What is Speaking? C.

Consultative style- refers to ordinary conversation

held at school, in meeting or conversation that leads to
Speech is the most basic means of communication result and production.
Bailey and Savage (1994) said that speaking in a second D. Casual style- is used to speak with friends, family or
language or foreign language has often been viewed as relatives, during the leisure time, while break or
the most demanding and challenging of the four skills. recreation, etc.
According to Brown (1994) a number of features of E. Intimate style- is used with people who have close
spoken language or foreign language includes reduced relationships with the speaker. By using this style those
forms such as contractions, vowel reduction, and elision; people do not need to use complete sentences with clear
slang and idioms; stress, rhythm, and intonation. articulation, they just simply use short words.
Nature of Speaking
Registers
 Speech Production
A. Frozen is also referred to as static register. Printed
Process by which spoken words are selected to be unchanging language, such as Biblical quotations, often
produced. contains archaisms.
Three Stages B. Formal is one-way participation; no interruption;
1. Conceptualization technical vocabulary or exact definitions are important;
includes presentations or introductions between strangers.
2. Formulation
C. Consultative involves two way participation.
3. Articulation Background information is provided prior knowledge is
not assumed. Back-channel behavior such as "uh huh", "I
 Self-monitoring & repair see", etc. is common. Interruptions are allowed. Usual
conversations are between teacher/student, doctor/patient,
Happens concurently with the stages of conceptualization, etc.
formulation and articulation.
D. Casual is within in group friends and acquaintances;
 Authomaticity no background information provided ellipsis and slang
common, interruptions common. This is common among
Allow speakers to focus on their attention on the aspects
friends in a social setting.
of the speaking task.
E. Intimate is non-public; intonation more important than
 Fluency
wording or grammar; private vocabulary. Also includes
Speaking Rules non-verbal messages. This is most common among family
members and close friends.
1. Don’t study grammar too much
2. Learn & Study phrases
3. Reading and Listening is not enough. Practice Austin and Searle`s speech acts
speaking what you hear.
4. Study correct materials • Speech Act Theory
5. Managing talk (Interaction, Turn-taking,
Paralinguistics) • Speech Act theory says that when we speak we are also
'acting in the world'.
Purpose of Speaking
Austin and Searle`s speech acts
 Oral communication is a two-way process between
speaker or listener (or listeners) and invloves the Utterance Act — act of saying something.
productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of
understanding (or listening with understanding). Propositional Act — referring to something or
 The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative expressing a predication about something.
efficiency.
 To help learners develop communicative efficiency in Illocutionary act — the function (assertion, warning,
speaking, instructors or teachers can use a balanced request)
activities approach that combines language input,
structured output, and communicative output.

Speech Styles & Registers Three forces

STYLES Locutionary force — linguistic form of the utterance.
A. Frozen style- is the most formal style used in formal Illocutionary force — the meaning of the utterance.
situations and ceremonies.
Perlocutionary force — the effect of a given illocutionary
B. Formal style- is used in formal speech, formal act on the hearer.
meeting, office correspondence, lesson books for school,
etc.
Segmental and Suprasegmental
Suprasegmental — refers to a phonological property of
more than one segment. Suprasegmental information
applies to different linguistic phenomena (such as pitch,
duration, and loudness). Suprasegmentals are often
regarded as the 'musical' aspects of speech.
— The term suprasegmental (referring to functions that
are “over” vowels and consonants)was coined by
American structuralists in the 1940s.
— In talking to a cat, or a baby, you may adopt a
particular set of suprasegmentals.
Suprasegmental features
a.Vowels and consonants are considered small segments
of the speech, which together form a syllable and make
the utterance.
b.Common suprasegmental features are the stress, tone
and duration in the syllable or word for a continuous
speech sequence. Sometimes even harmony and
nasalization are also included under this category.
c. Suprasegmental or prosodic features are often used in
the context of speech to make it more meaningful and
effective.
d.Without suprasegmental features imposed on the
segmental features, a continuous speech can also convey
meaning often loses the effectiveness of the message
being conveyed.
Segmental — Segmental language are the vowels and the
consonants which combine to produce syllables, words
and sentences. In phonetics, the smallest perceptible
segment is a phoneme. Segmental phonemes of sign
formally called “cheremer” are visual movement of
hands, face and body.
Types of Speech Delivery
Extemporaneous - delivered with preparation time from
a few minutes to half-an-hour.
