2)speaking

Zahra Fayaz 



speaking 



'''Towards acquiring communicative competence through speaking '''

'''

'''

'''1. Introduction '''

Speaking in a second language (L2) has been considered the most challenging of the four skills given the fact that it involves a complex process of constructing meaning (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). This process requires speakers to make decisions about why, how and when to communicate depending on the cultural and social context in which the speaking act occurs (Burns and Seidlhofer 2002). Additionally, it involves a dynamic interrelation between speakers and hearers. speaking is an interactive, social and contextualized communicative event. Therefore, the key role of the speaking skill in developing learners’ communicative competence has also become evident, since this skill requires learners to be in possession of knowledge about how to produce not only linguistically correct but also pragmatically appropriate utterances.

<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1level1lfo1">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">2. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Approaches to learning and teaching speaking '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">This skill has played within the three approaches to language learning described by Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume), namely those of environmentalist,, innatist and interactionist , is presented.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">2.1. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Speaking within an environmentalist approach

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Up to the end of the 1960s, the field of language learning was influenced by environmentalist ideas that paid attention to the learning process as being conditioned by the external environment rather than by human internal mental processes. Within such an approach, the primacy of speaking was obvious since it was assumed that language was primarily an oral phenomenon. Thus, learning to speak a language, in a similar way to any other type of learning, followed a stimulus-response-reinforcement pattern which involved constant practice and the formation of good habits (Burns and Joyce 1997). In this pattern, speakers were first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external stimulus and their response consisted of imitating and repeating such input. If this was done correctly, they received a positive reinforcement by other language users within their same environment. it was assumed that speaking a language involved just repeating, imitating and memorizing the input that speakers were exposed to. These assumptions deriving from the environmentalist view of learning to speak gave rise to the Audiolingual teaching approach '''<span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">. '''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">This instructional method emphasized the importance of starting with the teaching of oral skills, rather than the written ones. learners were engaged in a series of activities which focused on repeating grammatical structures and patterns through intense aural-oral practice. This type of oral activities was simply a way of teaching pronunciation skills and grammatical accuracy (Bygate 2002). In fact, speaking was mainly associated with the development of good pronunciation. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Consequently, although it can be assumed that this approach to learning and teaching speaking stressed the development of oral skills, speaking was merely providing language input and facilitating memorization rather than as a discourse skill in its own right (Bygate 2001).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">2.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Speaking within an innatist approach

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">By the late 1960s, the previous view of learning to speak as a mechanical process consisting in the oral repetition of grammatical structures was challenged by Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) theory of language development. His assumption that children are born with an innate potential for language acquisition was the basis for the innatist approach to language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). the mental and cognitive processes involved in generating language began to gain importance. the mental and cognitive processes involved in generating language began to gain importance. Within such an approach, it was claimed that regardless of the environment where speakers were to produce language, they had the internal faculty, or competence in Chomsky’s (1965) terms, to create and understand an infinite amount of discourse (Hughes 2002). speakers had internalized a system of rules which could be transformed into new structures by applying a series of cognitive strategies. speakers’ role changed from merely receiving input and repeating it, as was the view in the environmentalist approach, to actively thinking how to produce language. learners took on a more important role in that they were provided with opportunities to use the language more creatively and innovatively after having been taught the necessary grammatical rules. Speaking was still considered to be an abstract process occurring in isolation. this innatist view did not take into account relevant aspects of language use in communication, such as the relationship between language and meaning (i.e., the functions of language).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">2.3. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Speaking within an interactionist approach

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">During the late 1970s and the 1980s, important shifts in the field of language learning took place under the influence of interactionist ideas that emphasized the role of the linguistic environment in interaction with the innate capacity for language development (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). The changes under this approach pay attention to the functions that producing spoken language fulfills, as well as accounting for the social and contextual factors that intervene in such speech production act. Levelt (1989) proposed a model of speech production whose basic assumption concerned the fact that messages were “planned.” Thus, in order to be able to produce oral language, speakers had to construct a plan on the basis of four major processes: 1) conceptualization, which involves the selection of the message content on the basis of the

