What is speaking?

 

1.      What is speaking?

When children begin speaking, they experiment and play with the utterances that are made to form words and phrases (e.g. bye bye, go bye-bye). As they grow, children integrate these words and structures into their real and imaginary play. Play is an important aspect of child’s development.

Words can be used as a form of entertainment. Children practice conversations that they heard on TV between one another. In this children role-playing, they do make-believe activities (pretending).

2.      Background to the teaching of speaking

In North America, children together with teacher, often doing Finger plays, chants and rhymes with hand or finger motion. Many of song contain language repetitive, pantomime, and TPR style. This is important because teacher working with learner recognize how important develop strong speaking skill.

3.      The development of speaking skills

1. Avoid unrealistic expectations

-          Mean length of utterance (MLU)

MLU are the number of morphemes found in a sample of child’s utterance. Children should not beexpected to produced utterance that are beyond their stage of development

-          Pronunciation and young learners

Children sometimes have difficulty articulating specific phonemes (e.g.  /th/ of /r/) due to developmental factors. As children grow and develop, they become able to articulate the different phonemes.

2. Overgeneralized of errors

Children have tendency to overgeneralize grammar rul. For example, in using past tense, I seed the movie, I drawed the apple. Other example, when the learner take rulre of their first language and applies them in English. They might says “ I like ice cream chocolate” instead of “I like chocolate ice cream”.

 

4.      Classroom techniques and activities

1. Audiolingual Method (ALM)

ALM to language teaching is based on the notion that one can learn language by developing habits based on the pattern language.  There are two important features: drill and dialogues.

-          Drills with choral response

Aimed to get learners practice in using the patterns that occur in languages. Example, bring apple pictures, say “I like apples”, they have to repeat the sentence.

-          Dialogues

Dialogues provide learners with grammatically controlled scripts that they can use in real life.

-          Using puppets to introduce dialogues

The use of puppets is to show children how to work with partner or in a group. Teacher working with young learners are often aware that children feel more comfortable talking with a puppet than with an adult.

-          Fishbowl technique

Fishbowl : the teacher can either invite a volunteer to do activity with him or can model the activity using more puppets. Everyone in class watches the teacher and the volunteer in a fishbowl.

2. Communicative language teaching (CLT)

CLT is an approach that connects classroom-based language learning with the language that the learners need in order to communicate outside of the classroom.

-          Games

When game rule use English, children tend to monitor their use of English language when play the games and help develop speaking skill.

-          Talking and writing box

Talking and writing box is made of pictures that the children have self-selected and are interesting to them. Children have to talk why the picture is interest to them.

-          Teaching pronunciation

Rhymes, finger-plays, and chants help children to pronounce correctly. Tongue twister is a fun way to teach, it is same phoneme repeated over and over again. For examples, Sally sells seashells at the seashore.

3. Error connection

It is not necessary for teacher to respond to all error. If teacher correct every single error, teacher will be utterly exhausted at the end of the day.

 

 

 

5.      Managing speaking activities

Well-planned lessons contain activities where children are interested and stay on task. Teacher who do not use communicative approach in class can be especially harsh if the noise level seems to become too high. Children can be taught a number of signal to become quiet, such as turn on the light or raise the teacher hands.

6.      Speaking in the classroom

Children’s course book helps children to practice language pattern and pre-scripted conversation.