On developing spontaneous speaking skills of school students

The article deals with some examples of teaching practices with focus on consistent step-by-step developing spontaneous speaking skills in French as a second language. The characteristics of unprepared speech relevant to descriptive monologue based on visual and verbal support are given. It is this type of monologue that is the object of control in the test materials of the All-Russian tests and the State Final Assessment. The author analyzes the results of these diagnostic procedures over the past three years and determines students’ difficulties in speaking. The author proposes a two-step work on the development of skills of unprepared oral speech. Visual aids (pictures, photos) are considered as effective supports to train automated speaking skills at A1/A2 levels. The two-step work assumes a horizontal and vertical working through the speech material. Horizontal elaboration implies targeted work on relatively isolated speech patterns in the widest possible variety of visual contexts. At the level of one speech pattern the lexical accuracy of description and lexical and grammatical correctness are achieved; at the level of two or three speech patterns the lexical and grammatical coherence of the text is provided. Vertical elaboration implies combining speech patterns worked out at the previous stage into a text, giving it compositional and structural completeness. At first, students reproduce the material they have already worked on using a familiar visual support; then the support changes, and the developed skills are tested in relatively new communicative conditions, when students' oral speech acquires all the main characteristics of unpreparedness.