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">situational context and the particular purpose to be achieved; 2) formulation, which implies accessing, sequencing and choosing words and phrases to express the intended message appropriately; 3) articulation, which concerns the motor control of the articulatory organs to execute the planned message; and 4) monitoring, which allows speakers to actively identify and correct mistakes if necessary. Considering what these planning processes involved, speaking was regarded as a complex activity that required speakers to possess a capacity to integrate different interpersonal and psychomotor aspects during the oral production event (Bygate 1998). The importance of the model developed by Levelt (1989) with the identification of the underlying processes involved in producing oral discourse was also consistent with both functional (Halliday 1973, 1975, 1985) and pragmatic (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch, 1980; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983) views of language. According to Halliday, it could be theorized that, like children who learned to talk because language served a function for them, speakers learned to use language in order to fulfill a number of functions given a particular cultural and social context. Therefore, speaking was seen as a contextualized process in which both the context of culture and the context of situation (Malinowski 1935) influenced the nature of the language to be used. In relation to the former type of context, the notion of genre was developed in order to describe the ways in which spoken language was used to achieve social purposes within a culture (Burns, Joyce, and Gollin 1996). Thus, genre was defined as “a purposeful, socially-constructed, communicative event” (Nunan 1991: 43) which resulted in oral texts with different communicative functions (i.e., a political speech, a church sermon, a casual conversation, etc.). the notion of register was elaborated within the broader cultural context, speakers also varied their language depending on the social situation in which they were interacting. their choice of a particular register was based on the interaction of three contextual variables: 1) the field, which concerns the topic of communication; 2) the tenor, which refers to the relationship of the participants; and 3) the mode, which involves the channel of communication the pragmatic field of research was also concerned with how such meanings were created in context (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983). More specifically, pragmatics was defined by Crystal (1985: 240) as:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">pragmatics also focused on the importance of interaction. In fact, this aspect played a very important role when dealing with pragmatics, since it was claimed that the process of communication did not only focus on the speakers’ intentions, but also on the effects those intentions had on the hearers. pragmatics examined how speakers were able to perform actions by producing speech acts (e.g., requesting, apologizing, complaining, refusing) and how these speech acts should be performed in an appropriate fashion. the focus of attention in pragmatics concerned speakers’ appropriate use of such utterances within various situational contexts that affected their level of appropriacy. In this respect, the development of the politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) was of great relevance, since it described the three sociopragmatic factors which qualified a linguistic form as being appropriate. These factors involved: 1) social distance, which refers to the degree of familiarity that exists between the speaker and hearer; 2) power, which refers to the relative status of a speaker with respect to the hearer; and 3) degree of imposition, which refers to the type of imposition the speaker is forcing on the hearer. Thus, it was assumed that when one of these factors increased, speakers were expected to be more polite so that they did not threaten hearers’ face (i.e., a person’s feeling of self-worth or self-image). the particular teaching method that was developed was the genre approach. This consisted in teaching learners “how texts within certain cultures have evolved particular discourse structures to fulfil particular social functions” (Burns and Joyce 1997: 48). As a result of the influence exerted by the discipline of cognitive psychology as well as the functional and pragmatic views of language, speaking was viewed as an interactive, social and contextualized communicative event.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1level1lfo1">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Teaching speaking within a communicative competence framework '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">A strong background influence is associated with the work developed by Hymes (1971, 1972), who was the first to argue that Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between competence and performance did not pay attention to aspects of language in use and related issues of appropriacy of an utterance to a particular situation Thus, he proposed the term communicative competence to account for those rules of language use in social context as well as the norms of appropriacy. communicative competence have been developed since the 1980s by specifying which components should integrate a communicative competence construct (Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Savignon 1983; Bachman 1987, 1990; Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995; Alcón 2000; Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). In such a construct, it can be assumed that the role of speaking is of paramount importance to facilitate the acquisition of communicative competence.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.1. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Discourse competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Discourse competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">involves speakers’ ability to use a variety of discourse features to achieve a unified spoken text given a particular purpose and the situational context where it is produced. Such discourse features refer to knowledge of discourse markers (e.g., well, oh, I see, okay), the management of various conversational rules (e.g., turn-taking mechanisms, how to open and close a conversation), cohesion and coherence, as well as formal schemata (e.g., knowledge of how different discourse types, or genres, are organized). all these features during the process of producing a cohesive and coherent spoken text at the discourse level requires a highly active role on the part of speakers. They have to be concerned with the form (i.e., how to produce linguistically correct utterances) and with the appropriacy (i.e., how to make pragmatically appropriate utterances given particular sociocultural norms). an activation of speakers’ knowledge from the other components (that is, linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic) is necessary to develop an overall communicative ability when producing a piece of spoken discourse. Each of these components is described in turn below.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Linguistic competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Linguistic competence consists phonology, grammar and vocabulary, that allow speakers to produce linguistically acceptable utterances (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Regarding phonological aspects, speakers need to possess knowledge of suprasegmental, or prosodic, features of the language such as rhythm, stress and intonation. These aspects shape speakers’ pronunciation, which refers to the ability to employ speech sounds for communication (Burns and Seidlhofer 2002) and, according to Woodwin (2001: 117), is “the language feature that most readily identifies speakers as non-native.” speakers’ linguistic competence also entails knowledge of the grammatical system. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Thus, speakers need to know aspects of morphology and syntax that will allow them to form questions, produce basic utterances in the language and organize them in an acceptable word order these three linguistic aspects (i.e., pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary) is, therefore, essential for the successful production of a piece of spoken discourse since it allows speakers to build grammatically well-formed utterances in an accurate and unhesitating way (Scarcella and Oxford 1992).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.3. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Pragmatic competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Pragmatic competence involves speakers’ knowledge of the function implied in the utterance they intend to produce as well as the contextual factors that affect the appropriacy of such an utterance. Thus, speakers need to master two types of pragmatic knowledge: one dealing with pragmalinguistics and the other focusing on sociopragmatic aspects (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). depending on the meaning speakers want to express, they can choose a particular form from among the wide range of linguistic realizations they may have available. On the other hand, sociopragmatics deals with speakers’ appropriate use of those linguistic forms according to the context where the particular utterance is produced, the specific roles the participants play within that contextual situation and the politeness variables of social distance, power and degree of imposition. These politeness factors and the way speakers may use them to save face play a paramount role in successful communication (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). it has been claimed that speakers use more than one register on a regular basis (e.g., an intimate and casual register in familiar contexts, a formal register in situations involving strangers or higher-status participants, etc.) (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). Burns (this volume) pays attention to the importance of dealing with all these pragmatic aspects, the notion of register and also the importance of spoken genres when elaborating her text-based syllabus approach to the teaching of speaking.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.4. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Intercultural competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to produce an appropriate spoken text within a particular sociocultural context. Thus, it involves knowledge of both cultural and non-verbal communication factors on the part of the speaker. Regarding the cultural factors, speakers need to be aware of the rules of behavior that exist in a particular community in order to avoid possible miscommunication. For instance, the length of pauses within a normal conversation may be very short in one culture, thus making the speakers quickly look for something to say, whereas in another culture pauses may be desired, and even considered polite, given the fact that they allow time for reflection and prevent speakers from overlapping with other participants in conversation (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l1level2lfo1"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.5. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Strategic competence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">This competence implies speakers’ knowledge of both learning and communication strategies. On the one hand, speakers need to possess learning strategies in order to successfully construct a given piece of spoken discourse. Bygate (this volume) points out the relevance of repetition as a strategy that may allow speakers to contribute to their oral development. Repetition is also highlighted by Dalton-Puffer (this volume), who, in addition, pays attention to the importance of creating purpose as a strategy for encouraging speaking. speakers’ knowledge and ability to use communication strategies is of the utmost importance in order to avoid possible breakdowns in communication. In short speakers need to become competent in using strategies in order to overcome limitations due to a lack of competence in any of the other components integrating the proposed communicative competence framework.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoNormal">'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Areas of research that influence L2 speaking instruction '

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">1. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Introduction '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">This article considers how four areas of research into oral discourse can be used to inform the teaching of second language (L2) speaking. The areas of research that I will be drawing on are the following:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">1. the features of oral discourse

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">2. the sociolinguistic dimensions of talk

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">3. the psycholinguistics of speech processing and language development

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">4. the impact of pedagogical tasks and their implementation on oral language development.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The question the paper poses then is this: in the light of these four areas of research, is there a place for discursive repetition within a communicative approach to the teaching of oral skill? I will argue that research suggests that repetition is indeed a natural element of nonpedagogic oral discourse; that it is significant in the psycholinguistics of speech processing and language development; that it is an important element in the sociolinguistic dimensions of talk; and that its value is supported by research in the use of pedagogical tasks.