Impromptu - a speech that a person delivers without
preparation.
Manuscript - a written text read to an audience from a
paper script or teleprompter.
Memorized - focus on reciting written content from
memory to an audience.
TEACHING TALK AS INTERACTION
Talk as interaction is perhaps the most difficult skill to
teach since interactional talk is a very complex as well as
subtle phenomena that takes place under the control of
"unspoken" rules.
The best taught thought providing examples embedded in
naturalistic dialogs that can serve to model features such
as opening and closing conversations, making small
talk, recounting personal incidents and experiences,
and reacting to what others say.
The rules for making "small talk"
•Initiated by a comment concering something in the
immediate vicinity
•Both participants have knowledge of, and that the
comment will elicit agreement, since agreement is face-
preserving and non-threatening.
Giving feedback (back channelling) is another important
aspect of talk as interaction and involves responding to a
conversational partner with expressions such as “That's
interesting”, "yeah”, “really”, and so on, that indicate
interest and a wish for the speaker to continue.
Another technique to practice the use of conversation
starters and personal recounts involves giving
conversation starters which students have to respond to
by asking one or two follow-up questions.
Simple activities use to practice topic management are “in
the hot seat” and “question time”.
Mastering the art of talk as interaction is difficult and may
not be a priority for all learners. However, students who
do need such skills and find them lacking report that they
sometimes feel awkward and at a loss of words when they
find themselves in situations that require talk for
interaction.They feel difficulty in presenting a good
image of themselves and sometimes avoid situations that
call for this kind of talk.
Talk as transaction refers to situations where the focus is
on what is said or done. The message and making oneself
understood clearly and accurately is the central focus,
rather than the participants and how they interact socially
with each other.
In such action, talk is associated with other activities. For
example, students may be engaged in hands-on activities
(eg, in a science lesson to explore concepts associated
with floating and sinking. In this type of spoken language
students and teachers usually focus on meaning or on
talking their way to understanding (Jones 1996:14)
Talk as transaction is more easily planned since current
communicative materials are a rich resource of group
activities, information-gap activities and role plays that
can provide a source for practicing how to use talk for
sharing and obtaining information as well as for carrying
out real-world transactions.
These activities include ranking activities, values
clarification activities, brainstorming, and simulations.
Group discussion activities can be initiated by having
students work in groups to prepare a short list of
controversial statements for others to think about.
Group sex change statements and discuss them.
Role-play activities are another familiar technique for
practicing real world transactions and typically involve
the following sequence of activities:
Preparing: reviewing vocabulary, real world knowledge
related to the content and context of the roleplay (e.g.
returning a faulty item to a store).
Modeling and eliciting: demonstrating the stages that are
typically involved in the transaction, eliciting suggestions
for how each stage can be carried out, and teaching the
functional language need for each stage.
Practicing and reviewing: students are assigned roles and
practice a roleplay using cue cards or realia to provide
language and other support.
However an issue that arises in relation to practicing talk
as transaction using different kinds of communicative
tasks, is the level of linguistic accuracy that students
achieve when carrying out these tasks.
Despite these optimistic claims others have reported that
communication tasks often develop fluency at the
expense of accuracy.Higgs and Clifford(1982,78), for
example, reporting experience with foreign language
teaching programs in the US, observed:
In programs that have as curricular goals an early
emphasis on unstructured communication activities -
minimising, or excluding entirely, considerations of
grammatical accuracy - it is possible in a fairly short time
to provide students with a relatively large vocabulary and
a high degree of fluency. These same data suggest that the
premature immersion of a student into an unstructured or
"free" conversational setting before certain linguistic
structures are more or less in place is not done without
cost.
There appear to be a real danger of leading students too
rapidly into the creative aspects of language use, in that if
successful communication is encouraged and rewarded
for its own sake,the effect seems to be one of rewarding at
the same time the incorrect strategies seized upon in
attempting to deal with the communication strategies
presented.
-By reducing the complexity of the task ,e.g. by
familiarizing students with the demands of the activity by
showing them a similar activity on video or as a dialog
-By giving time to plan the task
-By repeated performance of the task
Willis(1966)suggests using a cycle of activities with task-
work using a sequence of activities in a lesson. These
create interaction mediated by a task and then build
language awareness and language development around
task performance. She proposes the following sequence of
activities:
Pre task activities
* T stands for teacher and Ss stands for student
Introduction to topic and task
T helps Ss to understand the theme and objectives of the
task, for example, brainstorming ideas with the class,
using pictures, mime or personal experience to introduce
the topic
Ss may do a pre task, for example, topic-based odd-word-
out games. T may highlight useful words and phrases, but
would not pre-teach new structures.
