Week 7 Reading reflection - Teaching Speaking

As i read chapter 4 in the P&B book, i felt identified with a lot of what was stated since i've experienced some of them as a language learner. Also, the reading gives me more indepth ideas of the speaking skill from a teacher's perspective.

First, i like the techniques to promote oral language development which are put forward and find them all very intriguing as a learner. Among them, the one which has the most lasting impression in my mind when it comes to practice speaking is drama. I remember doing a lot of short skits in my freshmen year's English Speaking class. My teacher would start by giving us a picture which could be interpreted in many ways, and as a group we described the picture, came up with a short story that related to the picture and then acted it out. My friends and I always had a lot of fun creating the plots and reciting the skit together. More importantly, i could see a lot of improvement in my friends' oral competence as the semester proceeded, since in the skit, all of us got a role and even the shyest person needed to speak up to contribute to the whole performance. The technique worked so well that at the end of that semester, I even started to develop a love for acting, a skill i had never thought i would be good at. In my opinion, this fun activity, together with other interesting ones listed in the book and else where, should be regularly used in the speaking classroom. Just as we don't like to talk when we feel anxious and stressed, language teachers can hardly expect students to speak up if they don't feel comfortable with the atmosphere and the people around them. Creating fun activities, therefore, can be a great solution. Also, i agree with what the book says about letting students have some say in selecting speaking topics and materials. Again the student-centered principle works here and it reminds us of how beneficial it can be to give students a certain amount of freedom in their learning.

How to assess students' oral performance is also an isssue which is worth mentioning. Personally i think both informal and formal assessment play an important part in the evaluation process. Informal asssessment may reflect students' speaking ability better if students feel so nervous in formal assessment that it adversely affects their performance. Meanwhile, formal assessment will give teachers a better idea of how students perform in formal contexts such as individual/group presentations. Besides, in my opinion, it is good that language teachers have a list of evaluation criteria in mind before they go about assessing students, and that these criteria may vary depending on the main focus of students. Moreover, it'll be a good idea to make these criteria clear to students right from the beginning of the class, so that they'll know what to focus their efforts on and somehow turn these standards into their own learning goals.