recordings etc. are more difficult to understand, as obviously they do not have the visual paralinguistic signals but only the vocal ones. It is nevertheless quite possible and very useful to imagine the speaker’s visual paralanguage on the basis of the vocal paralinguistic signals. For example, it is quite easy to hear and consequently visualise a sneer or to “hear” a smile when something amusing is being said. Therefore, you try to listen and see together. 

Stages in the process of listening:

·         Decipher:: Listen to sounds in a chain not isolated

·         Discrimination: content and non-content information

·         Semantic intuition: Contrast with previous hypothesis and convey meaning

Skills and sub-skills involved in Listening (extracted fromMcLaren & Madrid, 1995; Munby, 1978) A) "Ear-training" skills

-Discriminating sounds in isolated words and connected speech*.

-Discriminating stress patterns within words

-Recognizing variation in stress in connected speech

-Recognizing the use of stress in connected speech

-Understanding intonation patterns: uses of tone;  interpreting attitudinal meaning through variation of tone.

B) "Comprehension" skills

-Understanding explicitly stated information

-Understanding* implicit information in the text, not explicitly stated (inferencing)

-Understanding conceptual meaning, notions* (time, location, quantity,...)

-Understanding the communicative valué, function, of utterances and sentences

-Understanding relations within the sentence and between parts of a text.

-Interpreting texts

-Recognizing indicators used fon introducing/developing an idea, transition to new idea, concluding, emphasizing, explaining/clarifying, etc.

-Distinguishing the main idea(s) from supporting details

-Extracting relevant (main) points to summarise

-Transferring information from verbal code to, for example, diagrammatic display .

-Relating what is listened to the learner's own experience

-Internalizing what is communicated

Stages in the process of teaching

·         Pres-listening: brainstorming activities, working through the visual aids is mostly involved. Students are waken to the communicative situation presented. Old vocabulary is recycled and new vocabulary is correctly contextualized. Inductive approach to new input presentation

·         While-listening: activities to work out the listening through, Wh- qiestions, true & false, drawing, matching or any other activity. Clear directions should be given.

·         Post-listening: The text is seen as a whole and as a principal motivator to keep on working –maybe reading aloud the listening, doing a writing activity..etc.

Training in Listening

We should bear in mind intensive & extensive listening.

·         Intensive listening: Scanning the text : it is closer to ear-trainig and therefore to accuracy. We get them to listen carefully to phonemes and words in order to develop a grapho-phonological relationship. The listening is primarily concerned for language items as part of the language teaching programme.

·         Extensive listening:Skimming the text: It is closer to text-based approach and therefore fluency. We try our students to get a general picture of what has been heard.

Teaching listening. Basic points

Listening should be taught systematically, in varied ways and regularly. Some of the basic points to bear in mind when considering the teaching of the listening skill are:

-The importance of distinguishing "pre-listening", "while-listening" and "after-Iistening"

phases and activities in teaching the listening skill

- The need for motivation: if the student understands, s/he is happy. For this   reason , wherever possible, tasks and activities should be "success-oriented"

-Only "reasonable comprehension" is demanded. Students do not have to forcé themselves to understand every single word in a text. We must practise "listening for gjst".

-The importance of the purpose of the task, which should be explained to the students before they do the exercise, so they know why they are listening, as we do in real life.

-The problem of "communicative stress". Several principal features of language input have been found to be influential in listening comprehension, among them:

-features of the context (a familiar one, a formal setting,...);

-the way in which the information is organized

-the listener's familiarity with the topic

-the type of input: "siatic" (descriptions), "dynamic" (stories, action,...)

-the explicitness of the information given.

-The importance of "success-oriented" activities. The tasks should be relatively easy to do, basically simple, so that most students can achieve the goal and feel encouraged, motivated.

Tasks and Activities for Listening: A  brief Taxonomy

We have to provide the learner with a variety of tasks which will enable her to practise and develop the skill mentioned abo ve. The folio wing is a brief taxonomy of listening tasks:

A) Some "before-listeníng" activities:

-Activating vocabulary on the topic of the listening activity

-Answering "before- questions"of a general and specifíc nature

-Reading information and relating it to personal own experiences

-Looking at a visual/díagramatic aid (map, photo, diagram,..) related to the topic to oriéntate future listening and predict what the text will (probably) be about.

