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Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature


and
Teaching English Language and Literature for
Secondary Schools

Bc. Petra Šolcová

Teaching Speaking Skills


Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: James Edward Thomas, M. A .

2011
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Author’s signature

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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor James Edward Thomas
for his guidance, insightful comments and suggestions.

This project was funded by the Action Austria/Czech Republic grant.

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction...............................................................................................6
1.1 Thesis structure...................................................................................7
1.2 Underlying motivation and research questions.......................................8
1.3 Target age groups of learners.............................................................13
1.4 What is ‘teaching speaking skills’?......................................................16
2 Theoretical framework....................................................................20
2.1 Basic features of speaking..................................................................20
2.1.1 On the seemingly disorganised nature of speaking......................20
2.1.2 Classroom implications: teachers’ expectations............................25
2.1.3 The role of context....................................................................27
2.1.4 Classroom implications: teaching materials.................................29
2.1.5 The types of communicative exchanges......................................34
2.1.6 Classroom implications: communicative tasks use........................36
2.1.7 Characteristics of conversation...................................................41
2.1.8 Classroom implications: challenges of conversational classes.......44
2.2 Communicative competence................................................................47
2.2.1 Historical background................................................................47
2.2.2 Individual components of communicative competence.................50
3 Practical part...................................................................................65
3.1 Individual aspects of teaching speaking skills.......................................65
3.1.1 Fluency and accuracy................................................................65
3.1.2 Corrective feedback and evaluation............................................76
3.1.3 The importance of pair work in LT..............................................79
3.2 Practical techniques............................................................................81
3.2.1 Information gap activities..........................................................82
3.2.2 Cooperative activities.................................................................85
3.2.3 Interviews.................................................................................87
3.2.3 Storytelling and retelling............................................................89
3.2.4 Role plays and simulations.........................................................93
3.2.5 Discussions and debates............................................................94

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3.2.6 Creative tasks...........................................................................96
3.2.7 Games......................................................................................99
4 Research........................................................................................102
4.1 Introduction.....................................................................................102
4.2 Data analysis....................................................................................109
4.2.1 Teaching approaches...............................................................109
4.2.2 Communication and the success of teaching speaking skills.......121
4.2.3 Teaching materials and using transcripts of recordings..............128
4.2.3 Accuracy versus fluency and corrective feedback.......................131
4.2.4 Assumptions about teaching speaking.......................................134
4.2.5 Practical techniques for teaching speaking................................137
4.3 Conclusion.......................................................................................140
Conclusion........................................................................................142
References........................................................................................144
Appendix A – List of abbreviations...................................................153
Appendix B – Glossary of terms........................................................154
Appendix C – Activities.....................................................................166
Appendix D – Questionnaire.............................................................197
Appendix E – Charts and tables........................................................206
Czech resume...................................................................................234
English resume..........................................................................................235

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1 Introduction

This thesis sets out to show the full scope of teaching speaking skills, which in

its entirety means more than just teaching ‘speaking’. The concept of teaching

speaking skills is presented with respect to the notion of communicative

competence. The main line of argument is consistent with the view that in

order to become competent speakers, learners must acquire a good command

of all fundamental areas of communicative competence: linguistic,

sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic.

In addition, this thesis considers the differences between speaking

and writing and advocates a teaching approach which takes these differences

into account. It also attempts to link relevant theoretical concepts and thoughts

to practice and considers their implications for language teaching.

Furthermore, it aims to present some of the ways of practising

speaking skills in the classroom focusing on fluency and offers a variety of

practical techniques which can be used in the classroom. Finally, it seeks to

answer my initial research questions, which are presented in one of the

following sections of this chapter.

The research part of this thesis consists of a comparative study that

investigates how teaching speaking skills is realised in practice by teachers in

the Czech Republic and Austria. Moreover, primary focus is placed on the

teachers’ assumptions and possible misconceptions about speaking as well as

the classroom techniques they use.

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1.1 Thesis structure

This thesis is divided into four main parts. In the introductory part the

underlying motivation behind the choice of the particular topic is discussed and

my research questions and hypotheses are presented. There is also a

subsection providing an explanation why the focus of the thesis is not restricted

to any particular age group of learners and a section attempting to define the

concept of ‘teaching speaking skills’.

The second part explores the subject matter from a theoretical

perspective linking the theoretical aspects to practical implications for classroom

teaching. First of all, it deals with the basic features of speaking, such as its

different organization in comparison with writing and the role of context. It also

makes a distinction between two types of communicative exchanges and

discusses the basic characteristics of conversation. It further presents the

concept of communicative competence, describes its components and discusses

the individual aspects which they entail.

The third part is practical and aims to present a range of

communicative activities that can be used in speaking skills lessons. Apart from

this, it discusses several individual aspects of speaking skills teaching, in

particular the fluency/accuracy dichotomy, corrective feedback and the

importance of pair work in language teaching.

The final part presents my own research in the area and suggests

further directions for investigation. The appendices include a list of

abbreviations, a glossary of terms, samples of activities to practise speaking

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skills, a questionnaire used in the quantitative research and charts and tables

accompanying the research part of this thesis.

1.2 Underlying motivation and research questions

In my profession as a teacher and as the head of a private language school, I

meet hundreds of students seeking language training each year, mainly adult

learners. In the introductory conversations we have with newcomers the

majority of them stress that they especially need and want to improve their

spoken language production. Moreover, a substantial proportion of people

consider themselves to be very poor speakers.

Interestingly, although they may be coming from different

backgrounds and their motivations for language study may differ – be it school,

work or personal interests – almost all of the potential learners agree that what

they primarily want to practise is speaking. They also wish to gain practical

skills which they could utilise in their lives.

Upon hearing the often repeated requests for practical speaking skills

training, one naturally starts to ask oneself why it is, that the need for learners

to practise speaking is so great.

It is undisputable that “face-to-face communication is the most

fundamental mode of human language” (Givón 1997: 92) and its training is

naturally sought out by learners for a number of obvious reasons. On the other

hand, this does not explain why so many learners frequently feel there is a lack

of speaking skills practice in schools and courses.

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Even though learners are to a certain extent responsible for their own

learning success, or the lack thereof, teachers can greatly influence their

learning experience and language acquisition (LA). After all, teachers are the

key players in the way lessons are organised and what skills are taught, down

to the individual tasks that students deal with. According to Tomlinson,

researchers stress that it is the teacher who determines what actually happens

in the classroom. Referring to Williams and Burden (1997) he further adds that

“the teachers’ own beliefs can affect classroom action more than a particular

methodology or coursebook” (Tomlinson 2008).

Although some teachers might argue at this point that they need to

follow certain guidelines or that they do not have much of a say when it comes

to decisions about coursebooks it cannot be denied that they themselves opt for

inclusion or exclusion of certain activities and extra materials in their lessons.

Furthermore, they also decide on the way these resources are used and how

each individual task is put into practice. Even under very restricted conditions,

this gives them some leeway to shape the nature of their lessons on a daily

basis and to place emphasis on the subject matter they consider important.

My hypothesis is that although many teachers may think that

teaching speaking skills is an important part of a curriculum, their assumptions

about speaking may prevent them from being successful in teaching speaking. I

suspect that many teachers fail to recognise important differences between the

nature of spoken and written texts in the first place. As a result, their speaking

skills training fails to meet their learners’ needs because it does not reflect real-

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life conditions of speech production and the scope of the skills that are

necessary for successful communication.

As early as in 1979, Allwright reports that “language teaching,

globally, has not led to a satisfactory level of communicative skill in the vast

majority of cases” and in making a reference to the content of textbooks and

national syllabuses he says that there has been an “apparent failure to ensure

that communicative skill is adequately represented in language courses”

(Allwright 1979: 167). Twenty-six years later, Thornbury still suggests that one

of the reasons why students complain about inefficiency of language teaching

(LT) when it comes to speaking is ‘lack of genuine speaking activities’

(Thornbury 2005: 28).

In my research I would like to put this hypothesis to the test. My

research supports Thornbury’s view that students need an abundance of

practical skills training opportunities and interactive speaking itself.

Furthermore, I assume that in general, teachers do not succeed in providing

these in their lessons on a broader scale. If this hypothesis proves true, one of

my objectives is to examine the reasons why this might be happening.

There are several different scenarios that might emerge from my

research. I hope to find some indication which of the following hypotheses is

the most probable to apply in reality.

My initial research questions are:

a) Do teachers deliberately omit speaking skills practice from their

tuition and if so what is their justification?

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b) Do teachers think they teach speaking skills but due to various

reasons teach something else instead or fail to interpret their training

as speaking skills training to their students? Here I would also like to

look at teachers’ possible misconceptions about speaking.

c) Do teachers think they include enough speaking skills practice but

this is not sufficient for learners or the teachers’ choice of activities

does not meet their learners’ needs? Here I would also like to find out

what the teachers’ self-image is in terms of their success in mediating

speaking skills.

d) Do teachers devote sufficient time to teaching speaking skills in a

meaningful way and exploit variety of activities but it is the students’

perceptions and their beliefs about the ways languages should be

taught that are problematic? Here I plan to investigate the teachers’

preferences for activities they use to teach speaking.

In order to find answers to some of the above-mentioned questions I

plan to carry out a survey in the form of online questionnaires that will be

distributed to Czech and Austrian teachers of English. My choice to conduct a

short comparative study of two countries can be partly explained by the belief

that I hope to be able to see if there are any differences between the two

countries. The potential similarities and differences would be interesting firstly

because of the historical link that has existed between the two countries for a

long time and secondly because the fact of having data from two countries at

my disposal would allow me to choose a contrastive approach.

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Contrasting the two countries might help me to interpret the results

more precisely. For example, if the research showed that the teachers in one of

the countries considered themselves more successful in teaching speaking

skills, it would be interesting to examine if this belief originates in the ways they

teach. My next step therefore would be to compare the activities and strategies

these teachers use with those used in the other country. My objective would be

to find out if any distinctions in terms of different teaching techniques and

assumptions about LT can be identified in the first place and if they can, to

what extent they might be linked to the potential success or failure of learners

in acquiring speaking skills.

Another point I would like to make here is that the importance of my

research can be substantiated by two major facts. Firstly, it is the recent rise in

interest in the area of speaking skills teaching. Secondly, it is the high number

of language educators dealing with teaching speaking skills in their language

tuition on a daily basis. Both these facts make speaking skills research highly

significant. In addition, as far as the former is concerned, even though the

interest in this area can be observed over the last thirty years or so, the

intensity of this interest has recently increased greatly. Here I am especially

referring to the last few years when speaking and its teaching finally started to

get the scope of attention they truly deserve with books by authors such as

Thornbury (2005), Nation and Newton (2009), Hughes (2011), etc.

Furthermore, I hope that the questions under investigation could

throw some more light on teachers’ current attitudes towards teaching speaking

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skills and their ways of dealing with them in the classroom environment seen

from a Central-European perspective.

This particular perspective is essential. EFL contexts are generally

under-researched when compared to ESL and there is a growing demand for

research data from countries which have traditionally been disregarded in

literature on methodology and LA (Tomlinson 2008). Apart from filling the

present gap, this research might also open new interesting questions and

indicate directions for further investigation.

Finally and very importantly, the overall contribution of this thesis

might also lie in its attempt to link theoretical concepts to their practical

implications for LT because as Cook (2009) points out: “despite the vast strides

in SLA research, few people have been interested in maintaining the bridge to

language teaching and only a fraction of the research has been applied to

classroom teaching”.

Consistent with this view is my last point that if the primary goal of

theoretical research did not consist in its further application in practice, the

research itself would become meaningless. This thesis therefore seeks to

consider practical implications of first language acquisition (FLA) and second

language acquisition (SLA) research for LT, linking theory to practice.

1.3 Target age groups of learners

This thesis does not restrict its focus to any particular age group for several

reasons.

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Firstly, many aspects of both foreign and second language acquisition

still remain unclear and need to be explored further including the question of

language acquisition (LA) at certain stages of life.

Unfortunately, there has been no systematic treatment of language

acquisition within the age group of adult learners in an EFL context in modern

books dealing with language teaching methodology or LA, and where the

question of age in LA is frequently discussed (e.g. Lightbown and Spada 2006,

Brown 2008, Hoff 2009, Hughes 2011, etc.). It is precisely this target group I

would be most interested to investigate. The fact that this field remains still

under-researched (Bygate 2009) would push this thesis beyond its scope, if the

target group was specified.

Secondly, there is no unified opinion on some issues of L2 teaching,

namely its relation to FLA. In general, it is now understood that certain

processes of FLA and SLA cannot be the same,1 partly because learners already

have their knowledge of L1 which they build on. Correspondingly, language

transfer is one of the processes that distinguish FLA from SLA and influence it

both positively and negatively.

On the other hand, it is also true that scholars believe that many

aspects2 which play an important role in FLA are likely to play a part in SLA, too.

Nevertheless, it remains unclear to what extent FLA processes can be

successfully transferred into L2 teaching and learning. Additionally, which

factors might facilitate or impede the transfer is also yet to be ascertained.

(based on Thornbury 2007: Chapter 7; Clark 2000)


1
e.g. cognitive development (see Lightbown and Spada 2006)

2
e.g. input and output or exposure to modified input (Lightbown and Spada 2006)

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As can be seen, with so many areas yet to be explored and questions

still to be answered it would be difficult to draw distinctions between different

age groups. Restricting my references to one specific target group might place

this thesis on fairly unstable ground since there is a considerable amount of

research yet to be done especially as far as adult learners are concerned.

To deal with these gaps in the present understanding of FLA and

SLA, this paper makes references to the findings of both FLA and SLA research,

which can be considered as relevant for the purposes of this paper on the

following grounds.

First of all, the extent to which FLA and SLA differ is still a subject of

investigation, as suggested above. Secondly, it is generally believed that there

is some correlation between child LA and SLA or foreign LA respectively, even

though there is no consensus in terms of the applicability of L1 principles on

EFL teaching. Thirdly, L2 research frequently arises from L1 research findings,

so FLA research will always offer new perspectives to SLA and foreign language

teaching, opening new questions to be answered. In fact, this makes all FLA

research relevant for those dealing with SLA, as the former is highly suggestive.

Lastly, not only does FLA research raise important questions for further

investigation but, it may also have important implications for teaching from the

perspective of a teacher which are to be considered.

In conclusion, coming back to my choice not to limit this thesis in

terms of a specific target group of learners, I would also like to hope that the

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thesis might be of some interest to anyone involved in teaching English who

happens to read this text, regardless of age groups they teach 3.

1.4 What is ‘teaching speaking skills’?

Rebecca Hughes makes an interesting methodological point that as far as

teaching speaking skills is concerned one needs to distinguish between

‘teaching the spoken form of a language’ and ‘teaching a language through

speaking’. She also stresses the fact that unfortunately, when compared to

writing, the spoken form is under-researched and that this may be one of the

reasons why teachers may feel more confident when using ‘stable written forms

and genres’ in their lessons (Hughes 2011).

At this point, I would like to argue that both of the above-mentioned

concepts are interconnected. This may also be one of the reasons why they are

rarely distinguished from each other when educators speak of teaching

speaking. To explain, I have observed that teaching the spoken form of a

language is not very useful if it is not practised through speaking. By analogy, it

can be argued that teaching speaking if the data used comes from written

genres cannot bring much of a result in terms of progress in spoken fluency

either. Therefore teaching the spoken form of a language using samples of

spoken texts should be part of teaching speaking.

On the same subject, I believe that Rebecca Hughes’s statement that

teachers may incline toward the written form of a language when teaching

3
Having said that, it needs to be taken into account that my perspective of reasoning, choice of
resources, activities, etc. are bound to be influenced by my ten years experience teaching adult
learners.

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speaking is consistent with my main line of argument. That is, that one of the

problems with teaching speaking skills in the traditional classroom setting is

that it is not the spoken but the written form of language and its characteristics

that are taught. As a result, teachers do not meet their students’ needs when it

comes to speaking skills training because in the end it is not speaking skills that

are taught.

What exactly is it then that the terms speaking skills and speaking

skills teaching refer to? The definitions of both these terms are closely knit

together with the definition of speaking.

Speaking has often been narrowly defined. When speaking skills are

discussed, this often happens in a context of public speaking. Speaking,

however, is much more than that. Broader views focus either on communication

realised to achieve specific purposes, e.g. to inform, to ask for explanations,

etc., or they describe speaking in terms of its basic competences used in daily

communication such as booking a room, giving directions, etc.

What these approaches have in common is that they view

communication and speaking as an interactive process in which individuals

alternate in their roles as speakers and listeners and employ both verbal and

non-verbal means to reach their communicative goals. Chaney’s definition

describes speaking in a similar way saying that speaking is “the process of

building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal

symbols, in a variety of contexts” (Chaney cited in Kayi 2006).

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Consistent with this view, is Nunan’s description of what teaching

speaking involves. According to him, to teach speaking means to teach

language learners to:

 Produce the English speech sounds and sound patterns


 Use word and sentence stress, intonation patterns and the rhythm of
the second language.
 Select appropriate words and sentences according to the proper social
setting, audience, situation and subject matter.
 Organize their thoughts in a meaningful and logical sequence.
 Use language as a means of expressing values and judgments.
 Use the language quickly and confidently with few unnatural pauses,
which is called as fluency.
(Nunan 2003)

Therefore, whenever the terms speaking skills and teaching speaking

skills are mentioned in this thesis, they refer to all the above-listed aspects. It

needs to be pointed out, however, that the scope of this paper does not allow a

special focus on teaching phonetics and phonology. Since this topic can easily

be singled out and treated in a separate paper, the first two above-mentioned

points will be excluded from further discussion. Nevertheless, it is clear that

teaching speaking skills involves teaching these features as well.

Before closing this chapter, I would like to make a distinction

between another two terms that are frequently mentioned throughout this

thesis: language acquisition and language learning, a distinction that has been

made since Krashen and Terrell (1983) and their acquisition-learning

hypothesis. They say that “language acquisition is the ‘natural’ way to develop

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linguistic ability, and is a subconscious process”, which is realised through

communication. This means that people are “not necessarily aware that they

are acquiring language” (1983: 26).

By contrast, language learning is ‘knowing about’ language or ‘formal

knowledge’ of a language. Learning is therefore conscious and refers to “explicit

knowledge of rules, being aware of them and being able to talk about them”.

(p. 26).

Similarly to Krashen and Terrell, this thesis builds on the view that

second-language learners, regardless of their age, can acquire languages

through communication and meaningful activities. However, this view is

somewhat reserved with respect to the evidence that shows that certain

features of language “seem to respond only, or better, to instruction”

(Thornbury and Slade 2007: 231). Thus effective LT is such where teachers are

able to a) create the right conditions for LA through giving learners

opportunities to experience natural language use and b) provide formal

instruction with features that are better or only learned through instruction.

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2 Theoretical framework

2.1 Basic features of speaking

Before some ways of teaching speaking can be discussed and compared to

practices of teachers in the Czech Republic and Austria, it is important to

understand what the main features of speaking are, as opposed to writing for

example, and what skills are involved in the ability to speak a second language.

These are the main points presented in this chapter.

2.1.1 On the seemingly disorganised nature of speaking

One of the basic features of speaking is that it takes place in real time. Due to

the time constraints that allow speakers only limited planning time, speech

production requires ‘real-time processing’ (Thornbury 2005: 2). This is one of

the main reasons why language learners, and this is not only restricted to true

beginners, tend to find speaking difficult. Strategies used to ‘buy planning-time’

(Thornbury and Slade 2007) significantly shape the nature of speaking and

distinguish it from writing. Crystal and Davy also mention time as “the main

factor which distinguishes written from spoken language” (1979: 87).

Consequently, ‘instances of disfluency’ (Thornbury and Slade 2007)

like hesitations, word repetitions, false starts, unfinished utterances and repairs

make speaking look less neat and tidy than writing when transcribed. Therefore

one might assume that speaking is disorganised or even inferior to writing. But

this is not true in reality. As Halliday explains “the formlessness of speech is an

artefact of the transcription”. If judged from the perspective of written texts,

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spoken language will always look chaotic on paper because first and foremost,

“it wasn’t meant to be written down”. (Halliday 1989: 77)

Burns and Joyce also state that “[...] speech, far from being

disorganised, has its own systematic patterns and structures – they are just

somewhat different from those in written language” (Burns and Joyce 1997: 7).

For this reason, judging speech through the measures of writing means to deny

its basic characteristics and the purpose for which it is used. Likewise if written

texts like contracts, articles and reviews are rendered in spoken form, they also

sound unnatural. Moreover, they are difficult for listeners to follow because

they were originally created to be used for a different purpose and through a

different channel (Crystal and Davy 1979). An analogy, albeit inverse, is also

true for spoken texts.

As early as in 1989, Halliday argues that “the spoken language is

every bit as highly organised as the written, and is capable of just as great a

degree of complexity. Only it is complex in a different way.” (Halliday, 1989:

87) In the book Spoken and Written Language, he also suggests that unlike

written texts, spoken texts are dynamic and tend to have a lower degree of

lexical density. By dynamics he means the tendency of spoken language to

represent experience as processes. According to his words, written language

describes the world in terms of its products and makes a greater use of

nominalization, e.g. improvement instead of improve. By contrast, when one

talks, one says that “something happened or something was done” (1989: 81)

and one therefore tends to use more verbs.