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<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">2. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">A problem in learning language through oral communication '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">speaking in an L2 has a lot in common with reading and writing. However although the similarities are clear, speaking can also cause some difficulties that are a little distinct from those experienced when reading and writing. speech processing influences its effectiveness as a context for language learning, and that teaching and materials production need to take this into account, if classroom talk is to be not only motivating but also supportive of learning. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">The main difficulty with speech is the problem of “impermanence.” In contrast, written language can be re-read several times the writer can plan the whole, organize the topics and their structure, and has time to sort out difficulties of expression. In contrast, speech is transitory and impermanent, so talk has to be produced bit by bit, with new meanings added in the light of meanings communicated so far, with each utterance being expressed while the listener waits. Working with written text allows less time to make sure of the meaning and expression of each bit of talk, and no time at all to check over the whole interaction. The result is that whereas reading and writing are rather like navigating from a plan or a map (if necessary with the support of dictionary resources), speaking and listening involve navigating without a map, and relying only with the help of one’s interlocutors. In written text one can go back over written texts again and again, take notes from them, and use them as a basis for checking new material in grammar and dictionaries. In contrast, as soon as oral interaction is completed, most if not all of it is gone from the memory. Speakers’ language processing is inevitably situated within their general background knowledge, their knowledge of the interlocutors and of the situation, and directed towards their immediate goals, in terms of the meanings they want to construct. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Language then has to be selected to carry their intended meanings. This means speakers have to match available language to meaning, and where they are unable to do this, they have to adjust their meaning to the language they have available (see Faerch and Kasper 1983). All this implies that new language knowledge has to be “integrated” into learners’ own purposes, organizing it and their abilities to use it so that it is accessible for their needs. This becomes a central focus for any teaching of language use: formal knowledge and the ability to use it needs to be incorporated into learners’ needs, and the only way to do this is through a range of relevant activities. Given this perspective, there is however a new problem: seeing speech as goal driven means that it is fundamentally situated within particular contexts, and managed and produced for particular purposes. The problem this creates is that it is not clear how these conditions can be managed so as to promote learning. every speaking activity needs to be unique and newly creative, and this in turn means that speaking experiences are likely to be essentially “one-off.” If speaking experiences are “one-off,” the teacher is likely to have problems getting learners to build and improve on their efforts. Furthermore, we have also noted above that speech is in any case highly transitory when compared with writing. As a result, any attempt by learners or teachers to monitor performance with the aim of improving it is at best bound to be very limited.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Features of oral discourse '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">So far we have seen that language learning involves the integration of a complex skill into learners’ own purposes, and that in written language the absence of time pressure, the permanence of language, and the apparent uniqueness of different speech situations together make it seem far easier to process and learn from written than from spoken discourse. Repetition does however occur in spoken discourse. Indeed, the more we consider the matter, the more types of repetition there seem to be. This occurs in the two main dimensions of spoken discourse: the linguistic features at utterance level, and the discourse features. At discourse level, whole stretches of talk are often repeated, for perfectly good functional reasons. Greetings and small talk are commonly reused. Personal introductions are repeated again and again, to different people of course, but by definition, introductions do not often change. Stories, jokes, and experiences are typically told and re-told, usually to different audiences, but sometimes to the same audience: children love to hear the same story told again and again. Similarly at utterance level, speech events often depend upon repeated words and phrases. Word games are one example (Cook 2000). Bruner (1983) noted that very young children from the ages of 8 to 20 months commonly experience again and again very similarly structured speech events, in which very similar lexical items, verb forms and turns of phrase recur again and again. This is partly because young children’s schedules are typically structured around key daily events – meal times, getting dressed, going out, bath time, bed time, play time and story time. An important characteristic of these events is that each is structured every day in a very similar if not identical way. Playtime tends to be structured through familiar games, or variants of them. All this means that the speech acts and the relevant vocabulary and verb structures will also be very similar, from day to day. In other words, the recurrence of speech events brings with it the repetition of words and phrases. At infants and primary school, teachers and pupils continue to work with recurring speech events: the daily story. Children’s playground games – football, basketball, skipping, hopscotch, tag, little ponies: all depend on repeated rhymes, rules and refrains, and give rise to repeated commentaries day after day. Repetition is common in adult life. Native speakers have to re-learn the wording, within the request forms. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">The fact of recurrence is reflected in much of the analysis of spoken discourse. The concept of discourse structure itself implies that there are features that recur in different stories, such as introductions, background information and initial situation, some complicating problem, causes and effects, solutions or outcomes, and evaluations (or conclusions) (Labov and Waletzsky 1967; Cameron 2001). Descriptions often make use of copular, stative and habitual verbs, adjectives, place adverbs, and relationships between things or people. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Other aspects of discourse structures hint at repetition These are pairs of utterances in which the first part of the pair expects a response from another speaker, as in exchanges such as the following: A: “Hi how are things?” B: “Fine, thanks –and you?”; A: “Nice to see you” B: “Same here”; A: “Have a nice day” B: “And you”; A: “See you next week” B: “OK, bye for now.” Studies in pragmatics suggest that when speech acts are at all delicate they are often structured through sequences of turns.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">there are connections between context and utterance.In certain contexts, special sequences of utterances tend to occur. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Telephone conversations for instance start and end through a relatively small number of options for opening and closing utterances. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Furthermore, to close a telephone conversation, we typically perform “pre-closing” moves, indicating that we are preparing to finish the conversation, and giving the other person the opportunity to indicate whether they have anything further to add. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Some of the language will of course vary from occasion to occasion, but significant elements will recur. Negotiation for meaning exchanges are further ways in which speakers typically re-use sequences of utterances in different contexts. Negotiation for meaning exchanges are sequences of utterances through which speakers check that they or others have correctly understood, or ask for clarification, or request help with wording.

