SPEAKING ACTIVITIES TO ENHANCE LEARNING EXPERIENCE Isabel Fernandes Silva, Jane Rodrigues Duarte Centre for Linguistic, Comparative and TEL Studies (CELCT), Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (PORTUGAL)
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Abstract In teaching a foreign language, it is essential to provide students with the opportunity of communicating orally. In contact sessions there is often not enough time for educators to interact individually with learners, so it is important to provide opportunities for students to produce their own skills and knowledge. The answer may lie in the use of ICT tools. This paper presents examples of how technology has been used at a university in Lisbon, Portugal, to enhance students' learning experiences and communication skills. The teaching of a language, or any other skill, cannot be centred on the teacher. Production and awareness towards the learning process is of pivotal importance for students. Unfortunately, the majority of language classroom delivery is still based on unilateral ways of teaching. With the introduction of ICT in the classroom, it is our concern that the same scenario is not replicated to the virtual learning environment. Today, many course facilitators are using elearning platforms as mere repositories for additional resources. It has been our intention in the past years to introduce as many 2.0. web tools as possible to make learning through ICT an interactive process in which students take on full accountability for their learning. Through the use of podcasts and video/audio tools, students at our institution were able to produce material integrating text, image and voice in their individual or group projects. Interestingly, and although they were studying different languages (some groups were learning English and others Portuguese), all students perceived these tools as essential for their progress, as evidenced in a survey carried out at the end of each course. Keywords: Speaking activities, ICT tools, podcasts, audiovisual presentation tools.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF SPEAKING IN LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE
Teaching a foreign language has never been an easy task. For teachers and trainers, each experience is different and so is each group of students. The phenomenon of globalisation has not only allowed for there to be a change in learner profile and linguistic competence, but has also fostered the change of teaching methodologies and approaches. Although the four skills have always been considered of importance in the curriculum of courses, only in the recent decades have course designers taken a whole approach to language. In relation to other skills, speaking may be considered one of the most challenging tasks for both the student and instructor as it involves more active participation from the learner, autonomy and confidence and it impels them to put all their acquired linguistic knowledge to use. In other words, speaking skills in the second language classroom require active participation from students where they will necessarily have to produce and expose their linguistic competence to others. When it comes to speaking skills, especially in a second language, students will have to be able to speak in a range of different genres and situations and efficiently apply a communicative function that corresponds to the context in question. In his book, How to Teach Speaking, Thornbury suggests different speaking events that help describe what he calls “speaking genres” (Thornbury 2005a:13-14). According to the author, it is possible to distinguish between transactional and interpersonal function. The main purpose of transactional function is conveying and facilitating the exchange of goods whereas the interpersonal function refers to maintaining and sustaining good interpersonal relations between people.While going to a job interview or participating in a meeting are highly transactional functions and socializing with new friends in the second language may be considered interpersonal, it is our perspective that for students who are learning a foreign language for the first time, a language whose phonetics, semantics and cultural elements are completely unknown to them represents an additional challenge and must also include a different function: a survival function, or in other words, a function that goes
Proceedings of INTED2012 Conference. 5th-7th March 2012, Valencia, Spain.
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ISBN: 978-84-615-5563-5
beyond the communicative intention of socializing or interacting with others and that meets student profile and immediate needs at both a personal and professional level.
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SPEAKING ACTIVITIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING
Speaking activities are extremely relevant in terms of language learning but successful outcomes are not always as frequent as we believe they should be. It is our contention that ICT may provide the answer to the challenges these activities pose to the teacher.
2.1
From traditional to ICT practices
As already mentioned, speaking is essentially a productive skill which requires pivotal prerequisites from the students, such as confidence, self esteem, motivation and, above all, the necessary linguistic competence to be able to produce language that expresses what they intend to communicate. Traditional approaches to speaking skills in the language classroom include, for instance, the use of prompters or acting from scripts. In these types of exercises students are expected to act out scenes or role plays from their course books. These exercises help build student confidence, contextualize language and get them involved in problem-solving situations. Other activities are formal debates in the classroom, where students will prepare arguments in favour or against specific topics, games, prepared talks and speaking sequences. In order to develop awareness, students may also analyze transcripts of real speech or transcribe small sections of dialogues. These are possible and common activities for pre-intermediate students as they have already acquired both vocabulary and skills which allow for everyday conversation in the second language; however, for elementary students this represents a huge challenge and the range of possible activities is much reduced. Considering that, on the one hand, students use ICT tools in their daily lives and, on the other, that mastering ICT tools is now a requirement in both academic and professional contexts, our objective was to think of learning activities which would simultaneously combine previously acquired computer skills with the teaching of new tools that could be useful for students in the future.