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In reference to lexico-grammatical structures, Halliday states that

written texts are lexically dense and their sentence grammar is simple, whereas

spoken texts having a lower level of lexical density have a greater degree of

grammatical intricacy. In conversation, however, this intricacy may be realised

across turns.

Illustrating his view on a number of examples, he further explains

that by grammatical intricacy he means the tendency to use a broader variety

of tenses and aspects in speaking. According to him, spoken discourse makes a

frequent use of clauses and employs a greater variety of both syntactic and

semantic relationships. He says that “it is often thought that sequences of

conversational discourse […] are simply strings of ‘ands’. […] Rather, they are

intricate constructions of clauses, varying not only in the kind of

interdependency (parataxis or hypotaxis) but also in the logical semantic

relationships involved.” (1989: 86)

On the same subject, in particular syntactic relationships in spoken

texts, Crystal and Davy state that “the most obvious continuity feature is simple

addition of another structure, itself grammatically independent, using a

conjunction” (Crystal and Davy 1979: 88), a view that Halliday seems to find

too simplistic as suggested above.

More than two decades later and building on the present research

evidence, Thornbury reports that the ‘grammaring’ of spoken texts is

“constrained by how much information can be held in working memory at any

one time” (Thornbury 2005: 4). As a result and as a way to compensate for

limited planning time, speakers use the so-called ‘add-on strategy’ in places

23
where written texts might use embedding or subordination. This strategy

means that utterances, phrases or clauses, are added one after another and

“glued together by the insertion of the appropriate grammatical markers” like

articles, auxiliary verbs and word endings (2005: 4). Thornbury therefore

describes speech as not only spontaneous but also as ‘essentially linear’. By

linearity he means the fact that speech is produced ‘utterance-by-utterance’.

Thornbury and Slade also talk about “layering of phrase on phrase rather than

forming sentence by sentence as in written texts” (2007: 13).

This linear aspect of spoken texts is also dealt with in detail in A

Grammar of Speech by David Brazil (1995). In this highly interesting and

innovative book, the author analyses grammatical, syntactical, discoursal and

intonation patterns that arise from the real-time processing demands and the

interactional character of spoken language. Expressing his dissatisfaction with

the poor representation of speech in conventional grammars, he suggests a

new way of looking at the structure of spoken grammar. Rather than thinking

of words and other entities as “occurring at places in a hierarchically arranged

structure”, he analyses spoken language in terms of “chains of elements

occurring in time” (1995: 47). On a systematic basis, he thus manages to

demonstrate a clear structure of a spoken grammar dealing with its individual

elements. Since this is rather a unique work, it would be desirable if more

studies into the nature of spoken language emerged and also if the link

between spoken data and speaking skills teaching was further explored.

Going back to the subject of lexical density mentioned earlier in this

section, advocating Halliday’s notion, Thornbury and Slade say that “another

24
characteristic of spoken language which is attributable to its spontaneity is the

fact that information is relatively loosely packed.” (Thornbury and Slade 2007:

13) Therefore both informational (as in Thornbury and Slade 2007) and lexical

sparsity (as in Halliday 1989) of spoken texts can be explained by the real-time

processing and the time constraints speakers need to deal with.

In addition, it can also be observed that both these aspects of spoken

language are inevitable from the listeners’ perspective as well because while

written texts allow readers to read a text as many times as necessary, spoken

texts do not (Burns and Joyce 1997). Consequently, listeners need enough time

to process the content of the utterances. Should it be too packed with

information or lexis, listeners would find it hard to absorb all that is being said.

Moreover, should the situation also require interaction from their part, it would

be quite likely for such a conversational exchange to shatter.

In summary, the aim of this section was to show that spoken

language “is structurally patterned, and displays an orderliness that is neither

chaotic nor random but, rather is tightly organized and coherent” (Thornbury

and Slade 2007: 27). The main point that has been presented is that speaking

has its own patterns and structures that are different from those of writing. For

example, when compared to writing spoken language uses more verbs and

clauses rather than nominalization. Furthermore, in places where embedding or

subordination might appear in a written text, speech freely adds utterances one

after another. In terms of its lexical and informational content, spoken language

25
is loosely packed–both to allow its audience time to process the content of

utterances and as a result of real-time processing that a speaker faces.

All in all, speaking is dynamic and is operating under conditions that

are substantially different from writing. This means that it does not always

involve using ‘grammatically complete and written-like sentences’ because while

written texts can be redrafted, spoken texts are results of one-shot production.

(Burns and Joyce 1997: 14) All these facts have important implications for LT,

which are to be presented in the section that follows.

2.1.2 Classroom implications: teachers’ expectations

This section explores several important implications for classroom teaching

arising from what was mentioned above. Firstly, it is crucial for teachers to

realise that spoken language is essentially different from the written one.

Teachers therefore cannot expect their students to speak in full sentences as if,

in fact, they were producing written texts. Not only is this not the way people

speak in reality but also expecting and requiring such skills from learners, would

place extremely high pressure on their speech production for no reason at all.

Such expectations might result in the learners’ later reluctance or anxiety to

speak.

Secondly, teachers should help their students understand the

important differences between speaking and writing and instruct them in the

ways to use this knowledge effectively when speaking. For example, learners

may be less hesitant to express themselves if they are shown that speakers

string chunks of language together bit by bit without composing entire

26
sentences in their minds before they start to speak4. They may also find it

useful to learn that repairs, hesitations, repetitions and vague language are

acceptable in spoken language because without it speech production would be

made impossible. Consequently, all these aspects can be practised in class

through the use of meaningful tasks. Because as Thornbury and Slade point

out: “If this organization [meaning the organised nature of speaking] can be

described in ways that are accessible to teachers and learners, there are likely

to be practical classroom applications. (This does not mean, of course, that one

such application would simply be to ‘deliver’ the description to learners without

some form of pedagogical mediation.)” (2007: 27).

My next point is that teachers involved in their own course design,

may find it useful to make their teaching more data-driven and consult further

literature dealing with detailed description of spoken language and its use of

lexico-grammatical structures. There has been a significant rise in research in

this area in recent years and books like Longman student grammar of spoken

and written English (Biber et al. 2004) or preferably Longman grammar of

spoken and written English (Biber 1999) provide quite detailed accounts of

spoken language use based on corpus research. Another book dealing with

spoken grammar in an unconventional way, which has already been mentioned,

is A Grammar of Speech (Brazil 1995).

Furthermore, teachers may also find it beneficial to make use of

spoken language corpora that are accessible on the Internet. They may even

4
Unfortunately, I could not find any evidence supporting this specific suggestion. It would be
therefore valuable if this hypothesis was tested in further research. If this argument was
validated through concrete evidence, it would have important implications for LT.

27
choose to teach corpus-based techniques in classroom for the benefit of their

learners. Conrad reports that even though “there is little empirical research into

the effectiveness of corpus-based techniques for language learning, […] there

are a variety of theoretical reasons for using them and many reports by

teachers of student interest and improvement” (Conrad 2008: 402).

Finally, it is essential for teachers to seek ways to give their learners

enough systematic training in the relevant skills, the full scope of which is to be

discussed at a later stage of this paper.

2.1.3 The role of context

As Hughes points out speaking is ‘fundamentally transient’ and words are

produced “within the ‘co-ordinates’ of a particular place and moment”. (Hughes

2011: 10) What follows is that speech, unlike writing, is context-dependent.

Nunan (2010) defines context as:

The linguistic and experiential situation in which a piece of language


occurs. The linguistic environment refers to the words, utterances, and
sentences surrounding a piece of text. The experiential environment
refers to the real-world context in which the text occurs. (p. 304)

Therefore spoken texts are not created independently, regardless of

the environment, the situation or the listeners. On the contrary, speech

production takes place in a shared context between the speaker and the

listener, whereby both these participants shape the final form of a spoken text.

The more shared context there is, the easier it is for the listener to participate

28
in a conversation. Tannen even describes a listener as a co-author and speaker

as a co-listener (Tannen 2007).

As a result, spoken texts carry a number of specific features:

 frequent use of referents like pronouns or deictic words (this,

that, there) pointing to the physical context

 ellipsis (deliberate omission of certain items), the meaning of

which can be reconstructed only from the context

 non-clausal stand-alone expressions such as ‘Yeah.’ or ‘Mm.’,

whose interpretation is heavily context-dependent

(based on Thornbury and Slade 2007)

It is the context that primarily helps us reconstruct the meaning of these

utterances. By contrast, in writing, these elements are used less or avoided

completely because written texts being decontextualised, need to be as self-

explanatory as possible5 (Burns and Joyce 1997). While ambiguities are not

desirable in written texts because there is no opportunity to provide further

explanations; the meaning of utterances that are ambiguous can be easily

negotiated in speech. Moreover, ambiguous utterances in speech are frequently

welcome because they are a source of humour, an important ingredient of daily

conversation.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, spoken texts also contain

numerous examples of imperfect language and instances of disfluency such as

5
The decontextualised nature of writing is also one of the reasons why it is important for
writers to bear their potential readers in mind and be as clear as possible. This is of course true
only for texts whose purpose is informational, not texts which are read for pleasure.

29
hesitations, errors or repairs, which can again only be understood in the context

they are used.

Still on the subject of context, it also needs to be pointed out that

context is generally regarded as an important contributor to LA. Netten and

Planchat-Ferguson (1995) list context-defined cues along with socio-cultural

framework as one of the three principles of LA6. They further state that “without

these context cues and cultural norms, sensory input for acquisition purposes

may be insufficient” (1995: 35).

2.1.4 Classroom implications: teaching materials

As has been indicated, spoken texts are not normally placed out of context in

real life. The same fact should be reflected in the classroom setting. Structures

and vocabulary should be viewed in their immediate context. Longer stretches

of spoken discourse can prove extremely useful in demonstrating how different

elements combine and work together to create a successful conversational

exchange.

Consequently, teachers should consider if materials and textbooks

they use reflect the features of spoken language both in their recorded and

transcribed forms. If not, they may want to consider searching for other

samples of spoken language which can be transcribed for a later systematic

training in class. Recordings are more accessible nowadays than they used to

be and it is not difficult to find desirable samples online. More high-tech

teachers may even consider recording their own spoken texts. In fact, this is

6
The other two principles they highlight are Krashen’s concept of ‘comprehensible input’ and
Giles and Coupland’s notion of integrative motivation.

30
something which can be done quite easily, e.g. while on holiday chatting with

your friends or asking your native-speaking colleagues to talk on a certain topic,

using specific language, etc. I personally have good experience with both using

recordings from the Internet and working in class with my own mp3 recordings

and I have seen both techniques being used with a few other teachers, too.

More than thirty years ago, Crystal and Davy (1979) complained of

the tendency of textbooks not to be real:

People in textbooks, it seems, are not allowed to tell long and unfunny
jokes, to get irritable or to lose their temper, to gossip (especially about
other people), to speak with their mouths full, to talk nonsense, or
swear (even mildly). They do not get all mixed up while they are
speaking, forget what they wanted to say, hesitate, make grammatical
mistakes, argue erratically or illogically, use words vaguely, get
interrupted, talk at the same time, switch speech styles, manipulate the
rules of the language to suit themselves, or fail to understand. In a
word, they are not real. (p. 3)

All these features are still deliberately being omitted from LT and

simplified and unauthentic materials are used. According to Burns and Joyce

(1997), inauthentic materials create a false impression of speech presenting

them with ‘unrealistic models of spoken interactions’ (1997: 87).

Burns and Joyce (1997) claim that:

If the overall aim of language programs is to prepare students to use


spoken language effectively in social situations, then teachers need to
present students with authentic spoken texts in the classroom. This may
include the use of recordings and transcripts of authentic discourse.

31
Teachers need to know how authentic texts differ from scripted and
semi-scripted texts and how to use this knowledge to assist second
language learners to develop speaking skills. (p. 85)

Furthermore, even though the authors recognise some of the

potential benefits of scripted dialogues especially at the beginning stages of

learning, they warn against their exclusive use and point out that:

(...) if students are restricted to scripted dialogues they will develop an


unrealistic view of the features of spoken language and will not be
prepared for their role as participants in spoken interactions in social
contexts. For students to be able participate in spoken interactions
outside the classroom, the teacher will need to introduce authentic
discourse gradually into the classroom. Authentic spoken texts are more
difficult for students to deal with and how and when students are
introduced to authentic discourse will depend on their level of language
and their goals. (p. 86)

Burns and Joyce report that to eliminate the big discrepancies

between unscripted and scripted texts, some material writers choose to use

semi-scripted texts that are created by presenting several people with a

particular spoken language to be used in their interaction. In a semi-scripted

interaction, the context, purpose for interaction and specific authentic language

to be used are identified beforehand. Burns and Joyce conclude that “these

texts are a good transition between scripted and authentic texts because they

introduce students to the feature of authentic speech in a controlled way”

(1997: 88).

32
Even though it is up to teachers when and how they introduce

authentic materials into their teaching, it is important that these are gradually

made part of LT. One of the tasks of LT is to help learners cope with real

operating conditions and real language. If authentic materials and language are

not used at all or rarely, the learners’ picture of English language is idealistic

but not real. Therefore authentic language and materials should become an

integral part of tuition in order to help students on their way to autonomy.

Learners who are taught mainly through simplified materials may feel more

confident about their English while in class but the minute they encounter a

native speaker and experience English used under real life conditions they are

bound to fail communicatively because they are unprepared for it.

What must be made clear is that using authentic materials and/or

work with transcripts of spoken data is not to be applied exclusively or

exhaustively. Similarly to others, my experience is that adapted materials help

learners progress faster from beginning to intermediate levels. However, this

advantage should not be misused at the expense of excluding real language

from classrooms – a practice that might make a language classroom a safe and

secure island for learners and teachers. It is clear that such a procedure would

not be desirable for learners in the long term. Along the same lines, Nunan

(2010) states that “learners should be fed as rich a diet of authentic data as

possible, because, ultimately, if they only encounter contrived dialogues and

listening texts, their learning task would be made more difficult” (2010: 27)

As Nunan further explains, one of the advantages of using authentic

materials in reference to context is that learners encounter target language in

33
the contexts where they naturally occur not where the textbook writer uses

them. In the end, this will help learners because they can experience how

language is used in relation to other closely related grammatical and discourse

items.

To conclude, let me point out that whenever teachers feel the need

to adapt a particular lesson and include authentic materials to promote their

learners’ learning experience, the key question to be considered is not how to

adapt the materials but how to adapt the task so that it suits the learners’ level

of proficiency (Nunan 1989). If this is done with care, teachers need not be

afraid to include extracts from radio and television, public announcements,

telephone conversations, answering machine messages, conversations and

lectures in their classroom. Such material will make a lesson a real learning

experience and bring the content to life.

My final point on the use of materials from textbooks is that teachers

should be careful not to use textbooks as cookery books in which all ingredients

are used exactly as instructed. As Tomlinson (2008) reports, “there is evidence

that what teachers and learners actually do in the classroom is determined

principally by what the coursebook tells them to do” (2008: 143). Textbooks

have their greatest potential if they are used thoughtfully as resource books

rather than a prescriptive manual and adapted both to the learners’ needs and

the socio-cultural context they are used in.

Similarly, if the teachers’ aim is to teach speaking, they need to

consider if the current materials correspond with their aims and to make

necessary alterations where desirable. If they find that the books include

34
content that is contradictory to their aims, they should substitute relevant parts

with more suitable resources or ideally, opt for a better suited coursebook, if

they have a choice. If this is not an option, they can grab this opportunity as a

challenge to include some more authentic materials in their lessons.

2.1.5 The types of communicative exchanges

Having discussed the question of context, let us concentrate on the types of

communicative exchanges that can be identified within certain communicative

contexts. Based on a communicative situation and its purpose, two main types

of communicative exchanges can be classified: transactional and interactional.

Bygate suggests that conversations are comprised of predictable

routines. He distinguishes between information routines (called transactional by

other authors) and interactional routines (Bygate 1987). Both types differ in

their purpose and structure. Information routines consist of a number of highly

predictable language structures. Their purpose is mainly to transact goods and

services, therefore transactional (Nunan 2010). They include service encounters

such as buying a train ticket, booking a room or negotiating a loan. By contrast,

interactional routines are not product-oriented. They are social interactions and

fulfil a phatic function, i.e. they signal friendship and establish social

relationships within groups (Thornbury and Slade 2007).

Nunan (2010) illustrates different functions of both types of

exchanges in the following conversational extracts:

Extract 1:
Store attendant: Morning.

35
Customer: Morning.
Store attendant: Nice day.
Customer: Uh-huh. Can you give me two of those?
Store attendant: Sure.
Customer: Thanks.

Extract 2:
Father: Morning, Darling.
Daughter: Morning.
Father: Sleep well?
Daughter: Uh-uh. The thunder woke me up.
Father: Loud, wasn’t it. And the lightning . . . . What are you doing?
Daughter: I’m going to finish watching that . . .
Father: Well, don’t have it on too loud. Jenny’s still asleep.
(p. 228)

Although it is self-evident that the purpose of the first situation is

transactional, there is an interactional element in the first part of the exchange.

Similarly, while the second extract fulfils mainly an interactional function, the

last line of the dialogue is clearly transactional (Nunan 2010). Nevertheless,

even though “many speaking situations can be a mixture of interactional and

transactional purposes” (Burns and Joyce 1997: 5), Nunan reports that

“Bygate’s routines facilitate communication for first language speakers because

they make the interactions more predictable” (Nunan 2010: 229).

Finally, citing Brown and Yule (1983), Thornbury and Slade add that

“primarily interactional language is primarily listener-oriented, whereas primarily

transactional language is primarily message-oriented” (Thornbury and Slade

2007: 20). Viewed from this perspective, one can come to a realization that

listener-oriented interactions will tend to be freer in terms of their structure.

36
This is mainly because interactional conversational exchanges can easily deviate

from their primary focus reflecting the listener’s personal involvement. On the

other hand, message-oriented conversations will be more clearly structured, as

evidence shows, pursuing their ultimate objective to deliver a message.

2.1.6 Classroom implications: communicative tasks use

The fact that interactions can be predictable has important implications for

teachers. They can help their students prepare for both types of conversational

exchanges: transactional and interactional. Since these have different features

and a structure, they require different skills to be trained.

On one hand, service encounters are relatively easy to deal with for

their easily predictable structures (Brown and Yule 1983) and students will

strongly benefit from practising various kinds of transactional interactions

because these will help them prepare themselves for real-life situations.

Moreover, Nunan (2010) stresses the fact that learning prefabricated

conversational patterns enables learners to ‘outperform’ their competence. This

means that learners can become relatively confident in many situations even

with rather limited language means at their disposal.

On the other hand, interactional exchanges, in comparison with

transactional ones, will probably bring more life and enjoyment in the classroom

thanks to their free nature and eventual inclusion of sharing personal

experiences. Moreover, the latter point is believed to be a motivating factor

facilitating LA based on the evidence from peer-interaction studies. Willis (1996)

even lists sharing personal experiences as one of task types to be used in the

37
classroom. Furthermore, as early as 1961, Billows stressed the importance of

‘personal speech’ in teaching (Thornbury and Slade 2010). Thornbury and Slade

also support the use of personalised talk by reporting that it has even become

an integral part of one of the methodological approaches, namely Community

Language Learning developed by Curran in 1976.

Thornbury and Slade complain of the methodologists’ preference of

transactional LT and their choice to neglect free open discussions in language

textbooks. They remark that many classroom activities, such as role plays, tend

to be too prescriptive (2010: 266). Consequently, classroom exchanges–

whether interactional or transactional–have a tendency to turn into

transactional turns leaving not much room for free interaction. By the same

token, if instructions and workplans are too detailed, learners numbly follow

their patterns in pre-given sequences focusing on task completion without the

need to employ their pragmatic and discourse skills. This is because they are

simply not required to think about a discourse as a whole and produce it

independently.

An example of such an activity is Activity 1 (see Appendix C), a task

that is also mentioned by Thornbury and Slade (2007), in which learners act out

a phone call following detailed guidelines. In each turn they are asked to

respond in a certain way following the diagram. My personal experience with

this task is that for many learners the detailed guidelines are rather counter-

productive. With these types of tasks it frequently happens that learners want

to add some extra information and by doing so, their conversation no longer fits

the pattern and they do not know how to proceed. This causes confusion and

38
sense of failure in the task completion. Other learners who, on the other hand,

follow the given pattern to the letter usually end up quoting parts of the given

phrases or sentences without changing them too much.

It is true that at beginning stages strictly guided tasks may help

learners focus on how to say things rather than think about what to say next

and thus extend their communicative potential – at least for the course of the

task. However, such training will not equip them with the skills that are

necessary to engage in similar interactions on their own in the long term.

