Speak up, please!
This exclamatory sentence does not sound motivational, does it? It carries more than just a slight note of impatience. We can say that it is strongly imperative without a shred of the listener’s will to listen to or even an idle curiosity for what a speaker might say. Unfortunately, this imperative can be often heard in our classrooms.
To restrain ourselves from giving that, not so pleasant instruction, we need to be aware of speaking as a process that cannot occur just as a natural human impulse to talk. It is not a foreign language acquisition that happens automatically, repeating after a model speaker. It requires a lot more to become a complete, natural-sounding, linguistically correct and meaningful verbal expression.
Talking about the four basic language skills, their presence and their importance in foreign language learning, we can say that speaking mildly leads to that, so-called top list of the most important linguistic abilities. I have deliberately used the word “ability” as a synonym for competence because speaking requires, first of all, time, then frequent and constant practice in real situations. If it is not always possible to provide real situations, then we could organize a project context in which speaking makes sense, and we should not forget preparing, tutoring, encouraging and monitoring the students to verbalize their thoughts.
Obviously, speaking is a process and a result of the continuous exposure of learners to be heard by someone, rather than just an inborn competency that has been inherited. Let me briefly refer to the fact that speaking is one of the most “presented” skills that foreign language learner develops, and I am not trying to say that it is at the expense of reading, writing or listening. I believe that they, more or less, exist equally in teaching and learning a foreign language, but speaking prevails because of its quickness in teacher-student communication, classroom management and expressing someone’s ideas.
We can easily agree that speaking is a demanding, challenging, and lifelong learning process that unites different factors but, on the other hand, of similar significance are the use of grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, structure, and relevant content. We can add more essential elements to this list, such as presentation skills that cannot be left aside as less important. They are crucial when we talk about transferring the speaker’s message to the audience and it is all about that, isn’t it? Has the speaker been heard and understood? Has the speaker managed to make an impact on the audience?
Speaking is a primary social skill that develops along with a speaker’s inner growth; meaning evolves as the speaker’s personal development grows. Speech is more or less structured, fine-tuned and fluent depending on the speaker’s self-motivated pursuit of general and specific knowledge, literacy, ongoing education, and the influence of the speaker’s micro and macro social environment.
What does speaking mean in our English classroom?
When I ask myself this question, the following situations rapidly fly through my mind: role-play, questions and answers (student-student; teacher-student and vice versa), mini discussion episodes where the most verbally skilled students often imposed themselves as mini-group leaders, describing photos or pictures, guessing the meaning or the point of a picture leaning again to provoking speaking by teacher questioning and similar activities and situations.
These are formal and standard ways of setting up our classroom as a place where our students will accomplish their speaking goals, but still, I was not calm with this picture. Something was missing. Something that would fulfill the point of speaking itself where different communicational contexts and the students’ ability to adjust to it, play together in harmony as one well-trained orchestra.
In 2015 I attended, as a part of an Erasmus + project, a course where I found what I needed to help my students develop their speaking skills. It was a bit of a mix of different parts, such as courage – to try different approaches, innovation – to implement a new way of making my students talk more efficiently with the use of digital tools, motivation – to motivate my students to make their speeches more interesting, correct, fluent, organized, and to become more self-confident.
Then, during a field class in Stockholm my group, which consisted of 5 teachers from different countries, was given the task of making a short documentary on a topic of our choice but the condition was that it needed to refer to the museum we were at that moment. We had two or three hours to make a story, right there, on the spot. Each of us needed to make our individual speaking parts that required some time for researching the field and eventually we had to make it into a film together. That meant that we needed to decide which photos to take for each part of the story and later on to edit the short film together. Quite a task! It was, indeed! But, we did it, successfully, more or less, but as a team and as individual learners. I can surely say we learned a lot!
As soon as I got back to my classroom in September 2015, I introduced a new way of speaking practice, PPT and Slidedog presentations. I used Slidedog as a presentational tool because I became aware of common students’ reactions to their peers’ presentations and I wanted to use a digital tool that could offer the possibility of peer formative assessment. It worked pretty well regardless of the poor conditions we had back then, such as the lack of wireless connection that was a huge obstacle to its regular use in my English classes.
Students could follow the presentation on their mobile phones and they could take polls on the presentation and the speaker they had been listening to at the end of the presentation. The speaker could share the results with the audience and peer formative assessment was gained fairly. The premiere of Slidedog presentations was in May 2015, when my students made their speeches-presentations in front of their class and Spanish teachers, who were on job-shadowing mobility in my school and were observing classes for the whole week. It was a huge event for me and I can imagine what it meant to my students then! It wasn’t their first “performance” in front of the class, but in front of foreign teachers, definitely yes.
What lead to that stage of a completely new speaking experience and their ability to stand in front of their mixed audience, conquer their fear of public speaking and speak about the topic that was not so easy to present, “Beauty is/ isn’t in the eye of the beholder”?
I needed to set up the rules, meaning that I limited the time of their performance, taught my students how to prepare visually attractive and appropriate slides paying attention to basic, simple rules like limiting the amounts of text on the slides, using just a few keywords/expressions and photos/pictures as their speech cues, and how to make their thoughts flow connecting them with the structure of the written text because, a presentation needs to be well – organized with an introduction, a body and a conclusion. Then many more small but crucial details, which make a successful presentation, came along.
In the course of these six years of constant practising a sort of public speaking, my students have gained the competence to present, using digital or hand-made posters, short films, or PPT presentations, a topic that, has connections with their everyday life and is multidisciplinary. The best example is field classes in Diocletian’s Palace in Split where the sixth and seventh graders presented the parts of the Palace to different teachers from EU countries who were on their job-shadowing mobilities in my school. Students were separated into two groups of six, or four of three, playing the role of a “tourist agency” and their “client” was a teacher guest who was observing the class.
A guest teacher was given a speech assessment rubric and he/she needed to listen to every member’s speech and decide which group had the best pitches. Students needed to make a digital poster which would represent gastronomy, accommodation, sights of historical importance, interesting facts, what to do there, and recommendations for tourists. They could use a mobile phone to browse the Internet, to take photos and to make a digital poster.
To all participants’ obvious pleasure, I can confirm that all learning outcomes were achieved and today still, without the presence of European teachers as their audience because of the pandemic caused by Covid-19, my students prepare and make their speeches equally well.
Since there is no perfection, so there is none here as well, flaws needs to be detected. Occasionally, a speech can be memorized by heart by students who are less verbally confident. And ask them a few questions on their topic they have prepared, just let them know you will do it. In this way, you will quickly check their comprehension. Speaking reveals a speaker’s weak and strong points. With our help, the latter one will definitely dominate in our classroom.
Author:
Ivana Bokavšek
English teacher, teacher adviser
June 2021