-Completing a table or questionnaire

-Reading short stories as preparation for listening

-Reading a short summary of the material to be heard

- Preparation for listening to specially difficult types of text (e.g. "disembodied voice"*)

B) Some "while/after listening" activities:

It is not always possible to determinne exactly which activities may take place while listening, and which after the act of listening has finished. They are grouped together:

-Identifying_the topic

-Identifying the number, sex, nature of the speakers

-Identifying the attitude(s) of the speaker(s)

-Filling incomplete ("gapped") texts with information obtained in the listening task

-Conpleting a form or a table

-Writing information in spaces on a map or diagram

-Indicating a route on a plan ("draw a Une")

-Selecting the appropriate drawing/ photo from a group

-Reading, listening and associating sentences with the appropriate pictures

-Answering "true/false" questions

-Answering "multiple-choice" comprehension questions

-Answering "inference-type" and alternative comprehension questions

-Distinguishing between vocabulary data

-Correcting incorrect data, according to information in the listening

-Reacting to a story in an appropriate way (by laughing, showing surprise,...)

-Re-ordering the jumbled steps

-Summarizing a (narrative) text

            4.2       Speaking: A physical active productive oral skill whose main aim is to deliver a message. It interacts with listening and even with the writing skill (we often speak to ourselves mentally).

Stages in the process of speaking

The whole process of learning oral communication takes places in two stages (Rivers & temperley 1978)

Cognitive stage: (receptive):

• Knowledge of communication components: rules, categories, functions...
• Internalizing the rules relating those categories and functions.

Productive stage:

• Practice of sequences of sounds (that may incluse “words”, clauses, sentences..
• Practice in production complete communicative intentions: asking for information, introducing oneself, expressing likes or dislikes..etc

Stages in teaching :

• Presentation: New comprehensible input is introduced throuhg different resources and materils such as realia, texts (dialogues), posters, videos, drawing....etc
• Practice : controlled and guided activities are involve. Accuracy is emphasized. Most of the time teachers do create their worksheets or do use of the ones presented ion the textbook or workbook
• Production: free – or pseudo-fre- activities are involve-. Fluency is emphasized

Didactic considerations for the "Speaking" skill

In the teaching process, learners are the subjects of a series of cognitive operations which will lead them to the ability to communicate. So, the main function on the teacher's side is to help pupils activate the psycholinguistic processes resulting in learning. The natural framework for language development is social "interaction".

"Input" and "interaction" are two important factors in SLA. Krashen's comprehensible

input hypothesis claims that language is acquired only when learners understand the message(s). Ellis (1984) states that "interaction" contributes to language development. Finally, Klein synthesizes both theories and points out that both input and opportunities of communication are essential for SLL/A to take place.

(*) In the Audiolingual, structuralist, method pupils reproduced structures in "drills", exercises which aimed to internalize rules through repetition without a meaningrul context. Meanwhile, tasks and activities in Communicative Language Teaching are designed to promote interaction and provide input and opportunities for oral (and written) communication.

When we are doing oral communication in the EFL classroom in Primary schools, we must be conscious of the limitations and constraints that we have:

• Our students can communicate their ideas and emotions using their Ll, with fluency, expressing, in a natural way, their meanings, but in English they have serious limitations and lack of language, so they inevitably use reductive and simplifícation strategies in order to express themselves with the language they are able to use.

• Due to lack of competence, at an elementary level, students will often insert Ll linguistic elements combined with the FL already learnt. This is natural at that stage of their interlanguage and sometimes fulfils the communicative purposes.

• At the initial stages, young leamers often make many grammatical, lexical and phonetic mistakes which must be corrected systematically. Nevertheless, when they are involved in communicative activities and the main objective is to develop their fluency, the teacher must be more flexible and tolerant with errors and not interrupt communication (the teacher can write down the errors produced and correct them later)

Procedures, tasks (activities) and techniques to encourage oral practice and oral  production (Speaking)

Oral presentation:

Using visual aids: flashcards, wallcharts or realia to introduce new input. Listen and repeat. Following 3 phases:

1.      Natural speech: Listen to a natural model of pronouncition of the new input

2.      Isolation + distortion (Where an isolated phoneme is over-emphasized and teacher plays with stress; tone ; final ending consonant, long vowels, etc

3.      Natural speech: A final listen and repeat activity so students get a final pronounciation close to a natural model.

This presentation stage is developed through choral and individual repetitions.

Some variations: New input can be introduced through a communicative event –role play- or short story or ,merely asking open questions to the students about their preferences in Spanish an contrasting already known input to the same ones in a new code L2. In any case the 3 phases indicated above should developed no matter the mean we use to introduce new input.

