week 7

Speaking Strategies

It is good to have something that you have lived, experienced, seen and heard, explained to you in a direct and implicit manner. I had been in situations in which a person would use many words trying very hard to get the meaning across and most of the time not being successful. It's comforting to see that it has a name, "strategy of over-elaboration" where non-native speakers include more details than native speakers do when explaining or deacribing something. Studies by Blum-Kulka abd Olshtain(1986) named it Over-Elaboration.

The notion of studying strategies such as Circumlocution, Approximation, Literal Translation,Mime, and Message Abandonment is so appealing to me that I will center my project in this topic. Will will try to find out what types of strategies pre-schoolers use to communicate in a L2 , if they use any at all. And wether these are taught or by insticnt they arise.

As Helen Basturkmen mentions in her article, teachers must create speaking parctice tasks for their L2 students, but they should also create an awareness of the features of the spokenn language as well as placing tehg students in the position of analysts of discourse.
As I refekcted on my teaching strategies I found that I had used some of these strategies in my Conversational English classes yet did not know what they were called or that they had been studied. As I mentioned earlier, most of my teaching is based on instinct and gut feeling rather than taught strategies (taught to me I mean).
Now I know the importance of teaching startegies to your students in a way that they see the importance, value and benefits that using these straties might bring them.
I have my students observe themselves as they speak./ With the use of a video camera we record speeches and then analyze them. We also record interactions and the students really enjoy seeing themselves and evaluating themselves as well. It is true as Bastukmen says, that one can learn to talk by observing talk.
About Dantas-Whitney's article I must say that teh audiotaped journals proved to be exiting and fruitful. Having students reflect upon what they learned in class and the conncetions that they made with their personal lives is a great tool. Critical thinking skills are developed in a way that the students enjoy and that can also help them improve their speaking skills. It's a great way of NOT having your students feel theratened and evaluate themselves.
By helping students acquire speaking strategies and reflective and critical thinking skils, we are fostering self-directed learning as well as practice situations.
Dantas-Whitney asks " Does critical reflection via spoken journals contribute to oral language acquisition?" I can reply with Helen Basturkmen's statement that one learns to speak by observing and listening to others [or ourselves] speak.