Page 46 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 3. Perspective of the teachers - practicality
activities); and strategic skills. Strategic skills are strategies that are used both with receptive skills (reading and listening) and productive skills (writing and speaking) to compensate for gaps in knowledge of the language.
These components are familiar from language courses. Generally, but certainly not exclusively, a chapter in a foreign language course on a particular theme starts with input (texts to read and listen to), followed by exercises related to the input to train reading and listening skills and exercises for learning vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation (content- oriented processing and form-oriented processing). Next there is often a guided speaking activity aimed at reproduction (see the exercise typology of Neuner, Krüger & Grewer, 1981) in which words, chunks and grammar that were presented in the input and exercises are drilled and mastered through practice. After that further input and exercises elaborating on the theme of the series of lessons are often presented to extend vocabulary and grammar. Finally, there is a free speaking activity in which the language learners use what they have learned to express themselves in their own words in a free communication situation (Neuner et al., 1981). Figure 4 shows this sequence of a standard lesson or series of lessons broken down into building blocks.
Students often work in pairs on speaking activities in regular lessons and the teacher walks around giving feedback to the pairs and then at the end of the activity briefly touches on important points with the whole class before moving on to another lesson component. This standard practice has a number of disadvantages: the feedback is not so much geared to the students’ learning needs as based on a few speaking performances that the teacher happens to hear in the class and the students are often given no opportunity to improve their speaking.
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