Therefore, since the number of skills that learners practise in this way

is highly limited and such an activity has a tendency to turn into a drill exercise

rather than a conversation, freer tasks might be more appropriate allowing

learners to apply a broader range of skills. In terms of communicative practice a

better way of doing the same thing, that is practising telephone calls, is Activity

2 and even better Activity 3 (Appendix C), since learners are given more

leeway. In activity 2, learners A and B receive a different set of information and

act out their roles accordingly. Even though they are asked to convey a

particular message they are not told exactly in which part of the conversation to

do it. Nevertheless, once again the instructions are given exactly in the order in

which the conversation is likely to proceed based on the instructions the other

learner has.

By contrast, Activity 3 is a bit more genuine because it describes the

situation the learner is in and gives learners only general instructions such as

“answer the telephone and take a message”. This is the situation that

resembles real life most because in reality learners will hardly ever know who is

39
going to call and how they are supposed to react. Therefore using this type of

transactional task in class is likely to prepare the learners for real-life situations

best. Apart from this, learners are likely to enjoy the task more because using

cards instead of following instructions from a book is more interactive as well as

practical.

In comparison with transactional, interactional tasks can be much

freer, such as Activities 4 and 5. Activity 4 provides picture prompts and

questions which give learners a general idea of what they might talk about.

Nevertheless, the way they handle the task is entirely at their discretion. Apart

from pictures representing mainly popular American series, the activity also

offers culture-specific prompts which are likely to instigate more complex

interaction. Activity 5 is a success with learners because it is them who decide

how long each topic will be discussed and what questions will be asked. If they

are asked to pose questions and respond to them as quickly as possible, the

communicative exchanges can become very fast, highly competitive and

learners usually have a good laugh at it.

Since many communication exchanges require both transactional and

interactional language, a good example of how to prepare learners for that are

role-play cards which are cut up and distributed in pairs. Learners take turns in

picking up individual cards and act out the situations (Activity 6).

On the issue of interactional tasks, Thornbury and Slade indicate that

freer tasks such as ‘having a conversation’ are generally avoided in present

classroom teaching. They illustrate it on an example of task-based language

teaching (TBLT). They say that even though proponents of TBLT advocate

40
communicative environment creation in class and put their emphasis on

pragmatic language processing and meaningful language use which resembles

“the way language is used in the real world” (Ellis cited in Thornbury and Slade

2010: 267), conversation in itself does not seem to qualify as a task type in

task-based materials because it is not a clearly structured and goal-oriented

activity. They further explain that some scholars, such as Skehan, are sceptical

as to the value of conversation. In Skehan’s view “the elliptical and jointly

constructed nature of conversation is not conducive to the production of well

formed sentences, and speakers are able to ‘bypas syntax’ a great deal of the

time” (Skehan cited in Thornbury and Slade 2010: 269). However, based on the

findings in 2001, Nakahama et al. suggest that “conversation should be studied

in much more detail as a potential source of rich learning opportunities” (in

Thornbury and Slade 2010: 270), a conclusion which is consistent with

Thornbury and Slade’s line of argument.

As a result of a long-lasting tradition prioritizing transactional

activities over interactional ones, one of the challenges of language teachers

when teaching interactional language exchanges may be the shortage of

relevant resources. In the case of English, innovative coursebooks integrating

communicative activities – or at least offering materials that can be adapted –

are fairly rare but can be found nowadays. However, as far as LT in general is

concerned, the situation is pitiful. This is especially true with textbooks and

resources designed in countries where the tradition of form-focused LT has

been particularly strong: the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany being

illustrative examples. Thus, German teachers, for example, have to resort to

41
designing their own materials when teaching speaking. Unfortunately, searching

for communicative activities in German coursebooks, resembles looking for a

needle in a haystack7.

In summary, both transactional and interactional activities are highly

useful and should be included in LT in a sufficient measure to provide plentiful

opportunities for learners to practise using both types of communication

exchanges. In many cases, teachers will need to prepare extra materials to

cover both types of communication adequately in their lessons.

2.1.7 Characteristics of conversation

Coming back to the issue of free interaction practice, one cannot but notice the

fact that conversation is one of the most common types of speech production

that people are involved in on a daily basis (Thornbury and Slade 2007: 5). For

this reason, it is important for us to look at it briefly as a genre of its own.

Thornbury and Slade define conversation as follows:

Conversation is the informal, interactive talk between two or more


people, which happens in real time, is spontaneous, has a largely,
interpersonal function, and in which participants share symmetrical
rights. (2007: 25)

7
This statement is based on my five-year experience teaching German and using materials
available in the Czech market by German publishers, in particular by Hueber, Klett and others.
Having conducted a short empirical research of coursebooks by Hueber for the purpose of this
thesis, I found only a few activities which could be identified as communicative. The general
outline of all Hueber textbooks shows a strong accuracy-focused pattern, placing grammar and
vocabulary in the centre of LT.

42
Conversation, involving a two-way interaction between people,

requires from its participants a broad range of skills. Participants need to know

how to interact and manage talk. They need to be familiar with the rules of

turn-taking, that is they need to know when and how to interrupt, take the floor

and how to hold it, how to change the topic, how to signal they wish to speak

and how to yield the turn. Furthermore, it is important for them to know how to

signal interest and the fact that you are listening or even how to avoid long

silences (Thornbury 2005).

Quite importantly, all of these skills need to be employed readily at a

moment’s notice usually several of them at a time. For this purpose, speakers

need to be equipped with a number of discourse markers to signal the others

what their intentions are. Speakers also cannot do without paralinguistic cues,

such as various body movements, gestures, appropriate use of eye contact,

intakes of breath and so forth.

One of the concepts that is very important from a methodological

point of view for many types of conversational exchanges, is the concept of

adjacency pairs. Thornbury and Slade emphasise that “(…) the basic unit of

interaction is the adjacency pair” (Thornbury and Slade 2007: 114). They

further explain that “an adjacency pair is composed of two turns produced by

different speakers which are placed adjacently and where the second utterance

is identified as related to the first” (2007: 115). Adjacency pairs typically include

stereotypical exchanges such as question/answer; complaint/denial;

offer/accept; request/grant; compliment/rejection; challenge/rejection, and

43
instruct/receipt. A successful conversation typically includes a number of such

exchanges with one speaker initiating the move and the other one responding.

Another fact that is stressed by some scholars is that the success of a

conversation depends on how cooperative both speakers are (Tannen 2007).

Typically, the more cooperation there is, the fewer overlaps occur. The same

applies for turn-taking. Smooth transitions between turns usually happen with

speakers that collaborate (Burns and Joyce 1997). As a result, conversation

always needs to be viewed as an act of multiple parties where each individual is

responsible for the potential success or failure of a communication.

Consequently, it can be said that conversation is greatly shaped by

individual personalities of all participating members and their styles of

communication. This means that even under ideal conditions, when all speakers

converse in their L1, not all conversations are successful. If for whatever reason

one of the speakers is uncooperative, this will be reflected in the conversation.

Similarly, Hughes 2006 refers to evidence that communicative success of L2

speakers in L2 environment depends on the attitude of native speaker towards

non-native speaker. If this is negative, the communication is more likely to fail.

By analogy, conversations between speakers who have different levels of

knowledge may still be highly successful if all the participating members

cooperate; for instance, if native or highly advanced speakers are willing to

provide assistance to those whose level of language proficiency is lower.

In summary, to actively participate in a conversation requires a broad

range of skills. Speakers need to know how to interact and manage the talk and

need to be familiar with the rules of turn-taking. Apart from these, speakers

44
need to know how to effectively realise initiating and responding moves

through the use of the so-called adjacency pairs. Nevertheless, however high

their level of proficiency might be, the success of a conversation still depends

on all members taking part in a particular conversational exchange.

2.1.8 Classroom implications: challenges of conversational classes

To be able to engage oneself in a conversation using all the above-mentioned

techniques requires a great deal of skill. To become a truly effective participant

of a conversation means to be able to interact with others spontaneously under

many different and unexpected conditions and about a broad range of topics.

In this respect, purely conversational classes can be a challenge both

for teachers and learners. As a learner, it is challenging to become an effective

interlocutor in a foreign language especially if one does not possess these skills

in one’s L1 in the first place. By analogy, it is similarly challenging (if not

impossible) to become a good teacher of conversational classes if one is not

aware of all the skills that speakers need and/or if one cannot utilise them

effectively oneself. As mentioned earlier, one’s personality also plays an

important role here because it fundamentally influences the nature of a

conversation.

Along the same lines, one thing I have observed is that it is essential

for learners to have teachers who they can learn conversational patterns from

on a daily basis – by observing the ways their teacher interacts in class. For

teachers to be able to serve as good models as far as conversation is concerned

is essential for several reasons.

45
Firstly, it is generally believed that languages are learned partly

through imitation (Lightbown and Spada 2006). Secondly, evidence shows that

teachers are a source of input for learners, even more so in an EFL context

where the language lessons might be the only opportunity for some learners to

listen to English being used. Thirdly, the teachers’ role in the exposure of

learners to language also should not be underestimated because it is a proven

fact that some aspects of language are acquired subconsciously. Lastly, being

able to experience various conversational patterns in their natural context

enables students to gain unique language experience that is likely to have a

positive effect on their LA. Depriving students of these opportunities, on the

other hand, is a fundamental pedagogical failure. By the same token, this is

what Lightbown and Spada complain about when saying that “in many foreign

classes, teachers switch to their students’ first language for discipline or

classroom management, thus depriving learners of opportunities to experience

uses of the language in real communication” (2006: 32).

From my experience, another fact that teachers face when teaching

conversation is that learners often do not realise the complexity of skills that is

required but attribute their eventual failure to inadequate knowledge of

language. Diligent students often try to learn as many new words as they can in

hope that their conversational skills will improve as their vocabularies grow.

However, the result of such striving can only be disappointing because as can

be inferred, no knowledge of lexis or grammar can substitute for inadequate

interaction skills. Undoubtedly, it is a teacher’s role to illustrate the complexity

of skills that are required and help their students acquire them. Secondly, it is

46
also a good idea to help learners understand one of the fundamental features

of conversation discussed in the previous section, which is that conversation is

a two-way interaction. Learners therefore cannot attribute eventual failure of

conversation to their linguistic incapacities.

All in all, teaching conversation amounts to teaching interaction and

everything that it entails. Some of the skills that are necessary for one to be

able to converse have been touched upon. The whole spectrum of knowledge

and skills that learners need in order to become competent speakers will be

focused on in the following part of this chapter. For, as one might infer from

what has been mentioned so far, the ability to speak a language involves much

more than mere linguistic knowledge. The range of knowledge and skills that

are necessary are called communicative competence, the notion which is

presented in the next section.

To sum up, this section aimed to introduce some of the main

characteristics of spoken language that make speaking and its production

significantly different when compared to writing. It also sought to link the

individual features of speaking to their implications for classroom teaching.

On a final note, it needs to be pointed out that for teachers, it is

especially important to be aware of the above-mentioned differences between

speaking and writing. If teachers take them into consideration, they will more

likely be able to create lessons that will truly help learners acquire skills that are

needed for an effective oral communication.

47
2.2 Communicative competence

2.2.1 Historical background

The notion of communicative competence was introduced by Hymes in reaction

to a restricted Chomskian concept of linguistic competence. In 1965, Noam

Chomsky made a distinction between competence, an ideal picture of ‘speaker-

listener’s knowledge of his language’, and performance, ‘the actual use of

language in concrete situations’ (Chomsky 1965: 4). Chomsky further explained

that as a record of natural speech, performance is imperfect carrying numerous

false starts, deviations from rules, etc.

In contrast, Hymes (as cited in Magnan 2007: 350) defines

communicative competence as the ability ‘to participate in [the child’s] society

as not only a speaking, but also a communicating member’. Hymes’s

understanding of competence is much broader than to comprise only a

linguistic perspective. Trosborg notes that Hymes expands the definition to

encompass “all rule-systems underlying language use, and thus accords a

central role to sociocultural factors” (Trosborg 1986: 9). On the same page, she

further adds that the work of Hymes “exemplifies the shift away from the study

of language as a system in isolation towards the study of language as

communication”.

Using the notion as a broader term similarly to Hymes, Allwright even

implies that “some areas of linguistic competence are essentially irrelevant to

communicative competence, but that, in general, linguistic competence is a part

of communicative competence” (Allwright 1979: 168). Looking at the diagram

provided by Allwright, it needs to be observed that should the diagram be

48
representative of the scope of both competences, Communicative Competence,

from what we know nowadays, would need to be portrayed as much a bigger

circle in comparison with Linguistic Competence (see Diagram 1 below

portraying the relationship between communicative and linguistic competence):

Diagram 1 (Allwright 1979: 168)

Canale and Swain extend the model of communicative competence to

comprise four interrelated areas of competence: linguistic competence,

sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence.

Let us take a brief look at what these four dimensions represent.

Linguistic competence refers to ‘the mastery of the language code’.

Sociolinguistic competence focuses on ‘the sociocultural rules of use, i.e. the

system of rules which determines the appropriateness of a given utterance in a

given social context’. Discourse competence represents ‘the appropriateness of

utterances to their linguistic contexts’, i.e. ‘the knowledge how to combine

sentences into unified spoken or written texts of various types’ (Trosborg 1986:

9–11). In Swain’s words, strategic competence can be described as:

the mastery of the communication strategies that may be called into


action either to enhance the effectiveness of communication or to
compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting factors in
actual communication or to insufficient competence in one or more of

49
the other components of communicative competence (Swain cited by
Scarcella and Oxford 1992: 72).

In other words, strategic competence refers both to tools that help

negotiate the meaning and compensatory tools that speakers employ to

overcome real-time processing constraints. This is a very interesting definition

as we shall see in the next section of this chapter.

So far, the notion of communicative competence has been discussed

mainly from the perspective of Canale and Swain’s four-dimensional framework.

There have been several more attempts to describe language knowledge and

skills that competent speakers have at their disposal. For example, a more

recent model by Bachman expands the concept of communicative language

ability to include several broad areas: organizational competence including

grammatical and textual competence, pragmatic competence including

illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence and

psychophysiological mechanisms8 (Magnan 2007). Other models also draw

heavily on Canale and Swain’s model from 1980.

All in all, the crucial point to be made here is that through the use of

CLT it has become widely understood that communicative competence should

be the primary goal of LT (Savignon 1997). The eventual model that is chosen

to describe this concept is secondary to this realization.

8
This concept was expanded further by Littlemore and Low (2006), who stressed metaphorical
competence to be a part of communicative language ability. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) moved
discourse competence to the centre of the model, stating that it is shaped by sociocultural,
linguistic and actional competences. Nevertheless, their five-dimensional model also does not
abandon the concept of strategic competence proposed earlier. (Magnan 2007).

50
To conclude, since all components of communicative competence are

interrelated, as Trosborg (1986) mentions; it is crucial for us to consider all the

above-mentioned dimensions. As can be inferred, teaching any of the

competences as well as any of the four skills means to teach the others, too

because LT is highly interconnected. Teaching speaking skills is no exception

here (Hughes 2011). Along the same lines, Bygate argues that for teachers the

central problem in conceptualising the teaching and learning of speaking may

be the fact that “it can be hard to disentangle the different dimensions of

foreign language speaking” (Bygate 2009). In the next section, the focus will

therefore be shifted to the individual aspects that learners need to incorporate

in order to achieve communicative competence.

2.2.2 Individual components of communicative competence

This section aims to discuss the individual components comprising

communicative competence. Although the concept of communicative

competence can be viewed both from the perspective of spoken and written

forms of a language, the angle that is taken here is that of the spoken language

production.

Furthermore, even though Canale and Swain point out that there are

two basic dimensions to communicative competence: knowledge and skill

(Trosborg: 1986), this chapter discusses mainly the former, i.e. the knowledge

that one needs to possess to become a competent speaker. However, it should

not be forgotten, that attaining communicative competence would not be

possible without a great deal of skill.

51
The concept of ‘skill’ represents the readiness with which one is able

to combine this theoretical knowledge in order to conceptualise, formulate,

articulate and monitor their thoughts with a certain degree of automaticity

(Thornbury 2005). Thornbury also stresses the fact that speaking is “like any

other skill, such as driving or playing a musical instrument: the more practice

you get, the more likely it is you will be able to chunk small units into larger

ones” and achieve fluency (2005: 6). Knowing that both concepts of knowledge

and skill are interrelated, let us focus now on the description of the former so

that some forms of practising the latter can be presented in the next chapter.

It has been already pointed out that communicative competence

consists of four dimensions: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic.

Linguistic competence that is to be discussed here encompasses the knowledge

of grammar, lexis, syntax, phonetics, etc. The following sections focus on some

of the above-mentioned areas and discuss the aspects which are important for

speaking skills teaching.

The grammar of spoken language is distinguished from written

grammar by several important features. Thornbury lists them in a clearly

arranged table (see Table 1 at the top of the next page).

52
Table 1 (Thornbury 2005: 21)

The majority of the above-mentioned aspects, such as clause addition (add-on

strategy or layering of phrases/clauses), ellipsis and hesitations, etc. have

already been touched upon in the previous sections of this thesis. The

remaining features result from the inherent nature of speaking in a similar way

to what has been described. For example, time constraints can explain for the

tolerance of vagueness and a two-way character of interaction in conversation

for the frequent use of question tags.

Other important facts which might be useful for teachers whose

learners aim to attain the spoken rather than the written form of a language

are summed up by Thornbury (2005) as follows:

 present forms outnumber past tense forms by 2:1.


 simple forms outnumber progressive and perfect forms by over
10:1.

53
 the past perfect and present perfect continuous are rare.
 passive verbs account for only 2% of all finite verb forms in speech.
 will, would, and can are extremely common in speech.
(p. 22)

By including this list, I do not mean to suggest that progressive

forms, past and present perfect continuous and passive voice should be

excluded from tuition. However, the time that might be wasted to help learners

attain an active command of these phenomena, might be better spent

practising other aspects of communicative competence that would actually

make a difference in terms of learners’ practical communicative abilities, e.g.

sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competences.

Having mentioned grammar, it needs to be pointed out that some

important discoveries have been made, which unfortunately have not yet been

properly reflected in LT syllabuses. In 1973, Brown and his colleagues found

that FLA of grammatical morphemes in English occurs in similar sequences with

all children (Lightbown and Spada 2006). To put it in a nutshell, morphemes

that are first on the list to be acquired are for example present progressive - ing

(Mommy running), plural -s and irregular past forms (Baby went), while those

that are acquired at later stages are third person singular simple present –s

(She runs) and auxiliary be (He is coming). (2006: 3)

Similar acquisition order has been found with second language

learners as Nunan (2008) reports. On balance, it needs to be said, however,

that some studies contradict the clear-cut pattern of these findings, albeit a

number of similarities can be observed. Nevertheless, research has also

54
confirmed that some aspects like the formation of questions or sentence word

order are acquired at later stages of LA (Lightbown and Spada 2006).

According to Cook (2009), the current version of this idea is

Processability Theory. This theory, proposed by Pienemann, claims that learners

start their spoken production by producing single content words such as water,

flower, etc. Then they learn how to combine words and put them in the right

order within one sentence. After that they learn how to move parts of the

sentence around to ask questions Does Jane like flowers? Finally, they learn to

use the right order in complex sentences such as reported speech I asked if

Jane liked flowers.

In spite of the fact that many EFL and ESL textbooks do not reflect

these findings, teachers should be careful about introducing these

morphologico-syntactical aspects too early into tuition or to persevere in their

teaching if learners are not ready to incorporate them into their L2 language

systems (see Dulay 1982).

Another significant part of linguistic knowledge to be discussed here

is the knowledge of lexis. Lexis does not represent only individual words, word

families and their usage in context but it also includes formulaic language such

as collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms and sayings, sentence frames such as

would you like a ...?, social formula like have a nice day, discourse markers,

e.g. if you ask me etc. (Thornbury 2005).

In reference to the range of vocabulary that is needed for spoken

interaction Thornbury and Slade (2007) quote Nation saying that “from the

55
small amount of evidence available, it seems that about half the words needed

to understand written English are needed to understand spoken English” (2007:

42). Thornbury (2005) adds that “according to some estimates, a vocabulary of

just 2,500 words covers nearly 95% of spoken text (compared to 80% of

written text)” (2005: 23). This is good news, since a similar percentage (90%)

is generally quoted as necessary for one to be able to make sense of any text,

whether written or spoken (e.g Lightbown and Spada 2006). What follows is

that the knowledge of roughly 2,500 words should be a sufficient range to

provide learners with an operational command of English lexis for spoken

interaction.

It is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss various vocabulary

learning strategies; nevertheless, let me add a marginal note that Oxford

(2011) lists a number of those that are considered positive according to

theoretical or empirical studies.

My last point in relation to the acquisition of lexis is that, FLA

research shows that vocabulary growth is mainly dependent on how widely

children read, as Lightbown and Spada point out. Here they refer to the studies

of Nagy, Herman, and Anderson 1985 and Dee Gardner 2004 (Lightbown and

Spada 2006). To support vocabulary growth of learners, teachers should

therefore encourage learners to read extensively. Designing collective reading

plans may be a good idea as well.