Oral Practice:

It is important to notice that we are considering oral practice as a processand  as an ability that can be improved with practice and training, by using certain procedures and techniques. The following procedures and activities/ tasks are designed to encourage oral practice and develop the ability to move from imitating models to autonomous oral expression. Practice is therefore moving from an accurate presentation phase to a more fluent one. Activities indicated hereafter should be understood as in between these two processes (presentation and production) and they will be closer to the former or latter depending on how much freedom is left to students in their production

• Spot the odd one out: making contrast or deducing from a list
• Substitution tables
• Discrimination activities
• Substitution drills
• Expansion drills
• Transformation drills
• Conversation drills
• Using picture cues: Making true statements comparing the things in the picture
• Saying which you would rather
• Describing one object
• Pair work: filling the gaps
• Controlled or guided role-plays
• Asking and Answering questions

Question-answer techniques allow the students to practise certain structures and grammatical ítems. This procedure is used in EFL, "Teacher talk" imitates "Mother talk" asking simple questions to encourage pupils' oral production and giving them a feedback. 2.1. Yes/no questions; 2.2."Wh- questions"; 2.2. Personal questions

·         Playing with language

Playing linguistic and communicative games in the EFL classroom is one of the most popular and motivating activities. At elementary level games must be simple to play.

-Who is it?

- 20 questions (*)

-    I spy with my little eye...

-    Pass the message

-    Who says what ?

Guess what I am doing ?

• Mime, Gestures and Physical movement

Mime is a non-verbal communication procedure to represent an idea or a sequence of ideas (story) through gestures and bodily movement. It can be used as a strategy to compensate for breakdowns in oral communication.

Mime is particularly recommended for children, Activities such as "action songs", Total Physical Response, mime (guessing) games, etc. are funny and motivating

Oral production

We are considering oral production as the final oral product to be used in a mock-authentic real communicative situation.  Oral production is therefore understood as a freely communicative act either interactive ( in most of the situations) or individual ( sort of micro-speeches). Oral production is not necessarily close to target language but students can include their own knowledge (acquired in previous courses or exta-activities...etc). Evaluation of oral production should take into account content and final message and not isolated pronounciation on one hand, and on the other one para-language. The final goal of oral production is communication and as far as the message is transmitted – no matter the communicative strategy  in use- should be  valued.

Activities indicated hereafter should be understood as oral production although some of then mybe in between practice and production. Everything depends on how much freedom is left to students in their production

• Acting out

Acting out situations is one of the most effective procedure to give the students oportunities to speak and practice the FL in the English classroom. At elementary levéis, students need to be supplied with a basic corpus of communicative situations which can be used as models for developing their communicative competence.

1.      Role-plays

In this case, the students also take roles and act out what would happen in each situation. The most sequence for role play includes these stages:

•Setting the context and situation

•Characters and "roles" to perform, act out, in the particular situations

•Presentation of the useful language that students may choose when playing the roles.

•Aim or purpose of the conversationor role-play

•Demonstration (or rehearsal) to put into practice the different options

•"Role-play": performance of roles and use of the language to reach the aira

Role-plays can be classifíed into 3 categories: Controlled role-plays Guided role-plays Free role-plays

2.      Simulations: Through these 'activities, the students reproduce or simulate real life situations . They are given roles and are instructed to act out in a situation (dramatization). The difference with role-play or dramatiations stands in that an evaluative phase is introduced. Teachers can present situations in which there are cultural misunderstandings that cause people to become offended, angry, and confused. Then, thought-provoking information and questions can follow each description or anecdote for in-class discussion. Students can be asked to analyze and determine what went wrong and why, which will force students to think about how people in the target culture act and perceive things, and which will inevitably provide a deeper insight into that culture. This kind of exercise can strike a healthy balance between the necessity of teaching the target culture and validating the students' native culture, which will gradually sharpen students' culture awareness.

3.      Dramatizations: A contextualized role-play where acting, setting, dressing is included

• Dialogues: Dialogues help to learn everyday language and encourage oral production by providing a variety of situational contexts, where the learners can use the communicative functions of language, focusing primarily on the meaning of the interaction (rather than formal language)

1. Functional Dialogues

They aim to provide as real and authentic language as possible. Certain features are specially emphasized:

a)  Contextualization of language

b)  The participant's roles: intentions, purposes, feeling, altitudes

c)  Focus on meaning, not on form. The aim is to express ideas, not to manipúlate structures

d)  Speech acts and communicative functions of language(apologizing, asking information

e) The emphasis is on discourse, colloquial texis, not on isolated sentences.

