Oral Communication Essay

3340 Words14 Pages
Outline the crucial features involved in stimulating oral communication. To what extend and why, is some kind of information gap a vital element? Examine at least two speaking tasks/activities taken from an EFL course book, and state how they could be made more, or less difficult for specific group of learners. Speaking is one of the four basic productive skills. It has a long history and is important for communication and learning. For communication is the principle means of interaction combined with listening skills. It demands knowledge of the foreign language but it does not necessarily mean that people are able to speak that foreign language. Speaking is significant for learning because it is learners’ language output, followed by the input of the teacher. The output is the means of practicing new language items and the intake is what learners understand of the input. The shift of teaching methods, from audio-lingual language teaching to communicative language teaching, brought in teaching important changes. The emphasis in communicative teaching changed from accuracy where learners focused on learning specific skills of the spoken language to fluency, their ability to express their thoughts reasonably, intelligibly, accurately and without hesitation. Accuracy intends to ensure correctness while fluency is designed to improve language fluency. Both are important goals in communicative language teaching, but fluency became the main goal of speaking activities. Learners’ competence has been shifted from linguistic competence, the tacit knowledge of language to communicative competence, the explicit use of the language. Classroom activities were also restructured to match communicative language teaching’s objectives for fluency. Accuracy activities like repetition, drill and memorization in which language is learned by hard and emphasis is given on acquiring
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