Sociocultural knowledge or to use Canale and Swain’s terminology,

the knowledge that forms sociolinguistic competence is composed of ‘social

56
values and the norms of behaviour in a given society, including the way these

values and norms are realised through language’ (Thornbury 2005: 12). This

kind of knowledge can be both extralinguistic and linguistic. Thornbury

illustrates this fact with the following example: “knowing whether people in a

given culture shake hands on meeting, or embrace, or bow, is extralinguistic;

knowing what they say when they greet each other is clearly linguistic” (p. 12).

Thornbury and Slade (2007) provide a humorous yet apt illustration: “it is a

sociolinguistic error to greet someone by saying good night instead of good

evening, but a sociocultural one to individually greet all the occupants of a lift”

(2007: 228).

Sociocultural knowledge is a type of knowledge that is typically

acquired within one’s own culture. Unfortunately, the bigger the gap between

L1 and L2 cultures, the more probable it is for the transfer of sociocultural

norms from L1 to have a negative rather than positive effect on sociocultural

competence acquisition (Thornbury and Slade 2007: Chapter 7).

Sociocultural knowledge should not therefore be underestimated.

According to research evidence, sociocultural rules belong to that part of

language knowledge that is best learned through instruction (Thornbury and

Slade 2007). If left to work out the rules for themselves, learners will find it

hard to counter the effects of negative transfer from their L1 relying only on LA

processes. With respect to the evidence, nowadays it is widely accepted among

scholars that sociocultural competence should be mediated in language

classrooms and various integrative approaches to teach culture along with

language have emerged since the 1990s. (See Savignon 2008) The question

57
remains, however, to what extent teachers are successful in mediating this

knowledge.

On the same subject, the fact that standard textbooks often choose

materials to suit a broad range of cultures does not make it easier for teachers

to educate their learners in the sociocultural area. As a result, the range of

topics that are traditionally covered in textbooks is rather limited and generic

across publishers. To reconcile this division between the contents of textbooks

and learners’ needs, EFL teachers need to search for suitable materials and

incorporate culture-specific topics to be contrasted in their lessons with respect

to the sociocultural background of their learners.

Another important aspect of sociocultural competence is what

Thornbury (2005) calls intercultural competence, i.e. “the ability to manage

cross-cultural encounters irrespective of the culture of the language being

used”. As Thornbury explains “knowing how to ask How do you do that here?

may be more useful than a list of ‘dos and don’ts’” (2005: 32).

Finally, as suggested above, sociocultural competence does not

merely represent the knowledge of values and the norms of behaviour in a

society, but also the way these are realised through language. The latter aspect

is to be pointed out here because negative transfer of discoursal and

sociolinguistic features from the learners’ L1 into L2 “may have much more

serious consequences than errors at the level of syntax or pronunciation,

because conversational competence is closely related to the presentation of

self, that is, communicating an image of ourselves to others” (Thomas 1983).

Thus violating the language use in terms of politeness will have more serious

58
impact than any other linguistic error. This is especially true if the speaker has

reached a higher level of communicative language competence. Unfortunately,

such errors will be understood not as a bad language use but rather as irritating

personal characteristics of the speaker.

Therefore it is absolutely essential to instruct learners in pragmatic

aspects of language, such as speech acts (see Austin 1962), frequently also

called functions. In general, speech acts cover a broad range of specific

discourse moves such as ways of giving advice, suggestions etc. Examples of

these might be: you may want to consider ..., you ought to..., what I suggest

is..., etc.

Because speech acts theory interrelates several areas of language, it

is not easy to place speech acts in one of the four dimensions of communicative

competence. Therefore they can be seen as part of sociocultural, discourse or

even strategic competence. Nevertheless, the important thing is that speech

acts or functions will enable learners to “choose the words which most suitably

realize their intention, and this does not always entail the most closely related

form” (Cook 1989: 41). Since the choice of words may often not be intuitive or

cannot be transferred from L1, there is a good case for the explicit teaching of

speech acts as Thornbury (2005) advocates.

The discussion of speech acts leads us to the third area of

communicative competence, i.e. discourse competence. Even though not

named specifically, this dimension has already been touched upon when

discussing the characteristics of conversation (see section 2.1.7). To sum up

59
briefly what exactly falls under this category, discourse knowledge involves

knowing how speakers realise their turns and signal their intentions through the

use of discourse markers. Discourse competence also enables speakers to be

coherent and use register appropriately.

The former, coherence and cohesion, are partly realised in a manner

that is different in speech from that, which is used in writing. One of the

aspects that make spoken texts hang together is lexis and its repetition.

Although written texts also make use of semantic cohesion, the use of lexical

chains unlike simple repetition is preferred (Cook 1989). In addition, spoken

texts also make use of reduplication (e.g. She inspected, her passenger, this

little old lady), retrospective labelling (e.g. Well, that’s what she said!), etc.

(Brazil 1995). Syntactically, the texts do not contain complex embedded

sentences and subordinations as do written texts. Utterances are linked by the

so-called add-on strategy9.

Which of these aspects should be taught is a question. In reference to a

part of discourse competence, in particular the knowledge how to manage

turns, Thornbury (2005) notes that “since this is a universal feature of spoken

interaction, it is not something learners need to be taught. They simply need to

know how these turn-management moves are realized in the second language,

through the use, primarily, of discourse markers” (2005: 33). On the other

hand, it is clear that certain aspects such as register and the correct usage of

discourse markers will more easily be acquired through formal teaching. One

fact should not be neglected when deciding for or against treating some of

9
The way how utterances are strung together in spoken discourse has been discussed in
section 2.1.1 of this thesis.

60
these features. This is that “there is an extensive literature on the potential for

misunderstandings due to negative transfer, specially of discoursal and

sociolinguistic features of the learners’ L1”, as Thornbury and Slade put it

(2007: 227).

Before discussing strategic competence, the notion of

‘communication’ strategies needs to be introduced first.

Communication strategies, a term coined by Selinker in 1972 (Elllis

1985: 180), are an important part of TEFL. A number of scholars note that their

use enables speakers (or language learners in the context of L2 acquisition) to

compensate for language deficiencies. This tradition of seeing communicative

strategies in terms of failure, that is as a compensatory means used to repair

broken language, has been particularly strong as Cook (2009) points out.

Communication strategies can be viewed from another perspective as

a positive tool that helps listeners to ‘negotiate meaning’. Hesitations, word

repetition and repairs are therefore not perceived as communication

breakdowns but as an effective tool enabling interlocutors deal with challenging

conditions which oral exchanges bring. This tool also helps the interlocutors to

understand the meaning of utterances that might otherwise be misinterpreted

or not understood at all. Moreover, it also helps them express thoughts they

would otherwise not be able to convey.

Canale and Swain suggest that communication strategies are to be

seen as a part of communicative competence. Instead of the term

communication strategies they identify the concept as ‘strategic competence’

61
(Trosborg 1986). This term is certainly more precise because it also covers the

concept of ‘production strategies’, which according to Thornbury and Slade

(2007) are often used in an attempt to use a linguistic system ‘efficiently and

clearly, with a minimum of effort’ (2007: 220). By contrast, communication

strategies are used in the search for missing linguistic knowledge. Nevertheless,

Thornbury and Slade further admit that both concepts overlap and it may often

be difficult to determine what motivates the use of each.

Still on the subject of the divided perception of strategic competence,

it is to be noted that Swain’s definition of strategic competence covers both

sides of the coin because she says that this term refers to:

the mastery of the communication strategies that may be called into


action either to enhance the effectiveness of communication or to
compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting factors in
actual communication or to insufficient competence in one or more of
the other components of communicative competence (Swain cited by
Scarcella and Oxford 1992: 72).

In other words, strategic competence refers both to tools that help

negotiate the meaning and the compensatory tools that speakers employ to

overcome real-time processing constraints. Niżegorodcew (2007) summarises

the concept by saying that: “Positive strategic behaviour leads to the

achievement of the communicative goal while the negative strategic behaviour

means avoiding difficulties or transferring the responsibility to the interlocutor”

(2007: 34).

62
In terms of whether to teach strategic competence, scholars’ answers

are not completely unified. For example, Cook (2009) states that “teachers may

not need to specifically teach communication strategies” but “simply encourage

students to make use of those they already prefer” (2009: 145). She reaches

this conclusion on the basis of Poulisse’s study (1990) carried out at the

University of Nijmegen, in which learners demonstrated that their L2 strategies

largely reflected the strategies which they used in their first language. Cook

therefore infers that strategic competence teaching is not necessary because

learners can simply transfer the strategies they already use in their L1.

By contrast, Niżegorodcew (2009) recommends strategic competence

training, even though in reference to Solarczyk she admits that there are still

few studies providing evidence for significant results. However, she makes a

reference to her own research stating that “positive strategic behaviour can

slightly increase low proficiency L2 learners’ competence”. Nevertheless, she

also points out that “the most significant factor influencing communicative

competence of the learners is their linguistic competence, that is, L2 proficiency

level” (2009: 34).

In consistence with Niżegorodcew’s view, Scarcella and Oxford (1992)

also define the strategic competence as a tool allowing effective speakers “to

stretch their ability to communicate effectively in their new language” (1992:

155).

My personal view of this issue is that strategies improving

communication abilities can help all speakers a) to be more effective and clear

in communicating their message and b) to easily overcome time-processing

63
demands. This is true for all kinds of verbal expression, whether speaking L2 or

one’s own L1, a fact which I have observed as a teacher and a language learner

and also as an occasional participant in sessions of Toastmasters International,

a non-profit educational organization teaching public speaking skills.

The range of skills that is needed for successful communication is

really broad. To summarise let me present a specific list of features that are

particularly useful for learners, as recommended by Richards (1990) for

teaching conversation:

 how to use conversation for both transactional and interactional


purposes
 how to produce both short and long turns in conversation
 strategies for managing turn-taking in conversation, including taking a
turn, holding a turn, and relinquishing a turn
 strategies for opening and closing conversations
 how to initiate and respond to talk on a broad range of topics, and
how to develop and maintain talk on these topics
 how to use both a casual style of speaking and a neutral or more
formal style
 how to use conversation in different social settings and for different
kinds of social encounters, such as on the telephone and in informal
and formal social gatherings
 strategies for repairing trouble spots in conversation, including
communication breakdowns and comprehension problems
 how to maintain fluency in conversation through avoiding excessive
pausing, breakdowns, and errors of grammar or pronunciation
 how to produce talk in a conversational mode, using a conversational
register and syntax
 how to use conversational fillers and small talk
 how to use conversational routines (p. 79–80)

64
To sum up, speaking and successful communication require

knowledge of linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic features. Even

though to some it may seem that linguistic dimension such as knowledge of

grammar structures and vocabulary are the major aspects of communicative

competence, research shows that deficiencies in other areas such as discourse

and sociocultural competence may have more significant impact on

communication than incorrect grammar use. On the other hand, it needs to be

pointed out that overall it is one’s language proficiency that has a significant

impact on the character of one’s performance. Thus, even though

communication strategies can help learners bridge certain gaps in their

knowledge, they cannot substitute for one’s overall low language proficiency.

Therefore effective speaking skills teaching involves systematic development of

all dimensions of communicative competence assisting learners in achieving

higher levels of proficiency.

Taking everything into account, one needs to remember that apart

from requiring a certain knowledge base, speaking is primarily a skill. This skill,

called fluency, will be presented in the next chapter.

65
3 Practical part

This part focuses on two important objectives of speaking skills lessons: fluency

and accuracy. In addition, it also touches upon error correction briefly and

emphasises the importance of pair work in LT.

Apart from this, the aim of this chapter is to present a range of

techniques which can be recommended for speaking skills practice. Most of the

examples of the individual techniques which are included here were chosen

especially because I have observed in my lessons that they had a positive effect

on the learners’ spoken production. In general, they helped learners progress in

their communicative competence increasing their fluency and/or accuracy and

learners enjoyed them. The majority of the tasks presented here are fluency

focused because in EFL textbooks, fluency-practice activities usually receive

substantially less attention than other types of activities. However, it needs to

be pointed out that the range of task types presented here is by no means

exhaustive.

3.1 Individual aspects of teaching speaking skills

3.1.1 Fluency and accuracy

Fluency/accuracy dichotomy is one of the concepts which usually come to mind

first when speaking of teaching speaking skills. According to Segalowitz (2003:

384), the term ‘fluency’ is “an ability in the second language to produce or

comprehend utterances smoothly, rapidly, and accurately”. This definition is

interesting because it clearly shows that both concepts, fluency and accuracy,

66
are closely knit together. Technically speaking, the term fluency is a hypernym

because to be fluent means not only to ‘produce utterances smoothly and

rapidly’ but also accurately. This is where approaches like Communicative

Language Teaching (CLT) are sometimes misunderstood. Wen Wu reports that

“one of the fundamental principles of CLT is that learners need to engage in

meaningful communication to attain communicative fluency in ESL settings”

(Wu 2008). Since fluency means also accuracy, it is clear that the aim of CLT is

to reach both.

Fluency is reflected mainly in two aspects: speed of delivery and

regularity, which means a natural amount and distribution of pauses (Bygate

2009). On the subject of appropriate placement of pauses Thornbury (2005)

says that:

Natural-sounding pauses | are those that occur at the intersection of


clauses, | or after groups of words that form a meaningful unit. | (The
vertical lines in the last sentence mark where natural pauses might
occur if the sentece were being spoken.) Unnatural | pauses, on the |
other hand, occur | midway between related groups of | words. (p. 7)

From my experience it seems, however, that the distribution of

pauses is completely omitted from LT. To investigate this a bit further I have

studied several EFL coursebooks10 and have not found any formal instruction on

the issue of pauses distribution. Even though it could be that the level of

proficiency that the books under scrutiny focus on is too low, I still cannot

remember this issue being addressed in any coursebook I have taught from

10
Cunningham and Moor (2008), Dellar and Walkley (2005), Hutchinson (2007), Kay (2008),
Redston and Cunningham (2009) and Soars (2007).

67
intended for higher levels. Although it may seem that teaching linking, stress

and rhythm – the issues which are usually included in ELT – are to a certain

extent linked to pausing, I would like to argue that appropriate placement of

pauses correlates more with the concept of tone units. They are the elements

that tell us exactly where pauses can be made.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any studies to confirm my

belief that formal instruction in this aspect of fluency is recommended.

However, from my personal language learning experience I remember having

benefited especially from learning about this phenomenon. It was only when I

learned how tone units work in English that I first started to notice how native

speakers put their utterances one after another in speech and where they make

pauses. Having instructed my students in this I have also observed

improvement towards more natural distribution of pauses and linking of words

with some of them. Therefore empirical research in this area would be

recommended.

Next, one of the issues that have been discussed in the previous

chapters is the importance of work with spoken data and transcripts in ELT. For

attaining fluency, the use of authentic texts and spoken data is significant.

Guillot (1999) reports that there are “practical as well as academic reasons for

making the study of spoken data – native speaker and learner data – an

integral ingredient of a pedagogy of fluency” (1999: 61). One of the reasons

that she lists is that “it can facilitate the emergence of individual paradigms of

fluency, enable students to identify the features and strategies of greatest

relevance to them as learners and communicators, and, concurrently, help them

68
to exploit both their strengths and weaknesses more efficiently” (p. 61). She

further states that:

(...) it provides a teaching and learning framework for approaching


fluency more critically, can be used as a platform for helping learners to
negotiate the shift from communicative control and sophistication, and
project the development of their fluency beyond the confines of formal
settings to transcend their inescapable limits – time and restricted
exposure to resources. (p. 62)

In other words, Guillot supports my previous argument that use of

spoken data facilitates attaining fluency and that fluency leads to autonomy. As

she further puts it: “to teach fluency, in this sense, fits in with what Grenfell

and Harris describe as returning ‘ownership’ of the language to learners” (1999:

62).

Quite importantly, in the light of research evidence 11, Thornbury

(2005) and Thornbury and Slade (2007) suggest that reaching native-like

fluency is only possible thanks to prefabricated chunks or formulaic language

that speakers use. These units include fixed phrases and idiomatic chunks such

as on the other hand, at the end of the day, or It’s a small world. Johnson

(1996) states that a great deal of formulaic language is acquired unconsciously

either from direct transfer from L1 or from exposure to authentic L2 input. He

refers to these language items as ‘acquired output’, i.e. language that is

acquired unconsciously and produced automatically in tasks which require ‘high

11
David Wood summarizes a number of studies that confirm the importance of formulaic
language for fluency, e.g. Raupach 1984, Sajavaara 1987, Pawley and Syder 1983, etc. (Wood
2002)

69
automaticity’. Oral communication due to its real-time processing demands falls

under this category.

There is evidence which supports the notion of acquired output,

particularly the importance of extensive exposure to authentic language input

for formulaic language acquisition and use. For example, Cock et al. found that

advanced speakers use prefabricated language less than native speakers and

for different pragmatic purposes (Thornbury and Slade 2007). There are several

other studies presented by Wood (2002) which suggest that language learners

use less formulaic language than native speakers due to limited exposure to

authentic input. In addition, Wood discusses further implications which these

findings have for LT. He recommends that classroom activities “consist of

exposure to large amounts of input, with attention paid to the formulaic

sequences being used” and stresses the importance of linking particular

formulas to particular pragmatic ends (2002: 10). Thornbury and Slade (2007)

making references to Lewis 1993 and Ellis 1998 and 2005 confirm that

acquisition is best achieved through massive exposure and explicit instruction.

In my experience, some of the greatest resources of formulaic

language which learners love to work with are songs and films (or series). Song

lyrics usually contain a good deal of chunks, idioms, etc., which can be

exploited in the classroom. One of the advantages of songs is that learners can

listen to them repeatedly inside and outside the classroom. If a song is

particularly catchy, learners are quite likely to memorise a great deal of text by

themselves. Apart from this, songs are good sources of authentic language,

allow learners to experience a variety of accents, motivate learning while

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making it fun, break down barriers and build a relaxed atmosphere. Besides,

songs can be used with all ages and practically all proficiency levels if they are

chosen appropriately.

In terms of practicality, with the arrival of the digital era, songs can

be easily obtained for classroom use along with transcribed lyrics on the

Internet. ESL websites describe a number of activities which teachers can

exploit when using songs. My favourite is to write down language from song

lyrics (e.g. formulaic chunks) on little cards and stick them on the board. In the

classroom, learners form two rows. While listening to a song, they compete to

be the first to grab the card with the lyrics written on it, which they have just

heard. A variation of this awareness-raising activity is to prepare more sets of

cards and distribute them in pairs. While listening to a song, learners put the

words in the same sequence in which they hear them.

As far as visual input is concerned, there is a great range of activities

that can be done with films, series, soap operas, etc. For instance, a teacher

plays a muted scene of a film and puts a few lines or phrases from the scene

on the board. In pairs, learners try to make a dialogue which might be taking

place in the scene while inserting the language on the board into their

dialogues. After that, they watch the scene again but this time with the sound

on and check what was really said. Next, they can reconstruct the dialogue

based on what they heard and saw. Another variation of this is distributing sets

of cards with phrases from the scene on them in pairs, or groups depending on

the number of actors in the scene. Learners do a similar activity but this time

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they grab a card with particular language whenever they use it in their

dialogue. The one who has the most cards wins.

Another good idea on how to practise formulaic language is to cut

out newspaper headlines which contain prefabricated chunks and ask learners

to speculate in small groups what the story behind the headlines might be and

agree on the version of a story which is most probable/interesting/unusual, etc.

This way learners use the language in the headlines meaningfully several times

while speculating about the stories. They also make use of a great range of

linguistic means when negotiating their stories. Next, learners can be asked to

present their ideas to the class. At the following stage, learners can be given

real texts which the headlines refer to. Discussing the stories with their partners

or within their groups, they compare how the texts differ from their own

stories.

Even though it has been said that fluency and accuracy are closely

linked together, for the purposes of LT, activities to practise speaking are

sometimes identified as fluency or accuracy focused. This is not to exclude one

of the two concepts from teaching but rather to point out what the main

purpose of the activity is, i.e. to concentrate mainly on using language

accurately or the ability to ‘get the message across’. The former is usually used

to practise a particular linguistic phenomenon or language. The latter concept

usually entails using a broader range of skills and helps learners train strategic

competence.

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Whether an activity is accuracy or fluency focused depends on a

particular task learners are asked to complete. For example, role plays can be

accuracy focused if learners are asked to use particular language or phrases

which have been introduced earlier in a lesson. However, the same task type

can be also fluency focused if learners are to act out roles that require a

broader range of knowledge and skills and the task is freer.

Typically, the more controlled a task is, i.e. requires learners to use a

fixed set of phrases or a certain formula, the easier it is for learners to

concentrate on a form and practise accuracy. Therefore tasks which require

only limited language are used as accuracy-focused activities. These include

certain types of information gap activities such as ‘Find someone who’ (Activity

7), questionnaires, picture description, etc.