Ss can be given preparation time to think about how to do
the task.
Ss can hear a recording of a parallel task being done (so
long as this does not give away the solution to the
problem).
If the task is based on a text, Ss read a part of it.
The task cycle
Task
The task is done by Ss (in pairs or groups) and gives Ss a
chance to use whatever language they already have to
express themselves and say whatever they want to say.
This may be in response to reading a text or hearing
a recording.
T walks round and monitors, encouraging in a supportive
way everyone's attempt at communication in the target
language.
T helps Ss to formulate what they want to say, but will not
intervene to correct errors of form.
The emphasis is on spontaneous, exploratory talk and
confidence building, within the privacy of the small
group.
Success in achieving the goals of the tasks help Ss
motivation.
Planning
Planning prepares for the next stage where Ss are
asked to report briefly to the whole class how
they did the task and what the outcome was.
• Ss draft and rehearse what they want to say or
write.
• T goes round to advise students on language,
suggesting phrases and helping Ss to pollsh and
correct their language. If the reports are in
writing, T can encourage pour editing and use of
dictionaries.
• The emphasis is on clarity, organization, and
accuracy, as appropriate for a public presentation.
• Individual students often take this chance to ask
questions about specific language items.
Report
• T asks some pairs to report briefly to the whole
class so everyone can compare findings, or begin
a survey. (N.B: There must be purpose for others
to listen). Sometimes only one or two groups
report in full others comment and add extra
points. The class may take notes.
• T chairs, comments on the content of their
reports, rephrases perhaps, but gives no overt
public correction
 Language focus
Analysis
• T sets some language focussed tasks, based on
the texts student read or on the transcripts of they
recordings they heard. Examples include the
following:
 Find words and phrases related top the topic or
text.
 Read the transcript, find words ending in "s" and
say what the s means.
 Find all the words in the simple past form. Say
which refer to past time and which do not.
 Underline and classify the questions in the
transcript.
• T starts Ss off, then students continue, often in
pairs.
• T goes round to help; Ss can ask individual
questions
• In plenary, then reviews the analysis, possibly
writing relevant language up on the board in list
form: Ss may make notes.
Students then work jointly on planning their own texts,
which are then presented to the dass.
Feez and Joyce's approach to text-based instruction
provides a good model of how talk as performance can be
taught (1998,v). This approach involves:
• teaching explicitly about the structures and
grammatical features of spoken and written texts
• linking spoken and written texts to the cultural
context of their use
• designing units of work which focus on
developing skills in relation to whole texts
• providing students with guided practice as they
develop language skills for meaningful
communication through whole texts.
Modes of Communication
Communication is the process of sending and
receiving messages to share skills, knowledge and
attitudes.
Effective communication between patient and
provider requires a two-way dialogue where each
party respects the other. Both parties will be able to:
 exchange information
 speak and listen without interruption
 express opinions
 ask questions for clarity
There are three modes of communication: verbal, non-
verbal and visual.
1. Verbal communication — is the transmission of
information through spoken words or written
language.
• Oral communication, or spoken communication,
includes telephone calls, face-to-face interactions,
video conferencing, etc.
• Written communication is primarily used to
convey information in a permanent manner.
Examples of written communication include
emails, text messaging, electronic medical
records, reports etc.
2. Non-Verbal Communication
It provides a way to convey emotion and information
without using words. It can give the listener
additional information, sometimes contradicting the
spoken message.
• Facial expressions / gestures
body language / posture
eye contact
shrugging
pointing
3. Visual Communication
Visual communication delivers messages through
visual cues such as illustrations, videos, charts and
diagrams. Visual communication can be an effective
tool, especially when it is difficult to relay messages
through words.
Speech Formats
Talk as Interaction This refers to what we normally
mean by “conversation “and describes interaction
which serves as primarily social function. When
people meet, they exchange greetings,engage in small
talk and chitchat,recount recent experiences and soon
because they wish to be friendly and to establish a
comfort zone of interaction with others.
Brown and Yule (1983)
The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish
to present themselves to each other than on the
message, either casual or more formal depending on
the circumstances and their nature.