2. Open dialogues

This technique aims to develop the student's discourse competence focusing on the logical connection between utterances and on the cohesive and coherent elements of the dialogue.

3. Grammar-demonstration dialogues

These texts are constructed to demónstrate grammatical forms and rules in use, they help students to learn the grammatical ítems in context.

4. Cultural dialogues (On April Fool's Day British boys and girls oftenplay tricks...) These dialogues contain socio-cultural aspects of the English-speaking countries
5. Conversation-facilitation dialogues

These texts are the result of colloquial situations that provide the learners with a corpus of usefül expressions for conversation.

• Explanation and description: interpretations of graphs, maps, diagrams:

1.      Mini-speeches on topics of interest

2.      Street directions

3.      Instructions for operating a machine for instance

4.      Describing a process; a plant –lentis- growing for instance.

• Discussions: about a concrete topic in teams most of the time (uniforms at school: fors and againsts
• Using picture cues: for narrating the story behind a picture or a set of pictures
• Games and problem solving:

1.      Guessing games (teams or whole class) class has to guess by asking questions: personalities; hide and seek

2.      Elimination games: my mothe r went to the market (expansion drill)

3.      Arrange jumbled key paragraphs/ pictures/ dialogues...etc

5          ROUTINES AND RULES OF ORAL COMMUNCIATION

The functions of spoken language are interactional and transactional. The primary intention of the former is to maintain social relationships, while that of the latter is to convey information and ideas and maybe to influence in the hearer’s actions. In fact, much of our daily communication remains interactional. Being able to interact in a language is essential. Therefore, language instructors should provide learners with opportunities for meaningful communicative behaviour about relevant topics by using learner-learner interaction as the key to teaching language for communication because "communication derives essentially from interaction" (Rivers 1987:xiii).

Communication in the classroom is em-bedded in meaning-focused activity. This requires teachers to tailor their instruction carefully to the needs of learners and teach them how to listen to others, how to talk with others, and how to negotiate meaning in a shared context. Out of interaction, learners will learn how to communicate verbally and nonverbally as their language store and language skills develop. Consequently, the give-and-take exchanges of messages will enable them to create discourse that conveys their intentions in real-life communication.

5.1       Speech acts

The term speech acts`was coined & developed by the linguistic philosophers Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). They attempted to explain language functions within spoken discourses. The three basic fields of the Speech Act Theory are: the communicative context, the propositional statement and the speaker`s intended meaning. In other words, the importance of the context of situation and culture to interpret a meaning, the locution , perlocution and illocutionary acts of speaking.

There are four types of speech acts according to the speaker`s attitude:

·         Belief: speakers speaks belief that the proposition is true

·         Desire: Speaker expresses a desire concerning the action specified in the proposition

·         Commitment: Speaker expresses and intention to undertake a commitment associted with the action

·         Evaluation: Speaker expresses a personal evaluation towards some past action.

Locution/illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects (Austin)

When we speak we act, we have aims and repercussions. Speech Acts were defined by the philosopher Austin as the complex group of things we typically perform when speaking. He distinguished the simple locutionary act of saying something meaningful, the force of the illocutionary act of employing this language for some purpose, and the further perlocutionary act of having an actual effect on those who hear the utterance.

Thus, for example, in saying (locution) to a friend, "That's an ugly necktie," I may also insult him (illocution) and persuade him to dress differently (perlocution).

Locutionary act

The simple speech act of generating sounds that are linked together by grammatical conventions so as to say something meaningful. Among speakers of English, for example, "It is raining" performs the locutionary act of saying that it is raining, as "Grablistrod zetagflx dapu" would not.

Illocutionary act

The speech act of doing something else—offering advice or taking a vow, for example—in the process of uttering meaningful language. Thus, for example, in saying "I will repay you this money next week," one typically performs the illocutionary act of making a promise.

Perlocutionary act

The speech act of having an effect on those who hear a meaningful utterance. By telling a ghost story late at night, for example, one may accomplish the cruel perlocutionary act of frightening a child.

5.2       Speech Act Theory & Speech Event Theory:

Speech act analysis has proved to be a valuable way to look at language functions and the connection between language function and grammar forms in oral conversation.

Speech event analysis attempts to stablish the components of a functionally described interaction. This provides a bridge between speech acts and the higher levels of the communication system.

Some examples of speech events:

Compliments: (compliment elicitation)....Oh the ring!!! + compliment...such a gorgeous weeding + acknowledgment/denial.... it was, really + bridge ....keep on with the conversation

Complaints: opening (identification/self justification) + complaint act + (possible justification) + an apology + negotiated remedy + bridge.

