Make relevant classroom language to social settings

Plan:

• 1.    Critical thinking activities: Brainstorming/ Discussion/ Story narrating through the pictures/ Story forming/ Information gap/ Fish bowl

• 2.    Physical training activities: Network/ Role-play/ Talk shows

• 3.    Communication support activities: Two stars and a wish/ Jigsaw activities/ Reporting/ Interviews/ Opinion.

The most important point is that, activities should help learners to improve their oral and written communications. The point is that, the language used in the classroom during the communications should be relevant to the language of real social settings. Students must be able to use the target language properly when they are out of the classroom. In order to make easier and more interesting to learn English language a lot of games and are created.

The following activities help to promote language learners’ speaking and communication skills:

Brainstorming encourages learners to produce the idea of solving practical and scientific problems individually or in groups. The attendants try to find out solutions for more complicated problems without being criticized for their ideas.

Learners discuss the answers and select more intensive and effective ideas. Brainstorming performs all the tasks. However, its basic task is to improve students’ learning process, to motivate them to realize and solve the problem individually and to enhance their speech manner and expressing the ideas among others.

Discussion is one of the effective ways of teaching language. It is an active method of sharing opinions on a specific problem individually and freely.

There are several objectives of using it:

• •    To provide learners with new information;

• •    To encourage students to differentiate evidence and conclusions based on evidence;

• •    To motivate learners to exchange opinions with others;

• •    To help learners to confide and defend their personal opinions;

• •    To involve students to obtain the meaning of the questions and think them over;

• •    To foster students’ critical thinking and quick decision-making.

The teacher sets the purpose and organization of the discussion. For instance, students can be involved in advantages or disadvantages discussions. For this type of discussions, teacher forms groups that contain 5 or 6 students and provide controversial sentences such as, “Technology makes our life easier vs. Technology is the cause of pollutions”. Then, groups start working on their topic in given time and present their opinions to the whole class. It is important to divide speaking equally among members of the group.

Story narrating through the pictures is a quite enjoyable and free-speaking activity. For this activity, students are asked to read a story, a tale or they may create their own story and to draw several sequential pictures that describe the story, which they have read. When students come to the class, they tell the story relating with pictures to the class. This activity can be used as an individual or small group work. At the end, the rest of the students can ask questions about the pictures or story.

This activity helps language learners:

• •    To improve public speaking skills;

• •    To foster creativeness and imagination;

• •    To advance critical thinking.

Information gap is one more effective strategy to improve communication skills. The point is that, everybody has the opportunity to talk extensively in the target language. For this activity, students are involved to work in pairs. One student will have the information that other partner does not have. The partners will share what they have gained from the information, which they learned in a limited time. Each partner plays an important role, because the task cannot be completed if the partners do not provide the information the others need.

Fish bowl is one of the modern and productive ways of involving language learners to communicate. Educator needs to set double – inner and outer circles in the middle of the class. In the inner circle, there are five chairs. They are occupied by students whose views, preferably controversial, on the topic are known beforehand. Three of the students in the inner circle start the discussion. They may be joined by one or two students presenting yet another view. Students form outer circle may also replace speakers in the inner circle by tapping them on the shoulders if they feel they can present the case better. This activity provides an opportunity to improve learners’ communication, problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

Network is a strategy to develop strong language and communication skills. In this activity, students are supposed to be working in groups with no more than 8 students each. Each group receives a ball of string. Whoever is speaking on the topic chosen holds the ball of string. When the speaker has finished he/she gives the ball of string to the next speaker, but holds on the string. In this way, a web of string develops showing who talked the most and who talked the least.

Role-play is a teaching strategy that offers several advantages for both student and teacher. It is used in a variety of settings. In this activity, students are encouraged to act out roles of people in different spheres of society. The principle behind role-playing is that the student assumes a particular personality of a different person, such as a historical character, famous person. This helps learners in developing confidence and refining the skills. According to Jones (1982), students “must accept the duties and responsibilities of their roles and functions, and do the best they can in the situation in which they find themselves”.

Talk shows are conducted based on the different topics announced by the teacher. The role of language teacher is a facilitator who guides learners to organize talk shows. Class can be involved to work in small groups and with the whole class. Students, themselves choose their roles e.g. moderator, guests, scientists, psychologists and etc. Teacher gives a limited time for preparation and provides criteria to evaluate learners. Students prepare talk shows familiar real ones on TV. Preparation procedure and ready talk show take a place using the only target language.

Two stars and a wish is peer assessment of language learners. This is particularly useful for the writing process, verbal and written communication skills. Students are paired and asked to read each other’s written work. The reader must identify two things the author did well (stars) and one specific suggestion for improvement (wish). Before implementing this strategy, students must be trained on the process of providing appropriate feedback to their peers. The teacher can use this strategy as a formative assessment by circulating around the classroom and listening to the conversations between partners.

