Developing productive skills

The speaking chain

Jane Neill makes sure her students have plenty to write

about.
Writing activities can be the bane of a teachers life:
Do you plan short, sentence-level activities?
Do you only teach with the end product, such as a letter of complaint in mind?
Do you tackle the question of style?
Do you choose a language point and centre the writing around that?
Do you try to do everything, all in one fell swoop?
Also, why is it that so many books will take you step-by-step through some extremely
useful stages in working towards a final product, and then present the students with a
task on a completely different topic to do for homework? Having done all the
preparation for a letter complaining about a hotel contextualised vocabulary, looked
at paragraphing, sequencing and so on the follow-up task is a letter complaining
about a car! What are students supposed to do about all that unknown vocabulary?
For many learners the problem is two-fold: they struggle to think of ideas, and they
have difficulties with grammar and lexis. I realise this may be a simplification, but it is
what I set about solving.
The process
I trialled the following process with an intermediate group, but I have since used the
same approach with different levels of learners and the results are very encouraging.
First of all, it is important to get the students to work in small groups in order to
generate ideas on your given topic. Then you need to ensure there is plenty of time for
them to speak about these ideas and support them with examples, details or reasons
why. There are two ways to encourage a speaking chain: set up a pairwork activity
and then combine the pairs into small groups to exchange information, or ask the
students to move around the class individually, telling each person they meet their
thoughts. Both ways mean that the students will be working with different partners
exchanging ideas and justifying them to each other, but the one primarily described
here is the second of the two.
This amount of repetition brings a whole host of benefits: it will promote accuracy, give
the students some fluency practice, make room in the lesson for peer- and selfcorrection and provide an opportunity for everyone to consolidate their thoughts and
refine their statements. You may decide that some time needs to be allocated for the
correction of common errors, but each successive time the students change partners
their language will improve. It is for these reasons that I have been a champion of
repetition for a long time, and there are many activities that give the students an
opportunity to revisit and improve their production, which can be integrated into a
lesson on writing skills.
The speaking chain should be supported by notes and note-taking. This is the part of
the lesson which promotes process, rather than product. The students jot down their
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initial ideas at the start, and they are then responsible for altering and adding to them,
during the chain, without any direct teacher correction. This should encourage them to
take risks, use their own forms of shorthand and just get down and get dirty with the
whole act of writing.
It may even be the case that some students are working with a new alphabet, while
others may not be used to doing more than sentence-level writing. It is, therefore, up
to us, as teachers, to make the physical activity enjoyable and stress-free, not
forgetting to design our lessons in such a way that we are constantly promoting the
improvement of the students skills.
The class
One example I can give you is of a mixed-nationality class at B1 level on the CEF
scale. The students in this class had various problems: they ranged from Arabic
speakers, who spoke confidently but were struggling with written script and spelling, to
European students who were impatient with themselves and wanted to write at a much
higher level than their structural knowledge allowed. Creating lessons which satisfied
students at both ends of the ability spectrum was quite a challenge.
The day before the writing activity, the class were asked to choose different categories
for famous people in their country. The final list was sport, exploration, literature, art,
music and science. Asking the students to create their own list underpins the activity
with a sense of ownership, making it less something which is imposed upon them and
more of a personal choice, thereby, generating more enthusiasm for participating in
the task.
Their homework was to make some notes about a famous person from their country
who fitted into one of their categories. This gave the students space to collect
information and write without any fear of judgement. Equipped with this, the next day
they had to tell a partner about this person. One very important detail was that the
partner was allowed to ask questions. This meant that the descriptions became fuller,
and the students were encouraged to ask each other questions to clarify details. At the
end of the first discussion, the learners were asked to make any changes or additions
to their notes that they wanted.
This cycle was repeated, until each student had spoken to every other person in the
room and their notes were becoming more and more detailed. During all the speaking,
I was monitoring ready to lend a hand with any language problems which the students
could not solve for themselves. By the end of the activity, they each had enough
written information to start creating a profile of their chosen famous person.
When the students were asking each other questions, a natural opportunity for spelling
practice arose as they wanted to know how to write any unfamiliar names of people
and places which came up. Furthermore, they were constantly looking at each others
notes and helping with structures. This quantity of independent learning and skills
development was much greater than I had anticipated and what a joy it was not to
have a teacher-led lesson!
Returning to their desks, the students then worked on their notes for the remainder of
the class time. I did a short round-up of correction on such things as prepositions of
time and place, which was all what was needed. I singled out errors for correction
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without saying who had made them so that the correction was done anonymously,
with no one made feel embarrassed about their mistakes.
The product
The students written biographies were some of the best pieces of writing I had
received from that class. Those who struggled with English script did not feel stressed
during the lesson, and had enough accurate information from their notes to create a
good piece of writing. As a result, their confidence soared. Those students who wanted
to create more complex sentences also had the opportunity to develop their writing
because there was time to play with their notes, making changes and improvements.
This meant that they have a greater sense of achievement as well.
***
Later in that term, we returned to the topic of their famous people and, this time, the
writing activity was to make a biography of someone elses hero. This meant that they
had to ask a lot more questions and take notes about what they were hearing. It
automatically created the maximum possible amount of peer correction, and it was a
huge success.
Whether you are a devotee of producing or process, give this a whirl and take the pain
out of getting inky fingers.
Taken from English Teaching Professional issue 82. September 2012.
Jane Neill

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