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<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Sociolinguistic dimensions of talk '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Repetition can be seen as performing significant sociolinguistic functions. At sociolinguistic level, it has also been argued for some time that language can be used to mark group membership and interpersonal involvement or distance, whether at lexical level (Tarone 1988; Preston 1989; Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991), at lexico-grammatical and phonological levels (Rampton 1995), or at genre level (Swales 1990, who argues that genres enable people to participate in target discourse communities). Linguistic markers could be used to represent complex but familiar information in a way which was rapid for members of the group to process whether as speakers or listeners. The re-use and exploitation of familiar discourse structures is also likely to play an important role in facilitating the joint conduct of discursive acts between interactants. Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1990) found that students unfamiliar with North American one-on-one advisory sessions had difficulty selecting appropriate discourse moves within the tutorial. Knowing the “script” and its predictable elements helps all participants in managing new interactions. Indeed van Lier (1996) suggests that routine is a constituent of interaction in general and of classrooms in particular which has a key role in enabling innovation. In other words, the structuring of discourse is built up of repetitions at all levels, which help both to reflect and to promote shared understanding and a degree of solidarity. Such repetition is not verbatim, but rather enables constructive adjustments and adaptations according to the speakers’ local needs.

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<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">5. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">The psycholinguistics of speech processing and language development '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Repetition then occurs a lot in talk, and for good reason. The question is how repetition relates to learning. This leads us to consider aspects of the psycholinguistics of speech processing, and how this can lead to change in the learner’s language store. Perhaps partly because of the legacy of certain versions of behaviourism in language teaching, we tend to think of the term “repetition” as referring to “verbatim” repetition, that is, word-for-word repetition. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">we can repeat a lot, both in terms of content and form, without using verbatim repetition. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Bruner’s (1983) study, illustrates the types of repetition that children encounter as they learn to talk in their first language (L1). As in other contexts, people interacting with young children typically structure their talk around the phases of the activity they are involved in. One of Bruner’s examples is a peek-a-boo game, played with a doll. Bruner proposes that this particular game has four phases: Introduction of the doll; Hiding of the doll; Searching for the doll; and Re-uniting with the doll. It is clear from Bruner’s data that the child understands the game long before perceiving much if any of the language. Repeating the game helps the child to remember the game and to notice the language. Understanding the game then helps the child to understand and memorize bits of the language. In other words, the repetition of the game is seen as providing a first support for the child to become familiar with the language. Speakers might sometimes say, “Who’s this? Who’s this? It’s Bobby, isn’t it?” Other times they might say, “Hello, here’s Bobby. Say hello to Bobby. It’s Bobby isn’t it?” On other occasions there could be yet other phrases, or different combinations of these. The stability of the content then enables the speakers to vary the wording, without compromising the child’s involvement. That is, although there is repetition, it is not verbatim – it is varied. The variation probably occurs partly in order to sustain both adult’s and child’s participation As the participants become more conversant with the content and with the language, more and more variations can be brought in, introducing more and more language. In this sense, then, repetition can be thought of as “constructive.”  Levelt, in various models of L1 oral interaction (his 1989 version works well for our purposes), proposes that in order to communicate speakers and listeners have to process language simultaneously in three main phases. First, they need to work on the conceptualisation of messages, in which meanings are planned and tracked; second, they operate a formulation phase, in which words are selected, sequenced, and inflected, or recognized; and thirdly, they work at articulatory production or acoustic perception.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">1. Conceptualisation

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Become familiar with the content of the talk

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Organize the content of the talk for speech

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Explore additional content to add

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">2. Formulation

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Identify and recall relevant vocabulary and grammar for

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">managing the content of the talk and the interpersonal

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">functions (such as referential markers, aspect, tense and

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">modality)

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Try out alternative vocabulary and grammatical resources

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Monitor the grammatical features required by the vocabulary

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">and syntax

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Develop cohesion

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">3'''. Output '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Attend to speech production

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">- Attend to interlocutors’ understanding