The advantage of controlled accuracy-focused activities is that they

can help learners use language which they are not ready to use yet by

themselves and thus gradually transfer passive knowledge into their active use.

The downside of accuracy-focused activities is that they practise only small

samples of language. Furthermore, if too structured or offering a certain

pattern to be used, they do not require learners to think much about the

meaning of what they say and can become meaningless. This point has already

been discussed in the previous chapter with the section on transactional and

interactional tasks (see section 2.1.6). Another fact is that if teachers use

accuracy-focused tasks for language which learners are not ready to use, the

activity will not bring much of a result.

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When conducting accuracy-focused tasks it is important that learners

understand (and are instructed upon if necessary) that a particular activity is

accuracy focused. Otherwise a task can easily miss its aim. If learners do not

strive for accuracy but rather treat accuracy-focused tasks as a fluency practice,

their language skills will hardly develop further. This is mainly because

accuracy-focused tasks are designed to practise language in a very limited way.

Therefore it is crucial for teachers to make sure that learners understand the

real objective of an activity, albeit not stated explicitly at all times. In addition,

because of their limited language practice, accuracy-focused activities should

not be employed ad inifinitum at the expense of fluency practice.

All in all, for all accuracy-focused activities it is true that they should

be understood as transition tasks towards independent use of certain aspects of

language. It is therefore essential that teachers do not stop language practice

at the controlled level. The ultimate aim is to give learners opportunities to take

part in meaning-focused (rather than form-focused) activities. This can be done

at practically all levels through a gradual introduction of free tasks where

learners can utilise language that has been practised in a controlled or semi-

controlled way.

Unlike accuracy-focused activities, tasks focusing on fluency aim to

reflect natural language use, promote communication, require meaningful use

of language and produce language that may not be predictable. Thanks to their

lower level of predictability, they better reflect the requirements which are

placed on learners when producing spoken texts outside the classroom. On the

other hand, fluency-focused activities can be a real challenge for learners

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especially if their overall proficiency is too low. The key to success in this case is

to introduce free tasks into tuition gradually, to choose tasks which learners are

likely to accomplish, to pre-teach necessary language and strategies and

possibly to demonstrate how a task can be successfully completed by giving

learners a brief example.

Typical fluency-focused task types are opinion-sharing activities like

discussions and debates, storytelling, creative tasks such as designing plans for

a new school facility and board games which require learners to speak on a

particular topic, etc. Apart from this, many accuracy-focused tasks may be

adapted to focus on fluency as well. For example, Activity 7, the ‘Find someone

who’ task, can be made more complex by asking learners to expand their

answers if positive and report in detail about their experience, such as ‘the best

film they have seen’ or ‘the most beautiful place they have visited’. Naturally,

such a procedure is more time-consuming.

It should be added at this point that scholars differ in their

understanding of what is necessary for a communicative task to be effective.

For instance, first proponents of CLT suggested that three basic conditions must

be fulfilled in order for classroom communication to ensure progress in L2.

These are communicative purpose, information gap and language choice

(Littlewood 1983). By contrast, scholars supporting task-based approach

advocate L2 practice which is interactive, meaningful and includes a focus on

task-essential forms (Ortega 2007). To present contemporary trends of CLT, let

me use Brown’s list of seven principles for designing speaking activities:

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1. use techniques covering the spectrum of learner needs, i.e.

include both accuracy and fluency focused activities

2. provide intrinsically motivating techniques which appeal to

learners goals and interests

3. encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful

contexts

4. provide appropriate feedback and correction

5. capitalise the natural link between speaking and listening. Here

the author highlights the fact that language production is often

initiated through language comprehension. Therefore both

skills should be integrated in LT (see also Nation and Newton

2009).

6. give learners opportunities to initiate oral communication

7. encourage the development of speaking strategies

(based on Brown 2008)

To conclude, this section showed that it is necessary to utilise both

accuracy and fluency focused tasks in the classroom. Accuracy-focused

activities are likely to help learners use language correctly, while fluency-

focused activities will help them produce fluent stretches of language. On the

whole, fluency-focused activities are the ultimate goal in a classroom setting

because they help learners prepare for ‘what is out there’. As has been pointed

out, another important aspect of teaching fluency is assisting learners in

building their formulaic language. Furthermore, this section mentioned some

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important qualities of efficient speaking tasks, such as the need for them to be

meaningful, intrinsically motivating, to encourage authentic language use, to

provide feedback and to develop speaking strategies.

3.1.2 Corrective feedback and evaluation

One aspect which needs to be highlighted at this stage since it is closely

connected to the above-mentioned concept of accuracy and thus to teaching

speaking is error correction or corrective feedback.

Research shows that errors which do not interfere with meaning are

usually overlooked both in FLA and SLA contexts in real life. Parents typically

respond to their children’s errors in meaning rather than to those that violate

grammatical rules. Similarly, errors made by second-language speakers are

usually also left unnoticed if they do not impede with meaning. (Lightbown and

Spada 2006: 32)

It is therefore unnatural if teachers concentrate their corrective focus

mainly on structures and grammar rather than on meaning. Even though,

corrective feedback can be helpful, over-correction or frequent correction of

errors is neither effective nor encouraging for further spoken production. This is

especially so if learners are trying to formulate their ideas and their flow of

thoughts is interrupted by a teacher’s error correction. In fluency activities, it is

therefore undesirable for teachers to correct learners on errors which do not

substantially impede meaning. In general, it is recommended that corrective

feedback in such instances is provided after an activity.

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Besides, as Dulay (1982) concludes: “Correction of grammatical

errors does not help students avoid them” (1982: 263). By this she means that

errors which are made unconsciously rather than because learners are not

aware of the rules underlying the system or the natural usage of an expression,

will not be eliminated by a teacher pointing out to what learners already know.

Errors need to be unlearned through learners’ frequently practising language

while making an effort to ‘score higher’ when producing language. In addition,

as CLT suggests it is important to view errors in a positive way because quite

often they are a proof of learners’ ambitious attempts at testing new language

and their willingness to take risks when trying to express thoughts that go

beyond their level of proficiency.

Even though, some corrective feedback in LT is necessary, it remains

unanswered to what extent corrective feedback in classroom is helpful. On one

hand, it can be deduced that error correction is useful in cases where mistakes

are made due to not being aware of a pattern or a more natural way of saying

things. On the other hand, it needs to be considered whether learners are

ready to digest such information with respect to their proficiency. Another

question which cannot be answered easily is when and how to correct. Thus,

different teachers have different error correction strategies. Errors can be

treated directly during an activity, after an activity or learners can correct each

other.

Teachers may also prepare an awareness-raising exercise noting

down instances of learners’ incorrect language use and putting them into

sentences in which learners try to locate their errors. However, this practice is

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controversial with some saying that it is not a good practice to expose learners

to incorrect samples of language on one side and with those who object that

learners encounter incorrect language use when interacting with each other

anyway. All in all, in my experience it is an effective exercise if done

occasionally and for me as a teacher it is always good to realise what errors

learners perceive as errors and what incorrect or unnatural uses of language

they locate. Besides, as suggested above, the exercise also raises learners’

awareness of the language they can work on during their spoken production

practice.

My final note on error correction and on the decision of whether and

how to treat errors is that it depends on the type of mistake (e.g. grammar or

meaning), on the type of activity (e.g. fluency vs. accuracy focused) and a

learner’s perception of error correction. This last aspect is very important

because some learners feel threatened when corrected and may be discouraged

to speak out while others request corrective feedback and may even feel that

they are not learning anything if not corrected. This fact makes the issue of

error correction even more complicated and teachers need to make their own

decisions about how to proceed in individual cases. They may also want to

explain a bit more about how language acquisition works and try to eliminate

learners’ assumptions about how languages are learned if learners are blatantly

wrong. Nevertheless, my experience is that with adults in particular this is quite

a complex issue.

On the subject of feedback other than corrective, that is evaluation

after a task has been completed, it should be pointed out that it is

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recommended to provide a brief feedback after each activity. This is especially

so if the activity involved learners working independently in group work. 12

Majhanovich and Hu (1995) also add that “it is a good idea to have each group

turn in something tangible to the teacher after the activity. It keeps the

students task-oriented, gives information to the teacher about how well the

activity worked, and is something to base feedback on” (1995: 82). By the

same token, it is important for learners to get a feeling of task accomplishment.

Interrupting activities in the middle with no final outcome brings a sense of

irritation and purposelessness. However, if feedback is provided, an activity is

rounded off nicely even if learners do not manage to complete their tasks. This

brings a certain sense of satisfaction and meaningfulness.

3.1.3 The importance of pair work in LT

This section does not aim to present all the benefits of pair work, nor to show

how pair work can be used in classroom and discuss its possible challenges, for

this is not the main focus of this paper. What this section wants to highlight is

the fact that in EFL contexts, pair work should be used as much as possible in

LT for several fundamental reasons, which are presented below.

Unfortunately, research shows that teacher talking time (TTT) when

compared to student talking time (STT) differs substantially in ESL classrooms.

In general, the ratio of TTT versus STT is reported to be largely in favour of

teachers in many language classrooms. This does not correspond with the

notion that learners need a great deal of spoken practice in order to achieve a

12
Note: The term group work is usually used interchangeably in ELT meaning both work in
groups and pairs.

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certain level of fluency as some scholars believe and as has been suggested at

the beginning of this thesis. The notion of the importance of interaction has

been pushed further by a so-called interactional hypothesis. This is a belief

that: “language is acquired as learners actively engage in attempting to

communicate in the target language” (Nunan 2010: 309). As Nunan (2010)

adds: “The hypothesis is consistent with the experiential philosophy of ‘learning

by doing’.” According to interactional hypothesis, “acquisition will be maximised

when learners engage in tasks that “push” them to the limits of their current

competence”. (2010: 309)

The proponents of CLT also believe that interaction is an important

part of LT, thus making pair work one of the central concepts of learner-centred

LT. Apart from the fact that pair work increases STT, the assumptions about its

importance are also based on the evidence which shows that learners interact

better when talking to their peers rather than to their teachers (Pica and

Doughty 1985).

To conclude, pair work is the best way to give all learners as much

productive language practice in class as possible. The more time is spent in an

open-class setting, the fewer opportunities there are for individual learners to

interact, notwithstanding the fact that the time available to learners is

substantially shortened by TTT.

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3.2 Practical techniques

This section focuses mainly on activities developing fluency because in my

experience they usually get less attention in language textbooks, whereas

accuracy-focused activities can be found more easily.

One of the problems that teachers face with activities developing

fluency is that genuine speaking activities can hardly be planned. Bannink

(2002) states that “genuine conversational interactions cannot be the outcome

of preplanned lesson agendas, they have to emerge – and so, by definition,

cannot be planned” (2002: 271). This is especially so because the classroom

setting itself is adverse to real and genuine interaction. The best fluency

practice is therefore such that emerges from the situation, e.g. when learners

pose a question and a debate arises. Teachers should always exploit these

situations fully because they are likely to be one of the best examples of

meaningful and natural conversation occurring in class.

Apart from that there are numerous ways how to promote interaction

and fluency practice in class. However, it is important to remember that the

success of conversational exchanges is likely to differ from learner to learner

and from group to group. Techniques which may work with one class may not

be successful in another. Experienced teachers therefore use a broad variety of

techniques and adapt them according to the situation. Quite importantly, if an

activity does not seem to be working, it is more reasonable to drop it and seek

a better-fitting task than to push learners to engage in an activity they cannot

do or do not find interesting enough. All in all, fluency practice will best develop

with tasks which are intrinsically motivating.

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3.2.1 Information gap activities

One of the concepts that promote intrinsic motivation is an ‘information gap’.

Information gap activities are goal-driven activities where one or more learners

are given information which the others do not possess.

The significance of information gap activities can be supported for

example by the evidence referred to in Scarcella 1992 suggesting that

information gap activities are likely to produce bigger output for language

development than other tasks. Anderson et al. (1984) also refer to the fact that

for speakers it is satisfying and meaningful to be bearers of new information

and for listeners it is meaningful to receive information which they do not know.

They argue that for teachers it is reasonable to try and put learners in positions

where a functional information gap exists, i.e. learners really need to seek

certain information which the other learners posses.

Nation and Newton (2009) refine the concept of information gap

activities further. They argue that the term ‘information gap activities’ actually

includes two different types of tasks: split information and superior-inferior

arrangement activities. On the whole, they distinguish between four types of

activities according to how the information needed in the activity is distributed

among learners:

1. All learners have the same information (a cooperating arrangement)


2. Each learner has different essential information (a split information
arrangement)
3. One learner has all the information that the others need (a superior-
inferior arrangement).

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4. The learners all see the same information but each one has a
different task. (2009: 101)

Since the types 1 and 4 do not fall under the category of information

gap activities outlined above, let me focus on the arrangements number 2 and

3 in this section. The remaining two types will be discussed on different

occasions in the sections to come.

A good example of a split information arrangement task is activity 8

in Appendix C. In this activity learners are put into pairs. Both learners receive a

different photocopy showing pictures of two towns – one of a town in 1975 and

the other one of a different town today. Learners must not look at their

partners’ pictures. Their task is to find out how both towns changed asking their

partners questions. A possible follow-up activity would be to ask learners to

describe a neighbourhood they live in and discuss in pairs what changes they

have noticed or heard about. After that, learners could report shortly to the

class or divided into bigger groups what they have learnt.

Another split-information activity is a crossword where each learner in

a pair receives a different one with different words missing. Working in pairs,

learners take turns to define the words which the other learner misses. If

learners have not done this before, it is useful to pre-teach language such as

‘one down’ and ‘four across’, etc. Crossword puzzles are particularly helpful for

recycling vocabulary and are useful for practising communication strategies,

namely circumlocution. There are tools on the Internet that allow teachers to

design their own crosswords using the words they want their learners to

practise. A useful tool is for example a crossword maker available in Oxford

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Teachers’ Club13. Crosswords for pair or individual work are made within a

couple of minutes with this tool and look professional (see Activity 9).

Superior-inferior arrangement activities can be, for example, ‘drawing

a picture’ or ‘a treasure map’. ‘Drawing a picture’ is an activity which requires

little preparation. A teacher prepares a simple picture or a drawing – the

simpler the better, e.g. Activity 10. All learners but one are distributed the same

picture. The one who cannot see the picture stands by the board and tries to

draw the same picture according to the other learners’ instructions. Another

alternative of this activity is that learners do the same in pairs. One of the

benefits of this technique is that it promotes negotiation of instructions from

both parties.

An example of ‘a treasure map’ is Activity 11. Similarly to the previous

activity, learners receive maps – one complete and one blank version in each

pair. Learner A, who has the complete map, must not show it to Learner B, the

one with a blank map. Learner A describes the way to the treasure. Learner B

tries to capture the description on his/her map as accurately as possible asking

for a further clarification where desirable. Similarly to the previous, this is a

very productive task, which is also easily set up. Both pictures and treasure

maps can be downloaded from the Internet or drawn. Again simple maps work

better than overly complex ones. This is because complex maps and pictures

would take too long for learners to complete and would lose their appeal.

Another type of information gap activity is problem solving. For

instance, in Activity 12 learners role play two colleagues who work for an

agency which placed an advert in a newspaper. Based on their interview notes,


13
For the exact link see Activity 9 Appendix C.
the photocopy of which they receive from their teacher, they are asked to tell

each other about the best candidate they have interviewed. After that, they

choose the best candidate for the job by discussing the strengths and

weaknesses of each candidate. Finally, being placed in groups of four, they

present their recommendation to their client, who is played by the other pair in

their group.

Overall, information gap activities are a common type of speaking

skills training. Thanks to the information gap between the learners, the

activities prompt interaction and allow learners to engage in an exchange of

information negotiating meaning.

3.2.2 Cooperative activities

Cooperating arrangement or cooperative activities are such in which all learners

have the same information and work together to complete a task.

An example of this can be ranking tasks. In a ranking task, learners

are given a list of items and are asked to rank the items according to a certain

criterion. For instance, Activity 13 asks learners to rank the occupations in order

of how stressful learners think they are. After that, learners compare their lists

in pairs providing explanations for their choices. They can also be asked to

negotiate their choices and end up with a ranking their pair or group has

agreed on.

Ranking activities can also be based on a visual input such as Activity

14 where learners are asked to rank their preferences of restaurants according

to the photographs they can see. Learners might also be asked to reach a
compromising solution. In order to make the task more competitive, one idea to

tell learners to try and persuade each other about their points. Once again, this

activity provides a good opportunity to pre-teach functional language.

Another type of task which falls under the cooperating arrangement

category is a ‘joint task’ used in Part 3 of Cambridge Speaking Papers with PET,

FCE, CAE and CPE exams. These tasks can be easily arranged because they are

well covered online and in books preparing for Cambridge exams. Their outline

is always the same. Learners work in pairs (or in a group of three if there is an

odd number of learners) and are presented with pictures or photographs

related to a certain theme. They are asked to discuss the prompts and reach an

agreement following the instructions.

For example, in Activity 15 taken from a PET exam preparation

coursebook learners are presented with six pictures of different social activities,

such as a theme party, a picnic, a concert, etc. They are told that one of their

friends has a birthday and they should talk to each other to decide what

surprise they want to plan for him. Again, this type of task is a very good

opportunity to practise functional language like agreeing, disagreeing, giving or

asking for opinions. It can also be used for developing sociocultural, discourse

and strategic competences and practise aspects such as turn-taking,

interrupting, use of discourse markers, etc. Some of the tasks contain even

culture-specific content and are particularly useful for raising sociocultural

awareness.

Finally, teachers may want to set learners a time limit on this task. In

the original testing task by Cambridge learners are asked to complete the task
in three minutes. Nation and Newton (2009) make an important methodological

point in when saying that time limits encourage learners to reach a higher level

of performance. In my experience, this is true especially with learners at B2

levels and above who do not need all that much thinking time. However, it

needs to be noted that in certain types of tasks (e.g. debates, creative tasks)

learners should not be limited in terms of their preparation time to be able to

conceptualise their ideas nor in the time they might need to formulate their

ideas when speaking.

All things considered, training learners in the ability to negotiate their

ideas and reach a compromise quickly is desirable. Not only is this skill very

useful for all kinds of professions but it is also enriching for one’s personal

development and can subsequently help learners extend their L1 skills as well

while improving their English L2 communicative competence.

3.2.3 Interviews

Interviews can be motivating especially if they involve personal experience or

opinion sharing, a fact which means that learners engage in interactions that

interest them.

Interviews can have a simple outline, such as providing learners with

questions they can choose from to interview others – in a pair, group or an

open-class setting (Activity 16 in Appendix C). They can also involve learners in

taking notes of learners’ answers in a creative way, e.g. completing a map of

one’s life path or filling in a questionnaire which learners discuss together.


Learners can also conduct interviews on selected topics asking various people

questions which they prepared themselves.

Although interviews based on questions may seem an activity which

is easy to prepare, the truth is that it is not easy to collect questions that are

stimulating enough. If an interview is not to end up in a rudimentary question-

answer routine, teachers may want to look for questions that will instigate

longer turns, encourage learners to ask follow-up questions and promote

further discussion. Therefore, teachers should be particularly selective in their

choice of questions whatever resources they use. An interesting resource,

which I can recommend is Compelling Conversations by E.H. Roth and T.

Aberson (2008). This American English book contains a number of thought-

provoking questions on 45 topics, which can be photocopied and distributed in

class. Another way of using the questions which makes this activity more

enjoyable is to select particular questions and write them on cards. Learners

take turns to pick individual cards from their packs and interview their partners.

An example of an interview activity with a map completion is number

17, in which learners ask each other questions about their life experiences and

note short titles for each experience on their partner’s life map. Activity 18

exemplifies an interview activity based on a questionnaire learners complete.

They ask each other questions and note down their answers. With this activity,

teachers may want to encourage their learners to comment on their choices

providing further explanations. After the learners count their score they can

discuss to what extent they agree with the description of their personality.
Interviews can be followed by a short feedback activity where

learners present something interesting they have learned or provide more

information about each other to the class.

3.2.3 Storytelling and retelling

Storytelling is one of the techniques that can be employed with learners at any

level to increase their fluency. This is because stories are a good opportunity for

learners to practise longer stretches of discourse. Furthermore, research by

Ervin-Tripp and Kűntay (Givón 1997: 162) suggests that sharing experience and

stories can be motivating for tellers if met with prompts and collaboration from

their audience. Such circumstances are likely to turn one’s speech into a

performance. To promote this experience in class, teachers may want to

instruct learners on the ways of showing interest when listening and to raise

their learners’ awareness about the importance of feedback. This can be done,

for example, by contrasting two conversations – one with a good listener giving

encouraging feedback and another one with a listener who is more or less

silent.

There is a variety of techniques that involve storytelling. Learners can

tell stories based on their own experience, childhood memories, classical tales,

jokes, anecdotes or retell stories based on an input such as a text. For instance,

in activity 19 learners choose a classical tale they know based on the prompts

and discuss the story in their groups taking turns in their narrating. In a

different storytelling activity, which is likely to foster their creative thinking,


learners are given a set of words to create their own stories. This is a good way

of recycling vocabulary from the previous lessons.

