TEACHING ORAL COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS TO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Teacher:Radau Adriana-Georgeta School: Scoala cu clasele I-VIII Cuca

Teaching oral communicative skills to elementary school students In the process of teaching communication is the main tool, each participant receiving established roles. In the classroom, communication is produced in all its forms, from verbal to non-verbal, from oral to written, as it happens in real life. In fact, the purpose of teaching foreign languages is preparing the student for real life situations through artificial classroom situations. Learning a foreign language becomes a long process, which takes place gradually, and the students progress is observed in time. There is a big difference between the real life situation and the controlled classroom one. In the real life, language is not gradually structured, the student faces a wide variety of vocabulary and structures, the student meets people with different proficiency levels, the message is more important than the correctness of speaking, as long as the communicative process is not interrupted by speaking errors, the student participates to different events with various communicative levels. On the other hand, in the classroom, language is gradually structured, each item is presented in isolation - one at a time, the language used and the time of learning are limited, errors are frequently corrected, the teacher is the only model of foreign language speaking, the other students become the main participants in communication. Communication has three important parts: the emitent, the receiver and the message. The most important role is reserved to and played by the teacher the emitent, who, through different methods, is permanently trying to make the student the receiver react and participate to communication. According to the methods used and the teachers skills in manipulating the class during the lesson, the feed-back received is the desired one. The teachers task is to create activities which will gradually make students cope with real life situations, making use of all skills. Teachers should focus on precice

objectives which will enable students to develop their communicative skills. Thus, at the end of the teaching learning process, students should be able to manipulate structures and vocabulary in a spontaneous and flexible way, to use language to communicate efficiently in real life situations and at different social levels, by usig appropriate language forms. When teaching, the psycho-pedagogical characteristics of the student and the group of students should be taken into consideration. Teachers should design their activities according to the level and the particularities of the group. It is also important to have a look at the individuals, each student being unique and having a specific level of understanding, of attaining information, of reacting to new structures and vocabulary, different interests, beliefs or expectations. Students come to the classroom with a wide experience in oral communication in their native language. Some of them have been encouraged to express their opinions from early ages, others may have been discouraged to do so. The teachers role is to create activities which make each student feel confortable when speaking in the classroom. The teachers creativity in designing activities for the classroom makes students turn loose, the main purpose being to make them active, to participate during the course and to speak by using the structures and vocabulary learnt. There are a lot of techniques which could be used during the classroom, in order to make each student contribute and without making the student feel threatened. We can classify these asctivities in two main groups: non-communicative activities and communicative activities. Each of these two types of activities have specific characteristics and can be subclassified. 1. Non-communicative acivities: - mechanical drills students repeat a given structure and produce language by using a given stimulus;

- meaningful drills (contextualized dialogues) make students interact as partners in an exchange by giving them a dialogue frame to be contextualised; - guided dialogues replacing the lines of a dialogue with the corresponding function of the language used according to different promts leaving the student to select the appropriate language. 2. Communicative activities: - information gap activities emphasise the functional aspect of communication and make students use the language they know, bring the classroom environment closer to real life situation. These activities can be: - controlled information gap activities students work in pair, language can be predicted and students can be equiped with it (identifying pictures, discovering identical pairs, discovering sequences or locations, discovering missing information, discovering secrets); - less controlled information gap activities students must both share information and evaluate it to solve problems (sharing and processing information, reconstructing story sequences, pooling information to solve a problem); - problem solving activities students have access to all information which has to be discussed and evaluated in order to solve the problem. - role play, discussion and debate bring the classroom activities to real life communication situation by adding a social dimension (controlled role play, role play activities based on debate or discussion). In conclusion, when students are given opportunities to speak they are more likely to improve their communicative skills, especially when the activity is accompanied by well formulated instructions. It is important to plan varied activities, to use different techniques, otherwise students might get bored or the activities might become meaningless. The teachers goal is having students speak to learn by learning to speak.

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