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Levelt’s account links well with the picture emerging from the kind of analysis that we can derive from Bruner’s study. If speakers and listeners have to work simultaneously with new meanings, new formulations and at managing a new articulatory acoustic system, it makes sense to conclude that some recurrence and predictability at the conceptual level is likely to free up capacity to attend to the articulatory and formulation levels. if we think of the vocabulary as one of the main semantic resources, with grammatical material being both more detailed but also less crucial to our message, the picture this offers is of learning starting with the major resources and moving towards the more detailed features of language. we typically conceptualize meanings ahead of our ability to express them, and with the way we manage linguistic redundancy. The fact that we conceptualize ahead of our ability to express meanings is reflected in Bruner’s data. The child can understand the game before s/he identifies or understands the words. The possibility of a grasp of the concepts preceding control of the language is also reflected in our ability to understand language we would never be able to produce ourselves. The term “linguistic redundancy” refers to the fact that language is made up both of linguistic features that are relatively meaningful and of features which are relatively redundant (i.e., unnecessary).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">6. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Research into the impact of pedagogical tasks on oral language development '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">How then might our conceptual ability and our awareness of linguistic redundancy affect the way speakers approach their learning? If we assume that our attention capacity is limited, then it follows that learners will often not be able to attend to all aspects of the speech production process there is a clear likelihood that L2 learners will concentrate more on the content (conceptualization), and on the most meaningful forms of representation. Speakers will spend more effort sorting out what they want to say, and trying to find some ways of saying it under the time pressures of the activity, and will devote less effort to monitoring for accuracy, or to self-correcting when necessary. <span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">In these circumstances we should expect that on the first occasion they will spend more effort than normal on the content of what they want to say, and on finding as quickly as possible words that will express the meanings. If learners then repeat a speech activity, or at least significant elements of the activity, this will lead them to have to allocate less attention to the content, and enable them to allocate more attention to how the content is expressed, than they did first time around. That is, on repetition their attention would be expected to shift from the content, to the form, with the result that grammatical details are gradually integrated into the whole. In a case study (Bygate 1996) I found that a student repeating a familiar story two days after a first attempt, without any intervening tuition, and without expecting to have to repeat the task, produced significantly more accurate and idiomatic English on the second occasion. In addition, second time around she produced significantly more self-correction than when she first carried out the task In a subsequent study (Bygate 2001) larger groups of students were more accurate and more fluent when repeating a familiar task 10 weeks later. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">More recently Bygate and Samuda (2005) found that a subset of the students in the 2001 study also produced significantly more elaborated versions of familiar stories than unfamiliar stories. That is, they introduced more information about the reasons and effects of the events, of the intentions and feelings of the participants, and of the speakers’ own feelings about the characters and the story. In other words, the narrative was generally more elaborated on the second telling (although often actually using fewer words). Lynch and Maclean (2000, 2001) also found a general repetition effect. When different students repeatedly had to explain posters they had prepared to different interlocutors they all developed their language through the different repetitions, albeit in their own distinct ways. In other words, repetition of “unscripted” – ie. improvised – tasks seems to give rise to development in students’ oral language. this view of repetition is different from the one traditionally associated with the teaching of speaking in an L2. Audio-lingual approaches, for example, insisted on detailed accuracy in handling oral language through stimulus-response drills.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l3level1lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Constructive repetition in the classroom: whole class talk, and talk on tasks '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">rationale for encouraging meaningful constructive repetition in the classroom is that it can help to give learners space to work on matching meanings to language, and to integrate attention to the more redundant features (especially grammatical and phonological) into their speech. One common response to the idea of constructive repetition is that it is not welcome by learners, that it does not encourage creativity, and is not appropriate for learning. <span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">it is a powerful basis for creative invention, provided that learners are encouraged to explore for themselves alternative ways of expressing their ideas. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">I would like to consider how constructive repetition can be encouraged in classrooms. There are two main contexts in which this seems of interest, in talk on tasks, and in whole-class talk. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">the structure of many familiar tasks already involves degrees of built-in repetition. These are grouped below into two sets, which I will here call “external repetition” and “internal repetition.” “External repetition” is repetition where the task requires students to repeat their talk to different students. “Internal repetition” is repetition which is encouraged by the demands of processing the input material and/or of preparing the intended task outcome.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.1.1. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">External repetition '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">1. Survey tasks: I am calling “survey tasks” any tasks which require students to circulate around their class gathering information from colleagues in order to compile a group profile. The structure of tasks such as these in fact requires the students to ask many classmates the same set of questions. This is a simple example of in-built repetition. Although the wording is unlikely to change, as suggested in the preceding discussion, repeated enactment of the same questions is likely to lead to improved accuracy and fluency.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">2. Interview tasks: Similar to survey tasks, interview tasks usually involve students in interviewing a limited number of people, seeking the same information from all of them. The interview might be an opinion interview, or a job interview, or an interview about people’s personal histories. In each case, the interviewer is interested in getting responses to a pre-arranged set of questions. The key element here is for the interview to be repeated, either through rehearsals, or by carrying it out with different people. The fact of repeating an interview is expected to lead learners to build on their increasing familiarity to alter the phrasing, or again to improve their accuracy and fluency.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">3. Card games: Various oral activities are structured around sets of cards, with one student holding a card, while the others have to guess or ask questions about the card, or respond to what the student hold ing the card says. Each student takes it in turns to draw the card to set off a round of talk. Each round of talk is likely to be structured similarly, around the rules of the game. Hence each successive round is likely to lead to re-use of some strategies, changes or additions to them, with students borrowing strategies and formulations from each other. This is expected in turn to lead to improvements in the fluency and accuracy of students. That is, a “round” is at first strategically structured, and useful structures are then re-used, as students build on their experience of previous rounds.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">4. Poster carousel: Working in pairs, students prepare a poster on a topic. Posters are posted on the walls around the room, with one student going off to visit and ask questions about the other posters, while the second student stays and hosts visitors from the other pairs. Each visitor will be expected to ask questions of the host, so that given that the posters define the content, each host will have repeated practice in talking about the same content, to different people, leading naturally to constructive repetition (see Lynch and Maclean 2000, 2001).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">5. Pyramid (or “snowball”) tasks: Pyramid tasks are of course quite well known: students explore a topic initially in pairs, and then meet up with another pair to develop their account of the topic, the group of four then joining another group of four, to refine their ideas, leading to a plenary session. One of the purposes of this design is to encourage and support constructive repetition.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.1.2. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Internal repetition '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">6. Picture stories:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">activities where each member of a group can see a different picture from a story) typically first involve speakers in describing their pictures, so as to situate each picture in relation to the rest of the set. The task can orientate them towards repetition, since particularly if the story is difficult to sort out, students will be lead to repeat the narrative in order to check it, and potentially to ensure everyone is able to re-tell it if asked. In addition, where a large number of pictures are involved, or where the set includes a series of very similar pictures, there is likely to be a fair degree of repetition of the descriptions. In the former case, this is because it is hard to hold large amounts of information in working memory – participants are going to need reminding who holds which picture. In the latter case, repetitions are encouraged by the fact that sequencing depends on being able to identify the differences between the pictures, so that if several of the pictures are very similar the descriptions are likely to need repeating. The likelihood of repetition is increased if there is an expectation that any member of the group can be called upon by the teacher to report back to the class, leading to greater readiness to repeat, clarify and rehearse.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">7.Picture and map differences tasks:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi"> Picture differences tasks typically involve managing three important types of information: location, identification, and description. Location itself requires both use of prepositions, and the identification of reference points (e.g., on thetable, north of the forest), and some of these are likely to be repeated, with prepositional phrase constructions being widely used. Identification involves naming, or the use of strategies to negotiate reference: and the inclusion of a lot of referents which students are not easily able to name could lead to repeated use of negotiation communication strategies. Descriptions will tend to take the form of various kinds of noun modifiers and constructive repetition may be motivated where subcategories of referents are needed (a major road a minor road, a footbridge, a railway bridge). Making the task of identifying differences deliberately problematic is likely to lead to extended discussion of what is in the pictures and/or how to say it. For example the teacher might deliberately provide pictures for which students do not have all the vocabulary, leading them to have to negotiate understanding; or the pictures may contain a large number of distracting elements or ambiguous material (see Samuda and Rounds 1993 for an example of this).