2.2
Common challenges in speaking activities
When asked to participate in speaking activities, students are sometimes reluctant, either due to their personal traits or because they lack confidence. In other words, there are students who are naturally shy and not big fans of speaking in public. Basically, they are simply not predisposed to expressing themselves in public when using a second language. Others consider it a form of exposing weaknesses and insecurities. As such, we may consider anxiety as one of the main obstacles language teachers have to face. To add to the challenges the language teacher faces with speaking skills is the fact that many times when students work in pairs or groups, their tendency is to resort back to their own language. Within this scope, role playing or similar activities only provide students the opportunity to speak in the second language when the group is in front of the whole class but has not really led students to interiorize linguistic competence or be consciously aware of the importance of using the second language at all times during class. Making a presentation in front of their peers is only perceived as a form of evaluation used by their teacher and as a required task that does not contribute to enhancing their profiles as students or speakers of the language in question. It is an external activity that requires participation, not contribution. In addition to these constraints, many classes are simply too big to include these activities while, at other times, the classes integrate students of different ages, backgrounds, and interests, who come together in a classroom to attend this one course unit. This leads to weak group dynamics and hampers student enthusiasm and motivation. Finally, it is our perspective that teachers’ pedagogical styles will be reflected on the student learning process. If teachers have difficulties in dealing with group activities involving speaking skills or in motivating big groups to engage in conversation during class, it is more likely that speaking skills will be given less importance to in the language classroom, if not completely ignored. The same may be said of resorting to ICT. There are many teachers who still refuse to include not only simple MSPowerpoint presentations in their classroom but web 2.0 tools, stating that they see no advantage for the students when, in reality, it is their own insecurity and/or reluctance towards ICT they have to confront.
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In our case, as teachers who integrate ICT for both research and academic purposes, we strongly believe that it is possible to influence student behaviour and opinion with our enthusiasm and interest for this area and, as a consequence, they will engage in ICT learning when trying to overcome the obstacles mentioned above.
2.3
Our approach
Our teaching perspective and, consequently, the methodologies applied in the foreign language classroom involve an interwoven approach in which the four skills are given equal importance to. However, one of our main premises is that of making language learning a "real" experience for students, which is not only based on a coursebook but also on authentic materials and subjects related to students' personal interests and professional backgrounds (i.e., undergraduate law students will have legal English activities, management students will practice Business English, etc.). Overall, it is our main concern to provide a new learning environment that is based on real communication skills, giving attention to fluency and not just grammatical accuracy. In order to achieve this goal, two other approaches are used in our language classroom: the importance of learning about a culture, the different ways of thinking, acting and feeling and how language is used in these contexts and, secondly, the use of the ICT realm for integrating already acquired language skills. In both English and Portuguese courses, resources are made available on the university's elearning platform: Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment), an open-source platform also commonly referred to as a Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). However, the particularity of this tool, contrary to other VLEs, is the advantages it provides for both teachers and students in all approaches to learning. It includes a wide variety of materials (there are over 20 types of available activities, ranging from assignments, wikis, and forums to quizzes) and students and teachers can monitor student progress throughout the course. Additionally, features such as "Student Peer Review" "Self-assessment of submission" and "Student Journals" allow students to take on a more consciously aware attitude towards their learning and that of their peers. Finally, Moodle also provides a user-friendly interface for course facilitators and designers to use, i.e., teachers may choose from organising the course boxes in a topic, weekly, social, SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) or LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) formats. The Moodle platform at our institution is used by language teachers as a tool for a blended learning environment. This means that it functions as a sophisticated resource that provides students with the necessary activities for consolidating the skills acquired in the classroom while in the presence of a teacher. On their course page, students have access to interactive grammar and vocabulary exercises, videos, texts, etc. and are required to place their own generated contents there. In some courses, the material produced by the students is posted on especially created wikis, thus allowing students to experience yet another ICT tool. Exercises which require student active participation and production are task-based and implicitly promote student autonomy, not only in learning the second language but also in exploring the realm of ICT and consequently, optimising the combination of the two. Other major objectives and forecasted outcomes of our approach include promoting greater engagement from students in the learning process (individually and through peer-work), develop greater awareness towards their progress, their strong and weak points in the language; and finally, develop learner confidence and linguistic competence in an open, informal and ludic way. From all the language skills developed, the most challenging, as already mentioned, is that of speaking. The Moodle platform at our university does not provide the necessary plug-ins that allow students to create or record activities directly. For this reason, we have chosen to use other available 2.0 webtools and integrate them in the Moodle platform. These tools are further discussed in section 3.1.
