Teaching the Spoken Language

Abstract

Those familiar with the work of Gillian Brown and George Yule on Discourse Analysis might be expecting a book which deals with the applications of such analysis to teaching English. Insofar as this is true, the title of the book is misleading : discourse analysis is an ambiguous term which has been used to refer to (i) conversational analysis, or (ii) the process of producing language as opposed to 'text', the product (cf Robinson, 1980). Brown and Yule opt for the latter definition i.e. p. 57 &dquo;discourse is text interpreted in context&dquo;. Thus, the arguments in this book could well hold for written language, especially those on interpretation and assessment, despite the title. However; the book concentrates on speaking and listening i.e. conversation, so the title of the book is misleading -it is not a textbook or manual on speaking and listening skills, but rather an argument for certain types of speaking and listening activities to promote fluency and understanding. As such, the four chapters are like four separate articles on the following topics:1) Spoken vs written languagea summary.2) How to teach the use of long transactional turns.3) How to grade listening tasks. 4) How to assess speech and listening ability by using a measure of required information.The sub-titles are also misleading and often do not reflect the content of the sections. The book is given the appearance of being more comprehensive than it is.However, in the areas that it does tackle, it does admirably. It would more profitably have been titled:

Teaching learners to appropriately mitigate requests

“…More specifically, attention needs to be drawn to those interactional and contextual factors illustrated in Brown and Yule's (1983) interactional. The former refers to that kind of interaction in which the request is merely made to transmit information and therefore does not need to be softened (for example, a police officer's direct order to a subordinate during a car accident).…”

Transforming Passive Listeners into Active Speakers: A Study with Portuguese Undergraduates in ‘English for the Social Sciences’

“…In the past, studies have dealt with spoken performance in the EFL classroom as it is a complex issue for both students and teachers (Brown & Yule, 1983). Teachers recognize the usefulness of giving language learners as many opportunities to speak as possible (Harmer, 2001;Nunan, 1989;Ur, 1991).…”

“…Interaction in a foreign language demands performance of short and long turns (Brown & Yule, 1983), managing interactions and topic changes, beginning and ending conversations, knowing when and how to take the floor, and negotiation of meaning (Nunan, 1989). Teachers promote speaking activities in the classroom to encourage students to talk and to promote speaking that may resemble real-life communication, as proximate as possible to genuine communication (Nunan, 1988:78).…”

“…Bearing in mind that it is important for teachers to call learners' attention to the purpose of the activity, its potential interest and practical value (Dornyei, 1994), the first step of this research was to have the 20 students attend two awareness-raising lessons set up by the teacher. Lesson One intended to clarify the aims of whole-class discussions with an emphasis on the relevance of fluency (Dornyei, 1994;Brown & Yule, 1983). Lesson Two was designed to raise learners' awareness to the characteristics of real international English; the communicative skills needed for real-life international communication, the more relevant communicative skills to acquire today; and the need to accommodate to different speakers, contexts and purposes, as referred by recent research on EIL (Dewey, 2007;House, 2003;Jenkins, 2003Jenkins, , 2006aJenkins, , 2006bSeidlhofer, 2001, 2002, Seidlhofer & Jenkins, 2003Ur, 2009).…”

“…Successful speaking activities are those where learners talk a lot, participation is even, motivation is high and language is of an acceptable level (Ur, 1991:120). A continuing complex matter for EFL practitioners is that these learning objectives may be prevented if students experience speaking anxiety, a general broad term which may include: target or foreign language anxiety, classroom anxiety (Brown &Yule, 1983: Brown, 2000, state anxiety, trait anxiety, evaluation anxiety, task anxiety.…”