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">8.Prioritising tasks:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi"> A number of tasks have been designed which give students a set of options to consider and prioritise in order of importance, preference, urgency, moral significance, and so on. Tasks like this are likely to encourage repeated use of expressions of opinion and of justificatory comments, and depending on the design of the task can also give rise to repeated comparisons.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">9.Interpretation tasks:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Interpretation tasks require students to consider the significance of a set of objects in terms of some specified context. An example is a “Things in pockets” task, where the students are told the objects come from someone’s pocket, and are asked to consider who the likely owner is (see Samuda 2001). Constructive repetition can occur here if each student is pushed to speculate in turn about the significance of each item, and to propose a likely owner of the whole set.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">10.problem solving tasks:

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">It is referring to tasks which pose conceptual or logical puzzles and which are deliberately intended to engage learners in talking through the nature of the problem, identifying potential explanations, and evaluating them before arriving at a preferred solution. A well-known example is the famous problem of how a farmer can cross a river by boat, with a dog, a rabbit and a lettuce if he can only get two of them into the boat at a time (though note that this may need “taskifying” if the material is be used to generate interactive discourse). Other more real world examples might involve students in explaining why particular roads in a given town carry more traffic than others; working out the best location on a map for a new factory, hospital or housing, given a number of important sometimes competing criteria; or providing an explanation for the different rates of growth of three potted plants, or for what it is that causes a hole in a punctured tyre to create bubbles when put under water. Tasks such as these push learners towards constructive repetition to the extent that they are led in to checking that they have described the situation correctly, and checking and reviewing the proposed solutions in order to identify the best one. Barnes (1976) provides examples from across the curriculum, and Prabhu (1987) suggests basing language syllabuses around problem solving tasks. <span style="font-size:12.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">a characteristic of tasks with “internal repetition” is that this type of repetition depends on pressure on the individual students to manage the information content, and to be able to present and/or explain the outcome to the teacher and class at the end of the groupwork. In other words, repetition here is a likely product of pressure on them to manage the different phases of the task.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.1.3. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Internal and external repetition: three-phase “jigsaw” tasks '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">This is the kind of task developed by Geddes and Sturtridge (1979, 1982). Geddes and Sturtridge named their tasks “jigsaw” tasks, a term which has since been used more loosely, sometimes referring to any kind of information-transfer task (see for instance Yule 1997: 32). Geddes and Sturtridge’s original idea consisted of a type of task which was deliberately designed to have three phases. The first phase was based on four complementary reading or listening tasks, each one being entrusted to a different group within the class to be done in parallel. By the end of the first phase, each group would have a different part of the overall information needed to for the second phase. The second phase then involved the students in being regrouped to pool the information from the first phase. For this the new groups were made up of one student from each of the four original groups. The new groups then had to decide a solution on the basis of the pooled information, leading to a third phase, where each group had to present their solution in plenary mode to the whole class. Tasks designed in this way are a kind of “pyramid” task, that is, involve “external repetition” but each phase also pushes learners to clarify the information for themselves and for their colleagues, exploiting “internal repetition.” All these examples are intended to illustrate the power of the design of tasks to lead to constructive repetition. The idea is not to push learners by simply telling them to repeat, but rather to consider how the internal design of activities, and the overall expectations on them towards achieving goals collectively and individually, can together push learners towards working and re-working meanings and their formulations.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:48.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-30.0pt;mso-list:l3level2lfo2"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Whole-class talk

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">By whole-class talk I mean talk between the teacher and class in plenary mode. Obviously this is a type of talk which the teacher has considerable influence over. Three main types of constructive repetition are possible in this mode.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.2.1. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Plenary topics

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The first main type of context for constructive repetition is when the teacher explores common recurring topics and themes with the class as a whole. Teachers can structure this in various ways, such as through questions or headings of sub- topics given orally or on the board. Teacher and class then respond to each sub-topic jointly. In junior classes this can include the daily weather report; regular reviews of seasonal changes; regular accounts of pupils’ daily routines; sports results. With more senior classes, additional themes can include brief news reviews; contemporary social issues; sports results. All of these are topics which offer opportunities for updating around a limited range of lexico-grammatical resources, organized in a fairly standard way.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.2.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Pre- and post-task talk

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The second and possibly the most important type of context for constructive repetition is before or after specific classroom activities, exercises or tasks. Before students begin activities, whether individual, pair or group, it is clearly often useful if the teacher first rehearses with the class as a whole the information content to be covered, or the procedures to be followed. For instance, if students are to undertake a problem solving task in groups, in which they have to decide from a set of objects from someone’s pocket who it is that they probably belonged to, it would be possible for the teacher to rehearse the vocabulary needed to refer to the various objects through a preparatory activity. For example, the objects could be involved in a memory activity, in which the class are shown an array for 1 minute, and working in pairs, are to write down the objects that they had been shown. This is effectively a communicative activity built around the vocabulary items which, unbeknown to the class, are going to be needed in the coming “things-in-pockets” task. A similar preparatory activity could be used prior to a picture story, or a prioritising task, a picture differences task, or indeed most other kinds of task. Sometimes teachers might want to avoid doing this so that students are left to work out how to do the task on their own. However preparation can be helpful. The intended effect is to provide meaningful rehearsal of the vocabulary items to be used in the following activity, to give students a common starting point, and to reduce their processing load so that they are better able to attend to the language during the task. Another way of promoting constructive repetition through tasks is for the teacher to do an example task with the whole class prior to letting them work in pairs. For instance, prior to a picture differences task, the teacher can provide the whole class with one of the two pictures, and using an alternative version of the second picture themselves, perform the task in plenary mode. The point here is that the class would be able to rehearse roughly the procedures they might follow, and the kinds of utterances that they could use, to do the task effectively. If the pictures are versions of the ones they are about to use in pairs, this would also help them rehearse the vocabulary they would need. All of these pre-task activities would provide valuable rehearsal and preparation work, without undermining the communicative nature of the activities themselves. Opportunities for constructive repetition can also be found after a task. Too often it seems that once tasks are completed in pairs, the lesson moves on to other activities, with no opportunity for learners to put to further use the conceptual and linguistic work they had been doing in their pairs. That is, follow-up activities can be used to lead students from the task-based work into further constructive repetition. For instance, following a picture story, students can be asked to retell the story in plenary mode, working alone or with their pairs or groups. Given the fact that picture stories are unscripted activities, alternative ideas and different wordings can be subsequently noted on the board, along with relevant grammatical details. Other types of pair or group tasks can similarly lead into follow-up activities. For instance tasks in which students work in pairs or groups to prioritise their preferences from different pictured options (such as a selection of AV equipment, preferred designs of an apartment, preferred locations for public amenities) can be followed by whole class reports of options, along with reasons. For the same reason it can be valuable to organize follow-up activities after groups have been working on tasks centred on complex personal decision-making (such as suggesting responses to letters in “agony aunt” columns, or job appointment decisions) Any such follow-up activities serve a double function: partly to put pressure on the students to attend to the work they do in groups, and partly to provide valuable opportunity to re-use their language with teacher and the whole class. The main purpose then behind both the pre- and post-task phases is to ensure constructive repetition – that is, re-presentation of the ideas so as to encourage and/or allow for incorporation of new language. The whole-class format also allows the teacher to provide formal feedback – a valuable additional dimension, provided that it dovetails with the constructive repetition, and does not discourage it, or distract from it.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:.75in;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.5in;mso-list:l3level3lfo2">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">7.2.3. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">Classroom management '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">A third context for constructive repetition occurs around classroom management and procedures. This is talk which teachers typically use to explain or review classroom management rules or procedures to be followed for different activities. They are naturally repeated and rehearsed subsequently in collaboration with students, so that the class keeps them in mind.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">To summarize, teacher-class talk can encourage and model constructive repetition around the use of regular themes for plenary talk, around the running of the class itself, and above all to prepare the students for tasks they are to do, and to build on what they have done individually, in pairs or in groups. Pre- and post-task briefing is often justified as a controlling procedure that is, to ensure students do what they are intended to do. It is useful to think of this as playing a significant role in leading to progressive increases in elaboration, in accuracy and in fluency, and in enabling the plenary context to add to and complement the work done individually.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoNormal">'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Questions as strategies to encourage speaking in content-and-language-integrated classrooms '