Learners can also tell stories using a visual input, e.g. Activities 20

and 21. In the former, learners are given cut-up pictures which show the lives

of individual people in year 1990 and now. Learners match the pictures first to

find out how the life of each person changed. Then they make up stories

describing the development in the people’s lives from the past till the present.

The latter activity is based on a set of sequential pictures which each group of

learners is given. Learners put the pictures in the order in which they think the

story happened. Next, they take turns in telling the story.

Apart from pictures, teachers can also use cards as prompts for

storytelling. This is illustrated by Activity 22, in which learners pick a card and

try react try to tell their stories or talk on the subject on the card for two

minutes. While they are talking other learners try to interrupt them by asking

questions and stop them finishing. This is a very good activity for practising

ways of interrupting as well as maintaining a turn if relevant phrases are pre-

taught.

The topics for narrating or telling stories can be also organised in a

mind map. Mind maps are easily created with mind map software (Activity 23).

If using a very simple structure, a mind map can also be created in a word-

processor such as Word in MS Office (Activity 24).

A technique which is slightly different to storytelling is retelling. In

reference to other authors, Rachmawaty and Hermagustiana (2010) inform that

“retelling is a process of re-memorizing what we listened to and read” (2010:


3). They also mention the positive influence that a retelling technique has

saying that it promotes learners’ ability to rearrange information from the texts,

it develops their language knowledge through the internalisation of the texts’

features and overcomes difficulty using target language.

According to Nation and Newton, “the input to retelling is reading”

(Nation and Newton 2009: 70). I have also observed that presenting learners

with short texts which they retell each other is effective in terms of

enhancement of their communicative abilities. The texts to be read can be

accompanied by several questions to push learners’ output.

Another retelling technique involving information transfer which I use

is based on a recorded input. Learners listen to a recording and note down key

words to retell the content of the recording in pairs. From my experience,

recordings which learners are familiar with help learners extend their

communicative abilities. I have experienced that the technique of subconscious

listening of recorded materials outside classroom and subsequent spoken

output for example in the form of retelling facilitates LA and help learners

transfer knowledge from the passive domain into the active one through the

means of pushed output14.

Back on the subject of retelling, in reference to their study

Rachmawaty and Hermagustiana (2010) conclude that retelling techniques are

14
The technique of ample subconscious listening of tapes used for later language study was
proposed by Vera F. Birkenbihl (2002). Unfortunately, I am not aware of a research confirming
the link between systematic exposure to listening input outside classroom and LA. However, I
have observed notable results with the majority of learners who use the technique of
subconscious listening outside classroom which is linked to a subsequent systematic classroom
communicative language practice. Nevertheless, further investigation would be desirable.
recommended to be implemented “more often than usual in order to develop

students’ speaking fluency”. They also call for learners to collect short stories to

tell each other in or outside their classes.

Since this section also discussed various ways of using visuals to

stimulate spoken production, let me make a final note on a technique which can

also be used in LT and that is picture description. Describing pictures is an

activity which can be recommended especially for lower proficiency levels

because it does not require as complex organisation of thoughts and as fast

information-processing as more interactive tasks do. On the other hand, the

language that learners can produce on the basis of pictures is rather limited

and on the whole, the technique does not provide much of training in other

dimensions of communicative competence than the linguistic one. Therefore

picture description can be used as one of the techniques to practice accuracy

rather than fluency. It can also be recommended at beginning stages for giving

learners opportunities to put together whole stretches of spoken language and

experience the feeling of expressing oneself fluently when learners cannot

process language as fast as to interact in more complex situations.

Nevertheless, it is a technique, which in general should not be over-exploited.

Visual prompts including pictures can be used more dynamically. Andrew Wright

(2007) illustrates this by an example of showing a picture of the Eiffel Tower

while asking “Have you ever been up the Eiffel Tower? Are you afraid of high

places?” rather than eliciting objective descriptions such as “This is the Eiffel

Tower. It is very high.” (2007: 6)


3.2.4 Role plays and simulations

Role plays are another way of promoting speaking. Learners pretend to be in

various social contexts and have various social roles. Several examples of role

plays, namely telephone conversations, have already been presented in section

2.1.6 of this thesis in reference to transactional tasks.

Role plays are often designed for pairs but can also involve more

people. An example of an interesting role play to be acted out in a group of

four is Activity 25. Two learners play a couple of holiday makers who have

complaints about a hotel. Another two learners, the owners of the hotel, feel

that the complaints are unjustified or misguided. First, both couples prepare

themselves either to complain about the poor services or to defend themselves

in pairs based on visual prompts. After that, learners act out their roles trying to

reach some kind of understanding in the end. Again, if there is a special focus

on functional language such as making complaints, making apologies and

negotiating to reach an agreement the activity practises all dimensions of

communicative competence including sociocultural and discourse competences.

Another role play, which can be used as a warm-up or an icebreaker,

is called ‘I’m a fish’ (see Activity 26). Learners pretend to be fish and think

shortly about their lives as fish. After that, they mingle with the other fish and

talk to them about their day, worries, and plans for the weekend or even more

complex subjects such as global warming.

Simulations are a kind of role play with the only difference that

learners use realia, that is real objects which teachers and/or learners bring into

the class to make the situation more realistic. A typical simulation activity can
be ‘ordering food in a restaurant’ where learners are divided into two groups:

waiters and customers. The items which can be used are menus, knives and

forks, etc. Learners are given prompts describing their roles (e.g. you are a

difficult customer who complains about random things all the time) and act out

the situation of ordering and having a meal in a restaurant. Even though

simulations are unlikely to be practised in classroom on a regular basis, they are

a great spur for learners because they help them to see a direct link between

classroom English and real-life situations.

On a final note, role plays and simulations increase learners’ self-

confidence and encourage more hesitant learners to speak because it is not

themselves who they represent when speaking and thus they do not have to

take the responsibility for their utterances and actions (Harmer 1984).

3.2.5 Discussions and debates

Discussions give learners an opportunity to share their views and are a useful

means of training pragmatic and strategic competence and fluency in general.

Discussion and debates can touch upon up-to-date issues such as technology

(Activity 27), can include culture-specific debates such as the issue of the Czech

National Library by the world-renowned architect Jan Kaplicky (Activity 28), can

discuss advantages and disadvantages of a product/item/issue (Activity 29), or

can cover controversial issues (Activity 30).

I have observed that discussions are best performed in smaller

groups of 4–6 students. To instigate a productive debate, it is desirable to allow

learners enough thinking time to generate their thoughts. This can be done
through brainstorming in pairs. Learners discuss their ideas and become more

confident about what they have to say. While learners participate in debates in

their groups, a teacher monitors their discussions and provides further stimuli

where necessary. During a feedback stage, learners can report the main points

of their discussion to the class and receive feedback from their teacher. It is

appropriate for teachers to include a short segment, in which learners’ errors

are treated. It is also advisable to pre-teach useful language, especially

functions (expressing agreement/disagreement, giving one’s opinion, making

suggestions, structuring one’s speech, etc.), communication strategies

(hesitating, avoiding a question, changing the topic, etc.) and pragmatics

(interrupting, being diplomatic, etc.).

Discussions are stimulating if they concern topics or issues that

interest learners and/or challenge them. Topics which are quite likely to spur

debate more than anything else concern especially controversial and current

issues.

Another alternative to organising a discussion is to assign learners

roles such as in Activity 31. Learners are to discuss the issue of a congestion

charge which is to be introduced in a city. In the discussion, however, they act

as if they were a particular person from that town, e.g. a local resident, a local

politician, an environmentalist, a mayor, etc. Once again, such procedure is less

face-threatening because it is not the learners’ attitudes and ideas that are

challenged in the discussion. Furthermore, appointing a chairperson is very

effective and can be recommended for discussions in general, since it helps


prevent awkward silences and the learners are likely to get more involved in the

debate than otherwise.

The last activity I would like to present in this section falls under the

category of the number four arrangement as outlined above in reference to

Nation and Newton (2009), i.e. “The learners all see the same information but

each one has a different task” (p. 101). This can be exemplified by Activity 32.

Learners are told that they want to go on holiday. They are separated into

three groups where each advocates a different view. Group A wants to go on a

package tour around Europe, group B wishes to have a budget holiday by the

seaside in Croatia (a typical destination of Czech holiday makers), and group C

does not know where to go. (Group C is optional and can be omitted in classes

with fewer learners.) Groups A and B brainstorm points for their argument and

against the argument of their opponents. Group C prepares questions to ask

both groups for their later decision which of the holidays they want to take. In

the discussion, learners from group A and group B try to present their views

and persuade group C that their holiday is the best option.

3.2.6 Creative tasks

Creative tasks develop creativity and thinking, but are also effective in terms of

LT. Research shows that learners develop their fluency best, if they engage in

tasks where all their concentration focuses on producing something, rather than

on the language itself. Creative tasks should be allowed sufficient time so that

learners manage to finish their products and feel the feeling of satisfaction of

having completed a task.


Creative tasks resemble real-life tasks and can involve learners in

making a poster for a party, organizing a fictional (or real) trip including

producing their own itinerary, organizing a charity event, designing a TV

advertisement for a product (Activity 33), designing a room (Activity 34) and

other projects.

To illustrate how creative tasks can be conducted in class, let me use

Activities 34 and 35. In Activity 34, the learners work in pairs and are asked to

design a room. Learner A is a House Doctor and learner B wants to help. They

discuss together their ideas about how to design house A, but it is the House

Doctor who decides what to do and draws the items on the plan. When

finished, learners exchange their roles and discuss house B. This activity is an

opportunity for learners to practise making suggestions using language such as

How about..., Let’s..., Why don’t you..., etc. As with other tasks, it is useful to

pre-teach language the learners might need and encourage them to use it. Or

teachers may want to take the ‘noticing gap’ route: let learners perform the first

part of the task designing the first house, then discuss the language which they

may want to use. After that, teachers may want to encourage the learners to

improve their negotiation while designing the second house putting the new

language in use.

In Activity 35, learners are put in groups of six to design a new

community lifestyle magazine. They appoint a chairperson, who is to control the

group and ask questions, and a secretary to take the minutes. The chairperson

and the secretary receive photocopies (see Activity 35) to go by. Learners

discuss their ideas and agree on final looks of the magazine. After that, the
secretaries present their decisions to the class. The same task could be

extended by a productive phase in which learners would be asked to sketch the

first page and the content page of their magazine. The crucial thing when using

creative tasks in the classroom is to ask learners to make their products while

talking to each other, not after the activity. Thus they can negotiate their ideas

while in the process and have some more meaningful exchanges. Importantly,

it is not the completion of the final product that matters but the negotiation of

meaning which arises around it.

Another activity which does not directly fall under the category of

creative tasks but involves creative thinking and develops creativity is Activity

36 called ‘musical impressions’. Learners listen to songs and while listening,

they complete a chart which may include questions such as “How do you feel

about this song?” or “What do you think this song is about?” After that, they

discuss their ideas in class. Learners usually come up with many ideas and the

debate can become lively as their opinions differ. It is not important if learners

do not get the meaning of the song’s content – as long as the discussion which

arises is fruitful and meaningful, the task is successful. My way of performing

this task is to use extracts of songs rather than complete songs. They are

shorter and spur the debate in the same way as complete songs but prevent

the listening part from becoming too tedious. Extracts of songs can be made

with electronic tools which allow editing recordings. They are downloadable

online for free.


3.2.7 Games

Games can bring excitement in LT but should be used considerately. Playing

games for the sake of it can be as meaningless in terms of SLA as teaching

grammar for the sake of grammar. Playing hangman or word football at the end

of lessons because “it is not worth it to start another activity” is a bad practice

and a waste of precious time. Games are a great tool in LT if used purposefully.

A meaningful game is such that fulfils the conditions of a meaningful task as

outlined at the beginning of this chapter.

Games can involve competitions, quizzes, forming two lines

competing against each other, miming, guessing, board games, etc. An

example of a miming game is Activity 37 where a teacher gives learners an

imaginary object and they have to guess what it is by the way he or she picks it

up and passes it on. Next, learners say what they are going to do with it and

suggest other alternative uses. A guessing game is illustrated by Activity 38. In

pairs, learner A chooses one object and learner B asks yes/no questions to find

out what it is.

Some of the games that are popular with learners are board games.

LT board games usually ask learners to speak on a topic or answer a question

talking for a certain period of time when they land on it after throwing a die.

Teachers can prepare their own board games which cover the subject matter

they want their learners to practise. The website called ESL Lounge 15, for

example, offers several blank game board templates to choose from. An


15
The link to ESL Lounge for game board templates is: Board games http://www.esl-
lounge.com/board_gamesindex.shtml
Other game board templates can be found for example at DonnaYoung.org. The link is:
http://donnayoung.org/homeschooling/games/game-boards.htm
example of a self-made board game is Activity 39, which practises the subject

matter covered in lessons 1-40 of English for Life Intermediate coursebook.

Another illustration of board game is Activity 40, which is slightly more

interactive and can be adapted easily because it makes use of questions on

cards which learners either pick up or give each other depending on the

instructions on the square they land on.

As suggested at the beginning of this part of the thesis, the variety of

techniques presented in this section is by no means exhaustive. There are

many more activities promoting fluency which could be discussed here, such as

jigsaw activities, process descriptions, giving presentations and talks, playing

drama, and so on. However, even at this point one can see that the range of

activities to practise speaking in class is immense. In addition, one of my last

points to be made is that fluency and/or accuracy can be practised as a by-

product of most of the teaching time even though the main aim of a lesson may

be a focus on the four skills, grammar, vocabulary, functions or strategic

competence. This is one of the benefits of pair work in CLT.

There is one particular website I would like to recommend at this

stage to all those who seek further ways to help learners develop their

communicative competence. The website is called Foreign Language Teaching

Methods by The University of Texas at Austin16 and it contains extracts from

lectures and seminars dealing with teaching the four skills. It also covers the

areas of vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics and culture. Since the last two are

16
The link to the website is http://coerll.utexas.edu/methods/
not profusely covered in ESL textbooks, I would like to highlight these areas

especially. The videos, as well as all the website content, are inspiring.

All in all, the aim of this chapter was to present a range of techniques

which teachers can use to promote learners’ communicative competence. The

ideas discussed in order to provide a sufficient background for the following

chapter, in which, apart from other things, the techniques which teachers use

to teach speaking will be referred to.


“(…) the more teachers know about how people learn second languages the better
they will teach.” (Vivian Cook 2009: 139)

4 Research
The main aim of this chapter is to present the results of my own research

based on the questionnaires distributed among Czech and English teachers.

These questionnaires were to find out what the teachers’ assumptions about LT

and teaching speaking are and to test my hypotheses presented in the first

chapter.

4.1 Introduction
The two countries under scrutiny are in a comparable position in terms of ELT,

since they are both non-English speaking countries. From a geographical and

historical point of view, they are two neighbouring countries placed in Central

Europe with tight historical links. In present Austria, English is taught from age

6 (Year 1) as an alternative to other foreign languages, in the Czech Republic it

is taught from age 8 (Year 3) but in some schools it is also possible to start it

from the age of 6. The numbers of lessons taught per week are comparable.

On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that as a Germanic

language, German, which is spoken in Austria, belongs to the same language

group as English, while Czech is a Slavic language. This may also be one of the

reasons why Austria ranks among the countries where a large proportion of the

population claims to be able to speak English, a total of 53%, as opposed to

24% of Czechs17. The research results are also likely to reflect these facts.

17
Eurobarometer. Europeans and Languages. Fieldwork: May-June 2005. Publication:
September 2005. Retrieved from:
http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_237.en.pdf
Let us now turn to the research itself. The quantitative research

presented in this chapter was conducted on the basis of electronic

questionnaires, which were distributed to Czech and Austrian teachers via

email. The email addresses were collected from the Internet websites of Czech

and Austrian secondary schools. It was endeavoured to achieve an even

distribution of the questionnaire across both countries.

The total of over 800 English teachers were addressed with the

request to take part in a survey exploring teaching habits of Czech and Austrian

teachers of English. In the case of Austria, the over 400 contacts represented

almost all contacts for English teachers made available online. The number of

complete responses which was aimed at was a total of 50 responses by Czech

and 50 by Austrian teachers. The main variable restricting the number of

respondents taking part in the survey was therefore nationality. In order to get

an exact number for both countries, quotas were set to eliminate possible

responses over the limit. The complete sample was collected in seven days.

The electronic questionnaire was created using a paid online tool18.

On average, the questionnaire took 18 minutes to complete. The types of

survey questions which were used included mainly structured response formats,

such as multiple choice questions, Likert response scales and contingency

questions. There were also several unstructured open response questions.

For the purpose of the presentation in this thesis, the questionnaire

was converted into a static form to be printed out and is included in Appendix D

of this thesis. Unfortunately, this format does not allow seeing the filters, quota

The website where the tool is administered is called Click4Survey. The link to the website is:
18

www.click4survey.cz
and contingencies which were used in the electronic form in order to make the

process of completion quicker and the received responses relevant,

nevertheless this fact does not impede the general informative character of the

printed version.

The validity of the survey was ensured firstly by the fact that the

questionnaire was distributed to relevant contacts only, and also by several

subsequent measures. The first question “Are you an English teacher?” was

asked to eliminate ineligible participants. The second question inquiring about

the nationality of the respondents, contained three answers: Czech, Austrian

and Other. If the field “Other” was selected, the respondents were

automatically eliminated from the survey.

There was also a quota set on the distribution of responses in relation

to small towns and big cities. My reasoning behind this was that it would be

undesirable if the samples of the two countries would differ substantially in

terms of the size of the towns where the schools of the teachers were based,

since this factor might have an effect on the data received and it could make

further comparisons irrelevant. In the end however, this quota was not put to

use because the respondents fell within the limits which were set on this

question.

Looking at Chart 1 on the following page, it can be observed that the

differences between the two countries in terms of where the respondents teach

are not significant.


Chart 1 – Size of the town or city where respondents teach19
Q: How big is the town or city where your school is based? – It is ...

The majority of respondents, a total of 71% of those having taken

part in the survey, teach English in smaller or medium-sized towns with less

than 50,000 inhabitants. Out of these, the majority teach in small towns with

less than 10,000 inhabitants, comprising 42% of the total. At the bottom end

are respondents teaching in capital cities, at 10%.

To obtain some background information about the respondents

participating in the survey, the subjects were asked about their qualifications

and experience. The data shows slight differences with both factors. This,

however, does not influence the overall results in a noticeable fashion.

Chart 2 presents Austrian respondents as a more homogenous group

in terms of their qualifications. 90% of the subjects reported having a degree in

English teaching compared with 74% of Czech respondents.

19
Some charts contain the variable Other in their legends, next to Czech and Austrian
nationalities, even though the category is not represented in the charts. The variable itself does
not have any meaning in the charts, since it was included only for the purpose of the
elimination of ineligible participants. That the item is included in the legend is a feature of the
tool used for data analysis which could not be removed.

106
Chart 2 – Qualifications (Czech vs. Austrian teachers)
Q: What are your qualifications for the job of an English teacher?

Czech Austrian

The chart suggests that there might be more leeway in terms of

qualification standards required for English teaching positions in the Czech

Republic when compared to Austria. According to the chart, 14% of Czech

respondents stated having no degree in English in comparison to 2% of

Austrian respondents. Out of the former percentage, 4% of Czech subjects

admitted having no qualifications. Reading the answers which were recorded in

the “Other” field, representing 10 % of Czech respondents (see Table 2), it can

be noted that what was stated as the qualifications for the position of an

English teacher in most cases were Cambridge exams, followed by a

degree/course in pedagogy.

Table 1 – Qualifications (Other)

Czech:

Austrian:

107
Chart 3 – Experience in teaching English
Q: How many years of experience in teaching English do you have?

The respondents in the two countries differ slightly in the length of

their experience. Chart 3 shows that the biggest single category involves

teachers with more than 15 years of experience, at 41%. This category makes

50% of total Austrian and 32% of total Czech respondents.

Interestingly, 36% of total Czech respondents have less than 5 years

of experience compared to just 16% of total Austrian respondents. The

question remains how this data is to be interpreted. If viewed as a

representative sample of the group of English teachers in the Czech Republic

and Austria, does the data suggest that on average Austrian teachers have

greater experience than Czech teachers, or that Austrian teachers are

comparatively older than Czech teachers?

By analogy, the question remains whether more Czech teachers are

less experienced as a result of the fact that there is more new blood in Czech

education, or simply because they recruit from other professions? Since the

question of age was not relevant for the main part of the research and the

108
respondents were therefore not asked about their age groups, this is an issue

that would require further investigation.

In terms of correlation between lower experience and qualifications,

only a marginal link could be observed.

Unfortunately, the sample of 100 subjects was too small in order to

use Qualifications and Experience as one of the variables to observe any

patterns in the data in relation to these two aspects.