Jack C. Richards in the book “Communicative Language Teaching Today” (2006) provides the following examples of jigsaw activities:

o The teacher plays a recording in which three people with different points of view discuss their opinions on a topic of interest. The teacher prepares three different listening tasks, one focusing on each of the three speaker’s points of view. Students are divided into three groups and each group listens and takes notes on one of the three speaker’s opinions. Students are then rearranged into groups containing a student from groups A, B, and C. They now role-play the discussion using the information they obtained.

o The teacher takes a narrative and divides it into twenty sections (or as many sections as there are students in the class). Each student gets one section of the story. Students must then move around the class, and by listening to each section read aloud, decide where in the story their section belongs. Eventually, the students have to put the entire story together in the correct sequence.

Reporting is widely used activity in foreign language teaching. It serves many purposes such as collecting information or presenting attitude to a problem. Students are asked to read a newspaper, magazine or watch news on TV before coming to the class. In class, each student reports to the rest of the class what they find as the most interesting news. Moreover, they can present a report about whatever they have experienced anything worth in their daily life. This is the most productive way of motivating students to speak and communicate in the target language. Additionally, they will enrich their vocabulary e.g. the words, phrases, reporting verbs, expression used in reporting.

Opinion focuses on encouraging students to communicate in the target language. It is suggested by the ESL educators as a way of conducting discussions. It provides each student with the opportunity to share their opinions and to express feelings about the problem they are discussing. For this activity, the whole group is divided into two equal groups. As many chairs as there are students are arranged in a double circle, with the chairs in the outer circle facing inwards and those in the inner circle facing outwards. Thus, each member of the circle sits facing a student in the outer circle. After a few minutes of discussion, all the students in the outer circle move one chair and have a new partner to continue with.

Interviews. Students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides criteria to students so that they know what type of questions they can ask or what path to follow, but language learners should prepare their interview questions. Conducting interviews with people gives students a chance to practice their speaking ability not only in class but also outside and helps them becoming socialized. After interviews, each student can present their study to the rest of the class. Moreover, students can play the roles of any characters from the real life and interview each other. After interviewing they introduce their partner (hero) to the class.

To sum up, the goal of any kind of teaching second language (L2) is to motivate learners to communicate in the target language. There is variety of ways to help learners to improve their communication skills. The presented activities set the main objective as teaching how to communicate, integrating other language skills as well. However, the only person who can define which of the strategies is the most appropriate for language learner is teacher. In other words, the teacher is only person who knows what to employ and how to employ. Concluding all the presented opinions, we would like to mention that in order to have effective result, educator needs to choose perfect strategies considering all the factors of the learning and teaching process.

Activity

Approach

Assessment

work mainly, done by language learners, that involves direct experience by the student rather than text book study a set of principles about teaching including views on method, techniques, activities is the process of evaluating achievements

	of learners
Attitude	– the specific ability of teacher/learner for teaching/learning a second language
Authentic Language	– is a real and natural language used by native speakers in real life contexts
Authentic materials	– are the materials of language teaching, that were originally intended for nativespeakers, e.g. newspaper texts, TV, radio or internet broadcasts
Body Language	– the gestures used by individuals in communicating with others
Classroom observation	– is the practice of sitting in another teacher’s class to observe
CLT	– Communicative language teaching
Communication	– is the process of sending and receiving messages.    Verbal    and    written communication types are distinguished
Communicative activities	– activities     aimed    at    improving communication skills
Communicative approach	– is   the   theory   that   language   is
(CLT)	communication and it emphasizes developing language proficiency through interactions in meaningful contexts
Communicative	– refers to a learner’s ability to understand
Competence	and use language effectively to communicate successfully in social settings

Communication skills	– the ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently
Content-based	– is an approach in language teaching based
teaching/learning	on content/information that students will require
Critical thinking	– is evaluating claims, assumptions, and implications without simply accepting them as facts
Educator	– Language teacher
EFL	– English as a foreign language
ELT	– English language teaching
ESL	– English as a second language
ESOL	– English for speakers of other languages
Facilitator	– is the term used for language teacher in CLT
Formative assessment	– is a type of assessment completes during the course, learners can improve, it always includes feedback
Grammatical Competence	– is the ability to recognize and produce the distinctive grammatical structures of a language
Group formation	– is a process of setting/organizing learners into groups
Group work	– is requiring students to work together in learning procedure
Handout	– a sheet provided to each student by the teacher, it contains information, a task to

	be completed for an assignment
Independent learning	– is a way of learning completed by an individual without the assistance of teacher
Integrated Skills	– are defined as the combination of two or more skills within a communicative task
Interactive	– are methods that involve learners to
methods/activities	communicate and interact with others to receiving feedback after completion of a task
L1	– First language, native language
L2	– Second language
Language educator / instructor / teacher	– Foreign language teacher
Language learner	– is a person who learns foreign language
Learning styles	– the different preferences of learners in the process of learning foreign language
Linguistic Competence	– refers to the ability to use the language code or system itself and all its component parts