Aural / Oral Meaningful Communication

I never was tought with any kind of approach like the ones we are using nowadays. I was tought that through repetition I could get some kind of expertise in English. Today, teaching is really student centered and the way we organize materials and contents determines how successul our classes become.

When teaching listening is really helpful set up a previous background, thus students can take their minds to the context the conversation is really happening; by this time, it is really important to lay down clear and measurable objectives as well, in such way students can take themselves ready for what they are expected to achieve.



Teaching Listening
So many techniques and ways to help students develop their Listening Skills as Lindsay Miller mentions in her article, include Pre, While, and Post-Listening guided activities designed by the teacher.

I found quite interesting what Randall's Cyber Listening Lab does and I took it to classes for Basic and Intermediate Level students; working with these three (pre, while, and post listening) steps.

Another very interesting way to take students involved into English listening is by motivating them to hear real life English. Here is what Lida Baker and Judy Tanka call Using Authentic Audio. That way, I took a radio program recorded on Voice of America News about Excercising and downloaded to work with my students, and since the audio was quite slow, I used the Media Player Feature to faster the audio velocity in a range of 20% in order to suit it to my students level.

Using Authentic Audio recorded from Radio or TV Programs as Baker and Tanka say would carry grammar errors on it, and it would be considered terrible to bring material with grammar errors to class environment, however, "it is the way native speakers speak;" so, exposing our students to Authentic On-Street English would not be such bad idea, but productive.


English Oral Skills
Since communication involves several skills besides aural, oral proficiency requires also practice and devoted attachment to phonetics, rithm, accuracy and prosodic English production. CALL tools can help tune our students pronunciation in a mechanical aspect, but real-context exposure to English Communication is much productive in providing meaningful speaking as Julia Gong mentions in her article The Empoyment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills.

A very useful approach I read about comes from the serie Top Notch Professional Development. An article written by Allen Ascher and Joan Saslow gives us ideas for setting things up in a classroom environment to lead a discussion activity with very enriching results.

And, to conclude with my reflections, I can say that propper guide using the appropriate tools can help our students achieve their goal for English Speaking.