Quite importantly, when the data was studied from these two

perspectives, no observable patterns in terms of significance of qualifications or

experience were found simply because the overriding factor proved to be

‘nationality’. The same was true when studying the data in relation to the size

of the town the respondents teach in. Judging from the data obtained the

sample that would be required in order to observe any patterns in terms of

these variables would need to be up to ten times higher with respect to the

small representation of “unqualified teachers”, “teachers from big cities”, etc.

within one nationality. Taking the low-profile nature of the target group into

account, such research would be practically unfeasible.

To summarize, the facts to be pointed out before the main body of

the research is presented are that there is a slight difference in terms of

qualifications in favour of Austrian teachers. Secondly, almost 20% of Austrian

teachers had significantly more experience than Czech teachers. All in all, both

of these factors are marginal in terms of their overall effect on the results of the

research. The only factor which was observed as having a significant impact

109
was nationality. Therefore, further on, the data will be interpreted only in terms

of this variable.

4.2 Data analysis

This section aims to analyse the data which was obtained in the research.

To begin with, let me explain that for easier cross-referencing to

questions used in the questionnaire, the questions in the main body of the

questionnaire have been numbered, even though the numbers were not used in

the original version of the questionnaire.

Overall, when comparing the results of the two nationalities the

research shows some interesting indications. With some questions, the

distribution of the responses was surprisingly identical within both target groups

and there were only marginal differences between the two nationalities.

However, several questions revealed some significant differences. On the

whole, consistent patterns and trends were observed within the individual

groups distinguishing the way in which ELT is realised in both countries.

4.2.1 Teaching approaches

First of all, one of the things which the research aimed to explore was teachers’

approach to teaching and their preferences in terms of teaching individual

aspects of language. Even though the investigation of teachers’ teaching style

in general is interesting, this was not done for the description of their LT

preferences per se, but rather to find out what role the teaching of speaking

plays in the respondents’ ELT.

110
The questions which can be used for interpreting the teaching

approaches of teachers are 1 and 4. Question 1 was also included in the

questionnaire for other purposes, such as to observe what speaking techniques

teachers prefer to use (Question 1). Therefore, this aspect will also be partly

outlined in the following paragraphs.

First of all, let us focus on Question 1. This is a Likert scale question

asking respondents to rate individual activities on a scale from 1 to 5 (number 1

meaning very often, number 5 meaning never) in relation to the frequency in

the utilisation of the individual activities in class. To explain, most of the

activities which are on the list were discussed in Chapter 3, since their focus is

communicative. Apart from this, two more activities are included, namely

translation and dictation. This was done to test whether there is an inclination

towards grammar-translation approach of LT, which the question might reveal.

Interestingly, with some activities, the results show a similar pattern

for both countries while with others they substantially differ. The complete

chart showing data by all 100 subjects is included in Appendix E (Chart 4). The

data will be discussed from the perspective of individual activities.

There are three activities which show significantly different patterns.

These are translation, discussions and debates and oral picture description.

The most notable differences can be observed in the frequency of

translation activities in English tuition. Chart 5 shows practically opposing

attitudes to this technique.

111
Chart 5 – Frequency of translation activities in English tuition
Q 1: How often do your students practise English through the following activities?
Give 1,2,3,4,5. 1 = very often, 5 = never

While an overwhelming majority of Austrian respondents, accounting

for 72% of their total, never or hardly ever use the technique, almost half of

Czech respondents use it very often or often comprising a staggering 48% of

their total.

On the other hand, an inverse trend can be seen with discussions and

debates (Chart 6 on the following page). The research shows that a greater

proportion of Austrians, as opposed to Czechs use discussions and debates very

often or often, forming 68% of their total, while the same is true only for 42%

of the Czech. The most significant gap can be noted with respondents who

advocate using discussions and debates very often in their tuition. The ratio

differs between the two nationalities by 20%. While with Austrian respondents

it forms more than one-third of their total, at 34%, only about every seventh

Czech respondent, 14% of the Czech total, claim to do the same. Interestingly,

8% of Czech respondents report to never use discussions and debates in class,

whereas this is not even an issue with Austrian respondents.

112
Chart 6 - Frequency of discussions and debates in English tuition

Another activity which shows significant differences is an oral picture

description (Chart 7). The bar graph shows that the main difference lies in the

astonishingly frequent use of oral description by Czech respondents. More than

half of them (52%) reported to use the technique very often, as opposed to

only 20% of all Austrian respondents.

Differences which are observed with the frequency in the use of other

techniques are more or less marginal. The most noteworthy of these is perhaps

the distribution of answers with the technique of picture narrating using

sequential pictures (Chart 8). While overall this is not a technique which would

be frequently used, it seems to be slightly more favoured with Czech

respondents. 16% of total Czech respondents say they use the technique very

often in comparison with 6% of all Austrian respondents.

Chart 7 – Oral picture description in English tuition

113
Chart 8 - Picture narrating by several sequential pictures

Role plays, brainstorming and information gap activities show a very

similar pattern with both Czech and Austrian respondents. However, it needs to

be pointed out that all the three techniques are slightly more often put in use

by Austrian respondents. The charts showing the exact results can be found in

Appendix E (Charts 9, 10, 11).

The remaining techniques, namely interviews, storytelling and

dictation show surprisingly similar patterns (Charts 12 and 13, 14).

In terms of overall popularity of the individual techniques within the

two nationalities, the following ranking can be made:

Czech: Austrian:
very frequent 1. oral picture description 1. information gap activities
2. discussions and debates
2. information gap activities 3. brainstorming
frequent 3. brainstorming
4. translation 4. oral picture description
5. interviews 5. interviews
less frequent 6. discussions and debates 6. role plays
7. storytelling 7. storytelling
8. role plays
9. picture narrating 8. picture narrating
rare 9. translation
10. dictation 10. dictation

Table 3 – Frequency of use of individual techniques

114
Even though Table 3 is synoptic and should be understood rather in

terms of general trends than exact ranking of individual techniques, it shows

some significant differences between the two groups. These are put in bold.

Overall, the results suggest that Czech respondents prioritise form-focused and

accuracy-focused activities such as oral picture description and translation at

the expense of communicative activities like discussions, storytelling and role

plays. By contrast, Austrian respondents show a bigger push for freer

communication and creativity rather than controlled activities, since discussions

and brainstorming rank among the top three techniques in the pre-given list.

The most popular activities used frequently in both countries are

information gap activities and brainstorming, whereas dictation is at the other

end of the scale as the least popular and rarely used. Taking the broadness of

the term ‘information gap activities’ into account, however, it needs to be noted

that one cannot tell whether the term represents accuracy-focused or fluency-

focused activities. The knowledge of this might throw some more light onto the

interpretation of the data. This would need to be determined in subsequent

research. The broadness of the term, and a great variety of the techniques

which the term encompasses, may also explain its high ranking on the list when

compared to other rather narrowly-defined terms, such as picture narrating by

several sequential pictures.

Another question which is highly suggestive in terms of the

respondents’ teaching approaches is question number 4. In this question, the

respondents are asked to mark on a Likert scale how likely they are to teach or

do certain things in their lessons.

115
Table 4 – Interpretation of Question 4

Specific examples: Possible interpretations:


past continuous, going to x will, passive voice,
grammar
should / shouldn't

animals, school subjects, body, clothes vocabulary

complex grammar / grammar


past perfect simple, present perfect continuous,
used rarely in spoken
3rd conditional
interaction

creative tasks / task-based


making a poster, doing a survey, planning a trip
teaching
writing a formal letter, writing a description of a skills: writing / written
place production
booking a hotel room, buying a bus ticket,
real-life situations
ordering a meal, buying medicine
listening for main ideas, reading for specific
information, writing using linking words, the four skills
skimming
avoiding an issue, ways of getting thinking time
when speaking (e.g. using fillers such as well, strategic competence /
as a matter of fact, kind of, etc.), using all- communication strategies
purpose words like stuff and things

asking for advice, paying compliments, ways of


functional language
apologizing
reading a magazine article, watching or listening authentic materials use /
to a broadcast receptive skills

Before analysing the data that was obtained, it must be explained

that the question uses end-products rather than general terms. The purpose of

this was to make the question a bit more discreet and the answers less biased

as opposed to asking “Are you grammar-oriented?”. Therefore the categories

which the individual items on the list represent need to be interpreted first.

Table 4 lists the items from the questionnaire on the left, and their possible

interpretations in terms of general categories are on the right. For example, the

item “past continuous, going to x will, passive voice, etc.” stands for teaching

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grammar. In order to make the data analysis straightforward, the items will be

referred to in terms of the general categories they represent.

However, on second thought, it must be admitted, that there are two

categories on the list which are likely to be problematic. These are creative

tasks, and the last category on the list representing authentic materials use

and/or receptive skills. The problem with creative tasks might be that all the

three items on the list might bring different associations with different

respondents. For instance, for some, “making a poster” might represent asking

learners to decorate a room without any use of English instead of having a

task-based English lesson which this category is meant to refer to.

Similarly, “reading a magazine article” or “watching a broadcast”

might be associated with having a substitution class in which learners are left

with adapted English magazines to read or a film to watch but no teaching

actually occurs – a procedure which I experienced many times as a learner.

Therefore these two categories need to be taken into account with some

reservations. Having said that, this should not downgrade the validity of the

data, for it is to be interpreted mainly in terms of general trends rather than

individual aspects or items on the list.

Overall, when analysing Chart 15 it can be observed that with Czech

teachers, vocabulary is ranked the highest as the most important aspect,

closely followed by grammar and skills. By contrast, with Austrian teachers, as

Chart 16 shows, a substantially stronger emphasis is placed on teaching skills,

which is later followed by teaching grammar, vocabulary, and possibly authentic

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language use depending on how the first category on the list is to be

interpreted.

On the whole, three general trends can be observed when analysing

the data in this question. They feature significant differences between the two

nationalities in the likelihood of teaching skills in favour of Austrians (Charts 17-

19 in Appendix E), less significant differences in how likely grammar and

vocabulary are to be taught (Charts 20-22) and similarities in terms of teaching

other aspects of language such as real-life situations, functional language,

strategic competence, etc., which score the lowest with both nationalities

(Charts 23-26). Since the most significant differences can be observed with

teaching skills, followed by a few differences in teaching grammar and

vocabulary, these are to be focused on in the following paragraphs.

To begin with, as suggested, the biggest gap between the two

countries can be seen in their significantly different attitudes to teaching skills.

The bar chart on the following page illustrates the big gap between the

percentage of Austrian and Czech respondents. Austrian respondents are

completely likely to teach aspects which are related to skills teaching, a

staggering 82% of their total in fact. This is in stark contrast with only about

half of all Czech respondents (52%), who state the same.

Concurrently, the graph indicates that 16% of Czech respondents are

only slightly likely to teach skills, whereas none of the Austrian respondents

admit to this. In fact, counting the proportionate difference between the data

given by the two nationalities, it can be said that almost a half of Czech

respondents spend less time teaching skills than their Austrian colleagues.

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Chart 17 – The four skills
Q 4: How likely are you to do the following in your lessons?
 listening for main ideas, reading for specific information, writing using linking
words, skimming

At the same time, the graph suggests that 16% of Czech respondents

are only slightly likely to teach skills, whereas none of the Austrians admits this.

To summarise, counting the proportionate difference between the data given by

the two nationalities, it can be said that almost half of Czech respondents

(around 48%) spend less time teaching skills than their Austrian colleagues.

Reading two more graphs related to teaching skills in Appendix E

(Charts 17 and 18), similar patterns can be observed. While a high percentage

of Austrian teachers report to be completely likely or very likely to teach the

skills-related items on the list, Czech teachers are on average less likely to do

so, even though with these two graphs the gap is not as large.

On the other hand, aspects of language which are equally likely to be

taught in both countries are lexis and grammar (Charts 20, 21). However, while

in Austria they seem to be only one part of language teaching (Chart 16), with

Czech respondents these aspects score the highest. It can be inferred from the

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data that a certain proportion of Czech teachers20 are vocabulary and grammar-

oriented.

What is most remarkable is the emphasis on teaching vocabulary,

which 62% of all Czech respondents report to be completely likely to teach in

comparison with 50% of all Austrian teachers. In fact, the data shows that

teaching vocabulary groups such as “animals” or “school subjects” is Czech

respondents are more likely to teach vocabulary than any other aspect of

language. This is to be pointed out especially because most vocabulary groups

which were named on the list, in particular animals, school subjects and body

by no means refer to high-frequency words which would be necessary for

communication as opposed to other items on the list which are more likely to

help learners achieve both written and spoken communicative competence.

The last notable difference relates to complex grammar structures

such as past perfect simple, present perfect continuous and 3 rd conditional.

Chart 22 illustrates that Austrians are on average more likely to teach these

aspects than Czechs. Furthermore, the graph shows that every fourth Czech

respondent is only slightly likely to teach these aspects as opposed to every

eighth Austrian respondent. One interpretation of the data might be that some

of the respondents teach learners which are at a lower proficiency-level than

the others. However, with Austrian respondents it is striking that almost one-

fourth of them are more likely to teach these aspects than functional language.

20
The data does not allow the pinpointing a particular number in this case, as this was not the
objective of the survey, so the suggestion can be expressed only in general terms describing a
certain trend with some respondents.

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Chart 22 – Complex grammar / grammar used rarely in spoken interaction
Q 4: How likely are you to do the following in your lessons?
 past perfect simple, present perfect continuous, 3rd conditional

My interpretation of this is that on average substantially less time is devoted to

functional language in LT in comparison to other aspects. This is also partly

because this aspect is generally not well represented in English coursebooks.

To conclude, so far the analysed data suggests that Austrian teaching

of English indicates a strong tendency for a communicative approach while in

the Czech Republic English teachers incline to a grammar-translation approach,

although the data suggests that this is not true for all. On average, a

substantial percentage of Czech teachers having taken part in the survey

prioritise form-focused and accuracy-focused activities over communicative

ones and teach grammar and vocabulary as frequently as, or even more

frequently than skills and other aspects of language. By contrast, Austrian

respondents put a notable emphasis on teaching skills and strongly reject

translation. They also make a very frequent use of discussions and debates.

Overall, grammar and vocabulary seem to be understood as one of the most

important aspects of language which receive a strong focus in both countries.


Functional language and communication strategies are not taught to a

substantial measure in either country, even though both of these aspects are

represented in language classes of the two countries equally.

In conclusion, it can be inferred that on average Austrian learners are

likely to be better equipped in terms of their communication skills than Czech

learners who receive more form-focused than meaning-focused instruction.

4.2.2 Communication and the success of teaching speaking skills

Moving on to the question of communication, let me focus on Question 2 of the

survey which asked the respondents how often they students express

themselves in English in pairs, groups, in an open-class discussion and as

individuals. The complete results can be studied in Charts 27 and 28 in

Appendix E. The patterns are strikingly similar with both countries. However,

when studied in detail, it can be seen that Austrian learners are more likely to

express themselves in all of the above-mentioned situations.

The most notable differences can be observed with an open-class

discussion where the numbers of learners who speak in an open-class setting

very often or often differ by up to 24% in favour of Austrians. A similar pattern

can be observed with small groups where the difference makes 14%. This

result seems to correspond with the results of the first question in the survey

showing that Austrians prioritise discussions and debates, whereas the Czech

utilise them less frequently (Table 3 on page 113). It is interesting that learners

are reported to interact in pairs more or less to the same extent, with only a

small difference favouring the Austrian.

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Another section in the questionnaire investigates how teachers

evaluate themselves as far as successful mediation of teaching speaking skills is

concerned and how much they think their students are successful at expressing

themselves. This was a question 12 in the questionnaire in which the

respondents were asked to mark to what extent they agree or disagree with the

given statements on a Likert scale.

Overall, more Austrian than Czech teachers rate their lessons as

being effective in helping students to learn how to communicate in English (Pie

charts 29 and 30). 30% of Austrians strongly agree with the statement as

opposed to only 12% of the Czech. The other end of the scale shows that only

14% of Austrians neither agree nor disagree with the statement in comparison

with around one-third of Czechs (32%). In summary, 36% of Austrian

respondents more strongly agree with the statements than their Czech

colleagues.

Concurrently, more Austrians than Czechs report that their students

have plenty of opportunities to speak (Pie charts 31 and 32). However, the

differences are not dramatic. Strong agreement to the statement is given only

by 2% more Austrians than Czechs. Numerically this represents 20% versus

18% for each group. At the same time, only 6% of Austrian respondents rather

agree with the statement, followed by 20%, who neither agree nor disagree. In

comparison, the figures are slightly higher in the case of Czech respondents,

namely 10% and 26%. Counting all the differences together, the figures

suggest that 12% of Austrian learners are likely to have more opportunities to

speak than their Czech counterparts. Looking back at Charts 27 and 28

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discussed at the beginning of this section, it can be seen that the results of the

data from both questions correspond to each other. Comparing all the listed

opportunities for speaking such as interaction in pairs, groups, open-class

discussion and individual speaking which are reported as used very often or

often in Charts 27 and 28, the differences in figures range from 4% to 24% in

favour of Austrians. On average, 13% of Austrians report that their learners

express themselves in one of the situations more often than Czechs. Even

though the numbers are only approximate and need to be regarded only as

very rough figures, it can be concluded that there is some correspondence

between the general outcomes of both questions suggesting that a certain

percentage of Austrian learners have more opportunities to speak in their

lessons than Czech learners.

Along the same lines, Pie charts 33 and 34 show that more Austrians

assess their learners as being successful or rather successful at expressing

themselves in a foreign language. A stark contrast can be observed between

the two pie charts on the following page. According to these charts, 26% of

Austrian respondents strongly agree with the statement that their students are

successful as opposed to only 2% of Czech respondents. At the bottom end the

figures show that 12% of Czechs rather or strongly disagree with the fact that

their students are successful when speaking, while none of the Austrians thinks

so. Overall, the charts show that while three-quarters of Austrians think that

their students are fully or partly successful at expressing themselves, only

slightly over one-third of the Czech state the same, giving only a partial consent

to the statement.

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Pie charts 33 and 34 – Success of students in speaking
Q 12: My students are generally successful at expressing themselves in a foreign
language.
Czech Austrian

As far as the difficulty of teaching speaking skills at schools is concerned, the

Pie charts 35 and 36 below show that while three-quarters of Czech think that

teaching speaking is very or partially difficult, almost half of Austrian

respondents believe that teaching speaking is “OK”. The sharpest contrast can

be observed between the amounts of respondents who strongly agree with the

statement. While 20% of Czechs strongly agree, only 2% of Austrians think

along the same lines.

Pie charts 35 and 36 – Difficulty of teaching speaking skills at schools


Q 8a: Is teaching and practising speaking skills a difficult thing to do at schools?
Czech Austrian

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Table 5 – obstacles teachers face when teaching speaking

students themselves
external
or factors closely self-critique no answer
factors
related to students

Czech 72% 24% 5% 3%

Austrian 33% 67% 4% 7%

In reference to the above, Question 8b aims to find out what

obstacles teachers face when teaching speaking. This was an unstructured

question in the questionnaire and the respondents were free to give their own

descriptions of the problems they face. Based on the data, the table above was

composed. The table shows that there is a significant difference between the

factors which respondents mention. While the majority of Austrian respondents,

at 67%, name external factors to be the main problem, the vast majority of

Czech teachers (72%) refer mainly to their students and factors closely related

to them, as the main obstacles when teaching speaking.

Tables 6 and 7 in Appendix E look into the data in more detail and list

all the obstacles stated giving exact numbers of teachers that mentioned the

problem. The table shows that by far the largest obstacle for Austrian teachers

represents the fact that they are placed in large groups. Apart from this,

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teachers refer to inappropriate materials not reflecting their students’ interests

and needs, to other priorities in their schools and too many other things to be

done in classes than speaking. They also name lack of time and complain that

some learners turn to L1 when they interact in pairs or groups and several state

that learners lack discipline.

In contrast, Czech teachers see the learners’ uncooperativeness and

unwillingness to speak as one of the main obstacles. They report that some

students are not interested in the subject, lack motivation, that they are shy or

afraid to speak and they also complain that their students do not learn

vocabulary, do not remember things and are lazy 21.

In reference to the previous chapters of this thesis, it needs to be

mentioned that some answers of the Czech respondents showed a total

misunderstanding of the processes of LA. This can be exemplified by the

following assertions: “Students are shy, do not know what to answer even in

Czech. They miss words in English, I mean they can’t use them even they know

them.” or “Students are not able to turn ideas to the words.” Statements like

that show the some Czech respondents fail to understand that for one to be

able to speak a language the mere knowledge of things is not sufficient. As

discussed in Chapter 2, language is a combination of knowledge and skill. A

considerable number of answers suggest that what learners lack is practice as

well as an environment in which they will not be afraid to speak. However, a

number of teachers seem not to realise this, e.g.: “The students don't know
21
Here I am citing the data coming from the questionnaires. There was a certain difference in
the way the two nationalities reported the problems they face. While Austrian teachers referred
to “lack of discipline”, some Czech teachers talked of “lazy students” or even “low IQ”, etc. In
fact, attitudes to the learners with some teachers were striking.

127
how to express themselves, sometimes they are shy, they aren't used to

speaking English.”