<p class="MsoNormal">'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

'

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">      Introduction :

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Speaking the target language in order to solve real-life tasks is a complex, sometimes daunting experience for the second language (L2) learner.Whether we are moving among native speakers in the target culture or among other non-natives in international lingua franca contexts, on leaving the classroom and entering the “real world” as L2 speakers we often feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation. We have to function online and attend to several demands simultaneously: we search for mental schemata into which we can fit the content that is being talked about so that we can make a relevant contribution. At the same time we have to try and “get hold of the ropes” of the discourse, the relationships between the other participants while trying to honour rules we sometimes only have a vagu idea about so as not to jeopardize our aims (like getting a stamp in our passport on immigration). All this we have to accomplish using vocabulary, grammar and speech sounds we know only imperfectly or at least less automatically than we take for granted in our first language (L1). Actually mastering such a trying situation produces feelings of deep satisfaction as everyone who has ever functioned in a language other than their L1 can confirm. By the same token, true mastery of a foreign language is often equalled with being able to speak it fluently and efficiently in different situations. As L2 speakers, then, we need a good number of strategies for learning and for use. But if we happen to be language teachers who want to foster learning in their students only some of those strategies are open to our influence and can be transformed by us into strategies for teaching. In this contribution I want to focus on two of them: repetition and creating purpose. I will briefly discuss these two learning/teaching strategies and will then examine how they are made to work in an educational setting founded on the idea of language learning through meaningful use: CLIL. It is a fact of life that the more often we have done something the better we are at it. Like for any other skill such as playing a musical instrument or cooking, therefore, speaking develops through an inextricable combination of learning and use. We have to speak again and again, improving automatization and developing routines on all levels from the articulation of individual sounds, via recognizing complex discourse structures to accomplishing whole interactions like buying our breakfast in the corner shop or negotiating a contract. The second important point I want to focus on is that when we speak we normally do so for a purpose. We speak because we want to achieve something in a particular situation or context. Such achievements are not necessarily something grand like concluding a business deal, but may simply be passing on a piece of information or establishing contact with another human being. Another motivation for speaking which can best be observed with very young children is the sheer joy of being able to do it and relishing in the accomplishment. During my third elementary school year I often spent the last stretch of my walk home practicing tongue-tip “r” which my friend could do but I could not. I was simply thrilled to feel how it worked and the motor-skill I thus acquired served me well when I later started to learn Spanish. Some people preserve this kind of motivation into their adult life, transferring it to the sounds of a second or third language.

<p class="MsoNormal">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">  2. Questions in whole-class interaction '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">School lessons are very much a speaking event and the talk which happens in them commonly has one of two purposes. If the purpose is to organize work, set tasks, focus attention and conduct administrative affairs, this is the “regulative register,” which provides the frame in which content work can proceed. If the purpose is to pass on knowledge specific to the subject, the main topics are usually predefined by the curriculum and this is known as the “instructional register” (Christie 2000).

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l2level1lfo4">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">How questions shape speaking in CLIL classrooms '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The findings presented here are based on recordings and transcripts of over 40 lessons from CLIL classrooms taught in Austrian secondary schools (grade 6-13). They represent content subjects like history, geography, physics, biology accounting, and marketing. On the whole, teacher-led whole-class discussion is the predominant activity in the classrooms investigated but there are also student presentations and group-work activities. A subset of ten lessons, one with each participating teacher, was selected for coding and quantitative analysis. With a total of 657 information questions asked in these ten lessons (ca 520 minutes), the statistical average is well over one question (1.26) per minute.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">

<p class="MsoNormal">'<span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking awareness: Benefits for teaching speaking skills in academic and other contexts '

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking in spontaneous speech is at the same time the simplest and the most complex of mechanisms. At its most basic, a model of turn-taking is straightforward: an A-B-A-B speaker exchange in which one speaker takes over from another at an appropriate point. There may be many speakers – Cs, and Ds, and Es – but a very influential conceptualization of spoke discourse is that it is constructed of turns and that these are discrete entities which can be labelled as belonging to the person holding the floor. It’s a model which will be familiar from many course-book dialogues and transcripts at the back of these books, or from speaking tasks where the learner constructs an invented dialogue to practice with a partner, or respond orally to recorded initiating prompts. However, two aspects of turn-taking make it a more complicated than that model suggests. First, we need to consider how it is that a speaker knows or judges the appropriate point for the speaking move from one person to another. Second, we need to understand the extent to which the A-B A-B model reflects the realities of turn-taking. These two questions are at the basis of most of the research on turn-taking, an under-studied, but distinctive area of work on the spoken form. While making the situation complex, these issues also make turn-taking an interesting and rewarding area to work on with language learners. Most significant for the learner is the following: however good the language ability, however wide the vocabulary and however extensive the discoursal and pragmatic knowledge, if the speaker cannot judge the right moment to begin to speak, they will never be heard. The central benefit of working on turn-taking awareness, then, is that it should help the learner with that most often described problem often expressed as the difficulty of participating in a spontaneous conversation and more formal spoken interactions, such as academic seminars or business meetings, with native speakers in the target language.