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SPEAKING ACTIVITIES AT UNIVERSIDADE AUTÓNOMA DE LISBOA
At Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (UAL), a private university in Lisbon, all undergraduate programs include a semester of English. Besides this, the university also offers Portuguese language
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courses to Erasmus students (Erasmus Intensive Language Courses - EILC). This case study is based on the speaking activities designed and developed within these course units, their objectives, the methodologies used and the results achieved. In both cases, the objective is to use the Moodle platform as a means of consolidating classroom learning skills, and it is compulsory for all students to complete the exercises assigned by their teachers in order to successfully complete the course program.
3.1 3.1.1
Tools used Podcasts
In the past years, our institution has organized Portuguese language courses for students coming to Portugal within the scope of the Erasmus exchange program. As these are intensive courses, students are immersed in the Portuguese language and culture. They are divided in relatively small groups (1220 students in each group) and attend around 6 hours of classes and activities every day. EILCs at our university are typically 3 weeks and 80 hours long. There are elementary and intermediate level courses and, depending on the level, students are asked to write and record their personal presentation on the 2nd day of classes (intermediate students) or at the end of the first week (elementary students). This provides them with a sense of accomplishment (particularly in the case of elementary students) and not only gives them an idea of their oral skills in Portuguese but clues on what requires improvement. Elementary students are instructed to write a few lines about themselves each day (usually on their page in the class wiki) using the new vocabulary and/or structures taught on that day. Therefore, after a class on family relations and the verb 'have', for example, they are asked to write about their own family; after a class on hobbies and the verb 'like', they are asked to write about their hobbies and their family's hobbies, and so on. At the end of the first week, they will have written several sentences, which they are now asked to organize into a text and later record. After this, they place their recording on the class blog or wiki and listen to their classmates' recordings. In the case of intermediate students, they are asked to write a personal presentation, record it and place it on the class blog or wiki, listen to their classmates' recordings and comment on them. This way, they are required to first speak in Portuguese by reading their own text and then speak freely in Portuguese and express their opinion on their own text/recording as well as their classmates' 3.1.2
Voicethread© and Photostory©
Video presentation is presently a common activity in academic life. Students are usually familiar with tools such as MSPowerpoint. However, other video presentation tools such as Voicethread© or Photostory© are less known and present the advantage of students being able to add voice and sound in a very simple and user-friendly way. The first tool we used was Voicethread© and, due to its simplicity, we have introduced many students of different courses to this online tool. With EILC students it has been used for group project (students would select their two favourite pictures among those they had taken while on a walking tour around the city of Lisbon and would write and record a small text on each of the pictures) and individual presentations on typical food (students would select typical dishes of their country and create a presentation which would then be posted on the class blog or wiki). Voicethread© has also been used by undergraduate students of Communication Sciences in the course unit of English. Within the scope of a project with Azad Islamic University, Saveh Branch, Iran, students were asked to create presentations on Portugal using Voicethread©. After a brainstorming class in which several themes were suggested as interesting to the Iranian counterparts, students, divided in pairs, decided which theme they would develop. Research and organization were students' responsibility, they also wrote the texts, recorded them and posted them on the wiki so that the other pairs could comment and the Iranian students could see and comment on them. Photostory©, a tool by Microsoft, has also been used by both EILC and undergraduate students. EILC elementary students were given as final assignment a report on their experience in Portugal and in the three-week language course to be presented using Photostory©. Besides having to include at least one picture taken during one of the walking tours around Lisbon, students were free to select, organize and write/record their presentation. The last class was devoted to viewing everyone's presentation and commenting on it.
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Undergraduate Communication students were asked to organize a personal presentation in English, which would then be viewed by their Iranian counterparts. Selection, organization and recording of the Photostory© was the students' responsibility and the material produced was viewed in class and commented on by them as well as their classmates.
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CONCLUSION
At the end of the course, all students, regardless of the language they were learning, had to fill in a survey on the impact ICT had in their learning experience and, not surprisingly, most students considered that the elearning platform and the activities and resources available there made learning a language more fun (72,7% of EILC and 64,3% of undergraduates stated this), more interesting (68,3% of EILC and 85,7% of undergraduates stated this), faster (59,1% of EILC and 64,3% of undergraduates stated this) and easier (75,7% of EILC and 89,3% of undergraduates stated this). In the language classroom, it is not easy to provide students with authentic activities and materials. However, online task-based teaching allows students to gain confidence and autonomy in their learning progress. As they have to create and produce their own material, students become much more aware of their skills, progress and of the challenges they still have to face. Rather than a teacher-centred classroom approach, these speaking activities demand students to become accountable for their linguistic competence, holding greater responsibility while simultaneously being at the centre of their own learning process.
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