Developing speaking and writing tasks

From receptive skills to productive skills, I now focus on what criteria should be taken into account when developing speaking and writing activities. Speaking and writing are agreed upon to be the most complex processes with writing being the most difficult skill to be developed.
Speaking is fundamentally different to writing. Since CLT, there seems to be a lot of effort to be put on developing communicative-speaking activities. However, developing speaking is still the most ignored skill in many coursebooks. There is a tendency to go back to structural syllabuses which results in putting less emphasis on speaking tasks in coursebooks.
Let us look at this quote. "Conversation is the informal interactive talk between 2 or more people which happens in real time, spontaneous, has a largely interpersonal function and in which participants share symmetrical rights". However, we have agreed in class, as it has been pointed out by Brown and Yule (1989) that in most naturally occuring real-life conversations one person does the talking, the second functions as an active listener by contributing with small words.

• More awareness of discourse markers in listening tasks would help Ss use them in speaking and thus helps them to become more fluent. (John Field 2009, A. Hasselback, 2002, Small Words)
• Joanne Channel talks about "Vague Language" discussing the importance of words that helps the Ss become active listeners- i.e: stuff, whatever, so on, sort of, kind of etc
• Turn taking- raising the awareness (Bygate 2009). Importance of turn-taking effects fluency. Ss should also be introduced to backchanneling from the early stages of L2 learning. (backchanneling words such as: Ehm, Yea, right, well, huh etc). There are also adjacency pairs- set conversational phrases that always come together weather it would be Q&A form (A: Hello. How are you? B: Fine, thanks. Yourself?) or other expressions
• Scaffolding is really important in designing speaking tasks. T should build the linguistic knowledge necessary for the participants in the class. (Robinson, 2005, "The effect of planning on fluency, accuracy and complexity")
• Raising the awareness of language chunks in speech (Boers et al, 2007, "Putting lexical approach to the test")

Techniques:

• Games like guessing game, Twenty Questions are usually successful only if planned well
• Role-plays vs "real-play" (simulation)
• debates with time limit- raises the awareness that speech is time bound
• Practise turn-taking in conversations (confluence/contingency)
• washback- assessment- giving scores for speaking activities
• encourage the use of discourse markers. For example, using "well" at the beginning allows time to think, using "so" allows topic change etc

For more information on designing a speaking task, please refer to S. Thornbury and D. Slade, 2006 "Conversation from description to Pedagogy", CUP

Writing seems to be the most difficult task for many learners. It is hard enough to write in L1, imagine the complexity of brain operating in L2 whilst writing hey!  As with any other activity, writing need a pre-task to introduce audience, purpose of writing, genre and context. Scaffolding and planning and preparing students is really important. We have talked about product writing vs process writing. Developing learner strategies is really important in writing. Strategies are things learner do based on concious decision in order to learn. So, outlining, drafting, writing and editing are really important to produce a good piece of writing. However Ss will not be motivated enough to edit if there is no outcome at the end. So, writing tasks usually require feedback.  We have discussed advantages and disadvantaged of peer-editing in classrooms. In classrooms most learners may prefer Teacher editing their work. Outside classrooms, however, with the use of blogs and wikis, Teachers can introduce Ss to a less formal more informal ways of editing.