On a final note, I would like to highlight the fact that this is not

meant to put all Czech teachers in general in a bad light. The fact is, however,

that a considerable number of responses to the question follow a similar pattern

to the one shown above. At the same time it needs to be pointed out that a few

teachers made comments reflective of the fact that designing genuine

communicative tasks and motivating learners is a challenge:

It's sometimes difficult to make students speak. It's necessary to create


situations which lead to speaking because of their nature (devil's advocate,
role-plays, etc.) and I am not always successful. The students themselves
sometimes don't have the initiative and I must try to make them enjoy the
speaking. And this is sometimes very tiring.

To conclude, the respondents’ answers and their descriptions of the

obstacles they face correspond with Pie charts 33 and 34 which show that a

substantial number of Czech respondents consider their learners as rather

unsuccessful when speaking.

Still on the subject of communication, Question number three in the

questionnaire aims to find out to what extent teachers themselves use English

in their classes and it also focuses on the use of materials. While the former is

to be dealt with in the paragraphs to come, the latter is described in the next

section.

Question 3 in the survey is a Likert scale question asking respondents

to rate the statements according to how strongly they agree with the

statements.

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The pie charts 37 and 38 on the following page show dramatic

differences in relation to the statement finding out to what degree English is

used in the classes from the part of the teachers. A staggering number of 98%

of Austrian teachers strongly or rather agree with the statement that they

speak English in their classes at all times.

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Pie charts 37 and 38 – I speak English in my classes at all times.
Q 3: Do you agree with the statement?

Czech Austrian

In contrast, this is true only for 70% of Czech respondents.

Furthermore, the charts show that a great percentage of Austrians strongly

agree with the statement, at 38%, whereas this is true only for 8% of the

Czechs. 22% of Czech respondents report to neither agree nor disagree with

the statement. In summary, the pie charts strongly suggest that Czech teachers

are more likely to turn to L1 in their classes than Austrian.

4.2.3 Teaching materials and using transcripts of recordings

A section in the survey which dealt with teaching materials and tasks

in them was number three, the Likert scale question referred to in the previous

section. Pie charts 39 and 40 on the next page present the data corresponding

to the statement, which probed the question of whether respondents include

authentic materials in their classes. According to the figures, substantially more

Austrian than Czech respondents use authentic materials in their classes. 56%

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of Austrians strongly agree with the statement in comparison with only 24% of

the Czech. Since the statement can be basically understood as a yes or no

question, it can be inferred that all those who do not answer “yes”, answer “no”

or prefer to avoid the answer by neither agreeing nor disagreeing. The number

of people avoiding the answer or saying “no” accounts for one-third of all Czech

respondents as opposed to 4% of Austrian teachers.

Interestingly, on the whole, the results strongly correspond with

Chart 19, which was to investigate how likely authentic materials are to be used

in classes. Even though, it has been noted above that the data in Chart 19

might be biased, this strong correspondence between the two questions is

interesting.

The other two statements in the question 3 do not show any major

differences. According to Chart 41, Austrian and Czech teachers more or less

agree that they adapt tasks and instructions in the book so that they better suit

their students’ needs. One-fourth of respondents in both countries strongly

agree with the statement and only a negligible percentage disagrees.

Pie charts 39 and 40 – I include authentic materials in my lessons.


Q 3: Do you agree with the statement?
Czech Austrian

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The remaining number of teachers rather agree – just over half of all Austrian

teachers and slightly less than half of all Czech teachers.

Chart 42 illustrates that the majority of teachers claim to design their

own activities and/or teaching materials. One-third of respondents in both

countries strongly agree with the statement and approximately another third

rather agrees. The difference in the latter is marginal with 4% of the total

number of respondents in favour of Czechs.

Furthermore, the survey looked into whether transcripts of recordings

are used. The data indicates that a substantial percentage of Czech

respondents make use of transcripts of recordings, a total of 82% as opposed

to 66% of Austrian respondents. 18% of Czech respondents claim to use

transcripts during an activity as opposed to 8% of Austrians. Almost two-thirds

of Czech respondents say they use transcripts after their activity, while only just

over half of Austrian teachers do so. In fact, one-third of Austrian respondents

say that they never use them.

Skills, the training of which utilise recording transcripts, are shown in

Charts 45 and 46. Interestingly, while the use of transcripts for practising

listening follows a similar pattern with both countries, transcripts are used

significantly rarely for speaking skills practice in Austria. However, the

differences are more or less fractional. Nevertheless, it needs taken into

account that the percentage of Austrian answering this question was lower than

for Czechs and the data represents only those teachers that report to make use

of transcripts in their lessons. On the whole, it can be said that transcripts are

put to use to practise listening skills more than speaking.

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4.2.3 Accuracy versus fluency and corrective feedback

Questions 5, 9, 10 and 11 deal with the concepts of accuracy and

fluency and corrective feedback. They also investigate whether teachers aim for

written or spoken features of language when teaching speaking skills. The latter

is focused on in Question number 5, which asks respondents directly whether

they aim for the standards of written texts, such as grammatical accuracy, full

sentences, etc. Pie charts 47 and 48 illustrate that 38% of Czech respondents

do aim for written standards as opposed to only 22% of Austrian respondents.

In actual fact, both these groups of people agree to the statement: “Yes, I do. I

don’t like when students make too many mistakes and use vague language or

gesticulate instead of using good grammar and vocabulary.” It needs to be

stated; however, that a substantial proportion of teachers advocate that it

depends on a situation. This is true for 42% of the Czech and 50% of the

Austrian respondents.

Both Czech and Austrian teachers further explain that their decisions

about the standards which they require depend mainly on the type of activity,

i.e. accuracy or fluency focus. Some add that in terms of accuracy, they

distinguish between errors impeding meaning, which they correct, and non-

impeding errors, which they do not correct. Apart from this, for Austrian

teachers it is important whether the context is informal or formal and how

frequent a certain mistake is. Some of them also point out that the level of

proficiency makes a significant difference.

Question 11 focuses on the same aspect, that is, whether teachers

take real-time processing constraints into account as far as spoken production

133
is concerned. The question asks the respondents to choose the speaker who

resembles more the way they would like their students to speak. While the text

produced by Speaker 1 contains numerous examples of real-time processing,

mainly hesitations, fillers, repetitions, or discourse markers, the text by Speaker

2 uses complete and written-like sentences without any pauses or fillers. Both

texts are grammatically accurate and use the same language.

Pie charts 49 and 50 in Appendix E show that Czech respondents

slightly incline to Speaker 2 and his/her written-like production, at 59%,

whereas Austrian respondents show a sign of inclination to Speaker 1 (spoken-

like production), at 56% of their total. In total, however, the difference

between the two countries forms only 15%.

Another question which is related to the above is error correction,

which was inquired about in Questions 9 and 10 of the questionnaire. The

respondents were asked to give 1-5 to the statements, where 1 stands for

strongly agree and 5 for strongly disagree. The complete data can be viewed in

Charts 51 and 52 in Appendix E.

Overall, the statement whose responses varied most considerably

was the first one, quote: “I correct errors as soon as I hear them”. Studying Pie

charts 53 and 54 on the following page, it can be noted that a considerable

amount of Czechs gives their strong consent to the statement, at 22%, as

opposed to Austrians who agree only tentatively, at 28%. By comparison, 42%

of Austrians express their disagreement with the statement, whereas only 18%

of Czechs disagree.

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Pie charts 53 and 54 - I correct errors as soon as I hear them.
Q 9: Give 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to these statements. 1 = strongly agree, 5 = strongly disagree.

Czech Austrian

Otherwise, the remaining statements show similar patterns for both

groups (see Charts 51 and 52 in Appendix E). Around half of all teachers agree

that they have an error correcting segment after an activity and three-quarters

of all teachers either disagree or are neutral in reference to the statement that

“Students correct each other”. The only factor that slightly divides the two

countries is how many errors in class remain untreated. 62% of all Czech

respondents claim that “Most students’ errors are treated” in their classes, while

the same can be said only about 50% of Austrian respondents.

In response to the question what their decision for or against

immediate error correction depends on, respondents report that the aspects

which play a role are mainly the type of activity, closely followed by the type of

mistake (Chart 55). Comparatively, more Czechs than Austrians add that they

also take their students into consideration when treating errors. In figures, this

represents 24% versus 10% for each group. In addition, the respondents who

chose “something else” as an option mainly report that they do not want to

135
interrupt their students’ flow of language when speaking. The complete

answers can be read in Table 8 in Appendix E, below Chart 55.

4.2.4 Assumptions about teaching speaking

Before inspecting what assumptions teachers have about certain

aspects which have implications for LT and teaching speaking respectively, it

should be noted that the previous sections of this research revealed more about

teachers’ assumptions about LT than this short section is likely to do. Taking

everything into account, several of the items described below correspond with

some of the previously analysed data.

Moving on to the individual statements, in Question 7, respondents

where asked to rate on a Likert scale how much they agree with each

statement. In reference to the first one which says: “When students interact

freely they copy each other’s mistakes”, Austrians show a strong disagreement,

at 48%, compared to one-third of Czechs (Pie charts 56 and 68 in Appendix E).

In contrast, 12% of Czechs rather agree with the statement as opposed to only

4% of Austrians. On the whole, 84% of Austrian respondents and 72% of

Czech respondents disagree with the statement.

The subsequent charts (Pie charts 58 and 59) record a more dramatic

contrast between the two nationalities. 72% of Austrian respondents refuse

that “teaching English in the students’ mother tongue is effective because

students can better understand the teacher”. A disagreement, although more

tentative, is expressed by half of Czech respondents. Surprisingly, 24% of

136
Czechs and 14% of Austrians give their consent to the statement, albeit

tentative.

Similarly, Pie charts 60 and 61 illustrate that 34% of Czech

respondents agree that “learning vocabulary through vocabulary lists is

systematic and therefore effective for language learning”. The same statement

is given consent by 22% of Austrian respondents.

Unfortunately, the subsequent pie charts do not record what I

wanted to investigate (see Pie charts 62 and 63). On second thought, I must

admit that the statement the pie charts refer to is badly worded. The statement

says that “to become fluent in a foreign language one needs to learn it for

many years (usually more than eight) and spend some time abroad”. However,

the statement would be better phrased when beginning: “to reach a

communicative level in a foreign language (...)”. This is because fluency is

something which all speakers work on their whole lives. Even though the

statement starts with the verb “to become” which refers to the onset and not

the whole process, the statement is slightly controversial as it is. All in all, it is

interesting that 62% of Austrians agree to the statement, whereas the same is

true for only half of Czechs.

Pie charts 64 and 65 record one of the aspects which can be well

observed in other parts of the research and that is that the vast majority of

teachers having taken part in this survey place an emphasis on teaching

grammar and vocabulary. Even though the statement seems to suggest that

grammar and vocabulary are especially important to be taught at schools for

later success in communication, 86% of both nationalities agree with it. Czechs

137
show a slightly stronger consent, although the difference is relatively

unimportant. The important words in the statement are “especially” and “later”.

My understanding of the statement is that if learners receive good foundations

of grammar and vocabulary, they are likely to communicate successfully in real

life. The statement also suggests that fluency can be learned at “later” stages,

when learners leave school, not necessarily in their English lessons. Considering

the fact how controversial these suggestions are it is all the more surprising

that they do receive a considerable consent.

The last two charts show two statements which are strongly agreed

to. Both nationalities equally agree – whether strongly or partially – to the

statement that “the most important thing when learning to speak a foreign

language is to speak a lot” (See Chart 66 below). Interestingly, even though the

agreement is completely equal by both countries, various parts of this research

show that the space which is allowed for speaking skills practice as well as

activities which some Czech teachers choose to use in class do not reflect this

conviction to the same measure as to that of Austrian teachers.

Chart 66 – The most important thing when learning to speak a foreign


language is to speak a lot.
Q 7: Do you agree with the statement?

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4.2.5 Practical techniques for teaching speaking

The last section of this research will analyse a specific task respondents were

asked to reflect upon and also present some of the activities which teachers

named as their favourite ones. The sections of the questionnaire which will be

referred to are number 13 and 14.

Question 13 in the questionnaire asked respondents to read a specific

task and answer questions that followed. The task was taken from New Cutting

Edge Pre-intermediate (Cunningham and Moor 2007:85) and slightly adapted

not to show sections such as useful language, etc., which would make it too

suggestive. The task falls under the category of creative tasks where learners

are asked to discuss their ideas, design a plan of a coffee bar and present their

end-product to the others. The task was chosen in order to find out how much

time on average teachers would devote to the individual stages of this or a

similar communicative task and if they pre-teach any language, etc.

The times which the teachers gave are recorded in Tables 9 to 12 in

Appendix E. In summary, the tables show that while Austrian teachers would

allow such a task considerably more time, 33 minutes on average in fact, Czech

teachers would spend only 22 minutes on average on the task. This fact is also

reflected in the other tables. Czech teachers would spend 5 and a half minutes

on pre-teaching useful language in comparison with 10 minutes in the case of

Austrian teachers. On average, Czechs would allow around 10 minutes for

students to discuss their ideas and 8 minutes to present them to the others, as

opposed to around 15 minutes allowed for a discussion and around roughly 13

minutes allowed for a presentation by Austrians. What is more, 6% of Czechs

139
report they would not do such a task at all and another 4% add they would not

do the communicative part of the task.

As far as pre-teaching useful language is concerned, 23% of

Austrians and 29% of Czechs would not pre-teach any language (Pie chart 68

and 69). In the subsequent question some of the teachers explain that they

would prefer to teach what learners need during the task according to the

situation. Interestingly enough, what teachers report they would pre-teach

makes a remarkable difference with the two countries (see Table 13 below).

Table 13 shows general trends of the two groups. While Austrian respondents

would mainly pre-teach vocabulary, followed by functions, Czech respondents

would focus primarily on vocabulary, followed by grammar and functional

language.

Table 13 – What would you pre-teach?


If you put in “Yes” or “Maybe”, give an example of what you would pre-teach.

Language pre-taught: Czech Austrian


vocabulary 22 17
grammar and structures 12 2
functions 8 8
linking words 1
it depends on students 3 3
other 2 1
comment on instructions 2

Number of respondents answering the question: 22 Czech: 34 Austrian: 37

22
This was a contingency question. Only the respondents who reported to find teaching
speaking rather or completely difficult answered it. Some of the learners referred to teaching
more items on the list. The question was not compulsory, however, and some respondents
chose not to answer it therefore the numbers do not correspond with the number of
respondents.

140
The pie charts on the last page of Appendix E illustrate that a vast

majority of teachers would let students draw their ideas while discussing the

task, although 18% of Austrian teachers would ask them to do it after the

activity, compared to 8% of Czech teachers (Pie charts 70 and 71).

Remarkably, a greater percentage of Czech teachers, a staggering

96%, in comparison with 84% of Austrians claim to have done a similar creative

task like this (Pie charts 72 and 73). On the other hand, slightly more Austrian

teachers report they have done the task many times, 22% versus 15% of Czech

teachers.

On the subject of individual techniques which teachers use to teach

speaking, the answers to Question 14 asking the respondents to name their

favourite activities show a certain correspondence with Question 1 of the

questionnaire and the data presented in Table 3 on page 113 and Charts 6 to

13 in Appendix E.

Firstly, as far as Austrian respondents are concerned, by far the most

frequently mentioned activities are discussions and debates. These are followed

by group work and pair work, role plays, presentations, picture description and

storytelling. By contrast to Table 3, information gap activities are mentioned

only a few times, however, they are likely to be included in pair work, role

plays, etc., which all score high. Apart form this, a few teachers mention

brainstorming, games, milling activities (find someone who), and reading

followed by speaking.

Secondly, Czech teachers name activities such as picture description,

discussions and role plays, closely followed by games and quizzes, storytelling

141
and questions (probably meaning interviews). Pair work and group work are

mentioned by about half times less than by Austrian teachers. A similar pattern

can be observed with discussions. By far the most remarkable difference

concerns presentations. While they are named by almost every third Austrian,

they are mentioned only a few times (literally by 4 out of 50) by Czechs. Other

activities which are mentioned only fractionally are reading and speaking.

Interestingly, a few Czech teachers put ‘writing’ on the list, too.

On the whole, it can be summarized that Austrian teachers list

considerably more activities and name a greater variety than Czech teachers.

4.3 Conclusion

The research suggests that overall, a number of Czech respondents incline to

grammar-translation approach rather than to communicative language

teaching. They make use of activities which reveal a tendency for form-focused

instruction and accuracy focus. Top of the list rank such activities as picture

description and translation. On the whole, truly communicative activities seem

to play second fiddle. Even though a number of teachers do include discussions,

role plays, interviews and storytelling in their LT, this does not compare with

the extent to which communicative activities are used in Austrian classrooms.

In general, some Czech teachers taking part in the survey stress

teaching vocabulary and grammar viewing it as the most important things in

language teaching. Overall, it could be observed that Czech teachers allow less

time for speaking and create fewer opportunities for speaking in class. When

Czech learners are asked to express themselves, they are likely to be corrected

more than Austrian learners. They are also likely to hear less English in their

142
lessons, use fewer authentic materials, learn from vocabulary lists more, and

are likely to be more corrected than Austrian learners. The survey suggests that

Czech teachers consider their learners as generally rather unsuccessful when it

comes to expressing themselves. They explain this mainly by their inhibitions to

speak, fear of making errors and unwillingness to communicate, which they

report to be the primary difficulties they face when teaching. By contrast,

Austrian teachers view their learners to be by far more successful in speaking

and the main difficulties they see in teaching speaking are external factors, in

particular large classes, unauthentic materials, etc.

In conclusion, the results suggest that some Czech learners are likely

to be unsuccessful in their practical skills due to the following reasons. Firstly,

some teachers misunderstand the way language acquisition processes work

suggested as hypothesis b) at the beginning of the thesis. Secondly, some of

them omit speaking skills practice because they have other priorities

(hypothesis a). In reference to hypothesis c) it seems that Czech teachers do

not think that they are successful in teaching communication as opposed to

how Austrian teachers view themselves.

All in all, even though this is an outcome of only a small research and

the results should be understood only in terms of general trends of some

teachers, the correspondence with a number of results within the research are

interesting. The survey opens new opportunities for further research, such as

direct class observation of teaching skills or investigating the opinions of the

learners and pinpointing some of the data which the research did not manage

to reveal. Other questions suggested for further research have been presented

in the thesis.

143
Conclusion

The thesis aimed to present teaching speaking skills from a broader

perspective, in terms of communicative competence, which many learners seek

to attain as the introductory part to the thesis suggests. At the beginning, it

was hypothesised that learners might lack speaking practise because teachers

fail to create opportunities for genuine language use in a spoken form.

One of the hypotheses expressed the view that some teachers might

fail in teaching speaking skills because their assumptions about how languages

are acquired and what features influence the way spoken production is

composed prevent them from teaching the right skills. Therefore, the second

chapter aimed to reveal how spoken language is organised as opposed to, for

example writing. It also discussed the fact that context and discoursal aspects,

such as turn-taking and knowledge of adjacency pairs are important in

successful conversation. The main emphasis was placed on the fact that spoken

production cannot resemble written texts showing every bit of accuracy, full

sentences etc., that written texts have. This is because speakers face real-time

processing constraints when they speak. Furthermore, in conversation, success

of communication depends on all interlocutors taking part in the conversation.

The chapter showed the historical ties of communicative competence to the

Chomskian and Hymes’s views of language. Most importantly, the

communicative competence was presented with respect to its all dimensions:

linguistic, sociocultural, pragmatic and discourse competences. While all the

dimensions were reflected upon in terms of teaching speaking skills and

language acquisition, it was pointed out that sociocultural and pragmatic

features are likely to have the most significant impact on communication

144
because misconceptions in terms of these aspects are regarded as serious

mistakes and understood as personal characteristics of a speaker rather than

his/her linguistic incapacities.

Chapter three turned its focus to individual aspects of teaching

speaking skills, such as accuracy and fluency, corrective feedback and

evaluation and pair work. Quite importantly, it was pointed out that in order to

become fluent a great range of formulaic language is needed, instruction of

which should be mediated in classroom. Another methodological point which

was made was that teaching how pauses are distributed within utterances

seems to be completely omitted from classroom teaching. A suggestion for

further research into this aspect was made. Also, as far as corrective feedback

is concerned, it was pointed out that distinctions need to be made between

activities which focus on meaning and those which focus on form. It was

suggested that it is important for learners to receive feedback after

communicative activities. In the subsequent questions a great range of

activities which can be utilised for teaching speaking skills were outlined.

The last section focused on the research which was carried out

among Czech and Austrian teachers of English, firstly in order to explore the

links between my hypotheses and reality and also to compare and contrast the

teaching approaches and techniques put in use for teaching speaking skills in

the two countries. The outcomes of the research support my original hypothesis

that in general a number of Czech teachers are not successful in creating a

truly communicative environment with plenty of opportunities for speaking for a

number of reasons. By contrast, Austrian teachers seem to be more successful

in their mediation of communicative skills.

145
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