<p class="MsoNormal">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">2. How does turn-taking work? '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking behaviour and mechanisms have been studied in some detail for at least 30 years in the conversation analysis (CA) tradition. Early work tried to pin down the rules of turn-taking while later analyses moved towards quantitatively based research, looking for statistically meaningful patterns in how speakers appear to signal that it is time for another speaker to speak, or not (for example, the methodologically influential paper by Koiso et al. 1998, or Caspers 2003).

<p class="MsoNormal">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%; font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">3.Why turn-taking is difficult for learners ? '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Because of :

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.1. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Learners learn sentences.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The first reason for difficulties with turn-taking is due to the way that learners tend to be presented with language.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking requires active prediction of grammatical completions

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">prediction of the TRP requires the listener to monitor what is being said and to process both the meaning of words being uttered and, simultaneously, the probable grammatical completion of the utterance. Grosjean and Hirt (1996) have suggested that first-language speakers are very accurate in their ability to predict probable number of words remaining and the precise time that an utterance will end at a given point in a speaker’s stream of speech. However, in the L2 context the anxiety to understand present meaning may prevent the listener from bringing these skills into play.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.3. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking requires active listening strategies that take into account prosody

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">In addition to syntax, much of the literature on turn-taking suggests (and common sense tells us) that prosody plays a key part in helping a speaker signal whether they wish to hold the turn, or relinquish it. A speaker may, for instance, break off in the middle of a sentence and it will be clear from the intonation whether they are pausing to think of a word, or whether they have deliberately stopped. Additionally, utterances often have several possible completion points in them and in order to time their entry into the conversation the listener needs to be able to clarify which is the “real” ending.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.4. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Turn-taking is collaborative behavior

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">A fourth area of difficulty in turn-taking for the learner is that it frequently depends on the collaborative construction of utterances. Collaborating in utterance construction, echoing another speaker, or showing understanding all require confidence, trust and timing. There are two main forms which the learner can be introduced to. The first kind of collaboration is simple backchannel. In this case the listener produces voiced fillers and discourse markers at suitable points in the speaker’s utterances. By this means they show their level of understanding and can also signal to the speaker that it is appropriate for them to continue speaking.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">3.5. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Speaking in different contexts requires different kinds of interactions

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Very often, the spoken form is taught as if one kind of skill and one type of language are required. Burns (this volume) shows persuasively the benefits of moving towards a more fine-grained matching of types of talk and characteristics of language. Equally, the learner should be aware that different turn-taking behaviour is appropriate in different contexts. Certain speech genres provide their own norms of turn-taking which awareness of which can help the learner.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l2level1lfo4">'''<span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4. <span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">How can learners improve their turn-taking skills? '''

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">While the foregoing paragraphs suggest reasons why turn-taking is difficult for the language learner, there are several simple methods which can be used in the classroom to explore this rewarding area with the student.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4.1. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Awareness raising comes before production

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">The complex set of factors which influence turn behaviour – semantics, syntax, prosody – mean that it is best to begin with awareness raising tasks, rather than attempt productive activities to begin with.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4.2. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Introduce the learner to some facts about turn-taking

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Students need to be made aware that knowing when to speak is a matter of listening to both what someone says, and how they say it. Some basic facts about turn-taking can help the learner understand why it is not just their level of language proficiency which affects whether they can take part in spontaneous talk. If you can find a recording of an animated discussion from the radio or television, play this (without letting students see the picture, if a video) to the learners and ask them to listen for how many speakers are involved. Then play a short stretch of talk with several quick turns and ask them to guess how many times each speaker speaks in the example. This might only be 20 seconds of speaking and should not be very much longer. For upper-intermediate or advanced learners a transcript of the example can then be given and the learners check their answers. At lower levels you might go through the transcript slowly playing each turn and getting them to keep a tally of who is talking. Ask the students how each speaker knows that they can speak and then move on to a discussion of how the structure of the sentence and the way the speaker says the sentence combine to give out messages to the listene

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4.3. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Begin with structured tasks and small stretches of talk

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Learners need to build up to being able to stage an extended set of turns, or longer contribution to a conversation. Simple tasks which are built around common topics or functions in course books – saying telephone numbers, dates, or names, spelling out addresses, checking information is correctly understood, and so on – can provide excellent opportunities for structuring the practice of turn-taking. In this way, natural turn-behaviour can also be built into a standard class, without “taking over” as a topic in its own right. What is required is for the teacher to be aware of the need for incorporating appropriate turn-taking into the speaking class, and for learners to be trained to expect part of a task to focus on this area. A simple approach is to give a series of numbers of varying length and to ask the class to check the final three numbers. This will require them to listen for the intonation pattern that shows the end of the number has been reached.

<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:39.0pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-21.0pt;mso-list:l2level2lfo4"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif"; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-fareast-font-family:"TimesNewRoman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi">4.4. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">Use minimal responses to build confidence

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:major-bidi;mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi;mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi">If it is clear that the learners have grasped the basics of turn-taking, they can move on to listening to extended stretches of talk, and finding the moments when it might be appropriate to break in. These are usually also the places where speakers use “backchannel” (the short words, or noises, used in English to show understanding or request the speaker to go on). Therefore, a non-threatening task is for the learner to listen to a stretch of talk and simply try to say “mmm” as if to encourage the speaker to go on. As this appears to be a very simple task for advanced learners a system will be necessary to show them quickly the effects of getting the positioning wrong. The teacher may, for instance, tell a story or anecdote and ask a learner to tap the table with a pencil where they might make a sound (this is, for some reason, less threatening and much simpler for the learner than trying to say “mmm” to begin with). If the tap comes at a point when the speaker feels it is not appropriate, they should stop speaking completely. In this way, although the task is quite artificial a sense of the importance of timing the backchannel utterance, however simple it may be, can be conveyed.