Speech acts and events because are part of the discourse theory are therefore affected by the co-text and the context (mostly of culture) and therefore speech event may differ from a culture to another... for instance in the way a Spanish speaker do complain and a British do act.

6    Rules of speaking – norms of interaction- are culture specific and largely unconscious.

In interacting with foreigners, native speakers tend to be rather tolerant of errors in pronunctiation or syntax. In contrast, violations of rules of speaking are often interpreted as bad manners since the naive speaker is unlikely to be aware of sociolinguistic relativity. (Wolfson 1983)

Communicative interference is understood as the transference of the rules of speech belonging to a community to what seems to be a corresponding situation in another speech community – for instance turn-taking or voice tone is clearly different in Mediterranean cultures than in north-European ones-

Norms of interaction

1.      Sociolinguistic competence:

·         Use of titles; status is predominant over age

·         Open a conversation; greetings; telephone calls; the weather; etc

·         Introduction of new topics

·         Accepted forms of address, perform,interpret and respond to speech acts; for instance compliments or disapproval;….. thin non very thin person; not thin, is he?

·         Compliments: She looks really nice; she is a really nice person

The cooperative principle: (Richards & Schmidt 1983); conversation is more than merely the exchange of information. When people take part in conversation, they bring to the conversational process shared assumptions and expectations about what conversation is, how conversation develops, and the sort of contribution they are each expected to make. When people engage in conversation they share common principles of conversation that lead them to interpret each other’s utterances as contributing to conversation.

·         There is some shared knowledge

·         Participants assume their roles

·         There are some contributions

The cooperative principle was phormulated by the linguistic philosopher Grice. This principle must be applied to listener & speaker; the listener should assume that the speaker is following the four maxims.

Grice`s four maxims:

·         Quality: the propositional must be true – irony is part of the illocutionary force and therefore do not break the maxim-

·         Quantiy: enough of it to be clear

·         Relevance: content relevant to audience

·         Manner: message and manner should be adequate

TURN TAKING PROCEDURES IN ORAL SPEECH

Turn taking procedures: the distribution of talking among the participants in a conversation is governed by turn-taking norms and conventions:

These norms differ according to the type of speech event, ex. Raising a hand, etc

They must be generally negotiated in conversation; ex:  openings: guess what... sorry to trouble you.... lovely day....got a match?........but never how much do you earn?

Ongoing checks: by the speaker: do you see?; can you guess what he said?, are you with me?; do I make myself clear?, let me put it in another way, what I’m trying to say is...

By the listener: have I got you right?, I don´t get you...you mean....

Changing topic: that reminds me... incidentally...., by the way... makes you think , doesn´t it?

Turnover signals: trqansitional-relevant place: slowing the tempo, vowel enlongation, falling intonation...... interjections such as...”e”, “and”, but”, “so”...

Ending: sorry, but I have to go now...nice talking to you....

Repairs: the exchange of meaning also involves monitoring to ensure that intended meassages have been communicated and understood.

This involves correction of unsuccessful attempts where necessary: self repairs; listener repairs; echoing, non-verbal language.

Back-channels signals: verbal & non-verbal signals –yes...yes...really...ok... (and) receiver body language (are they understanding?)

7    Oral Communication strategies

1. Avoidance: it maybe Topic avoidance – avoiding reference to an object for which learners does not have necessary vocabulary- or Message abandonment – the learner begins to refer to an object but he/she gives up because it is too difficult-

2. Paraphrase: 3 types: Approximation; Word coinage and Circumlocution. An example of approximation it is the use of the word “ big fish” to describe a whale; on the other hand the learner may make up a new word “ballenation” –word coignage – or finally may describe the characteristics of the object instead of using the appropriate Target language.

3. Conscious transfer: Literal translation – the learner translates word by word from his native language. Many examples are found with movie titles:  – lo que el viento se llevo: what the wind took; instead of Gone with the wind.

4. Language switch or borrowing: the learner inserts words from another language –balon for balloon.

5. Appeal for assistance: the learners consults

8    Conclusions

In conclusion, listening + speaking are ones of the central elements of communication. In EFL teaching, it is an aspect that needs special attention and instruction. In order to provide effective instruction, it is necessary for teachers of EFL to carefully examine the factors, conditions, and components that underlie listening and speaking effectiveness. Effective instruction derived from the careful analysis of this area, together with sufficient language input and speech-promotion activities, will gradually help learners speak English fluently and appropriately.

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