Pawlak Mirosław - Issues in Teaching, Learning and Testing Speaking in a Second Language

University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Dave Willis

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Speech comes before writing. Infants begin by acquiring or creating dialoguean overtly interactive system (Halliday ). They first learn to make demands so that their basic needs are met. Then they learn to socialise, to integrate with the society around them. Monologue comes later. We learn to tell stories, and to give extended and detailed instructions. And monologue eventually leads to writing. But the language that we learn naturally is the spoken language and that begins with spoken interaction.

Learning to write is a struggle. We not only have to learn a script and learn how it relates to spoken forms. We have to learn quite different ways of expressing ourselves. We have to learn a new grammar. And once we learn to write, we soon become over-educated and over-literate. We began to see written language as the norm. There is a good reason for this. The written language is static. It is there on the page available to be examined and analysed.

So our descriptions are descriptions of the written language. With one or two honourable exceptions, such as Brazil (), linguists tend to describe spoken language in terms of the written language. Written English is taken as the norm and spoken language as some kind of aberration. An unfortunate consequence of this is that language teachers find themselves trying to teach people to speak written EnglishI have done this myself as I will relate later on.

One of the difficulties with teaching and learning conversation is that learners have little idea what spontaneous spoken language looks likeor should I say sounds like. Unfortunately the same is often true of teachers. Even more unfortunately it is often true of applied linguists. At a recent conference, I attended a presentation by two people who were involved in the design of a language teaching program. The aim of the program was to enable teachers whose first language was Arabic to teach science and mathematics through the medium of English. The program was carefully thought out and structured. But one thing disturbed me. I did not know where the designers got their model of classroom language. As part of one activity students were given a number of classroom utterances and were asked to assign a function to themwere they a part of the social framework which surrounded the lesson (Good morning everyone. Its nice to see you all)or did they contribute to classroom management (Okay I want you to open your books at page 29)or were they instructional language giving the learners information about science and maths(What is the square root of 64?). This seemed to me to be a good way of raising awareness of the variety of language used in the classroom. One of the utterances was this:

Now this is clearly meant to be the language of instruction, but I have doubts as to whether this was recorded in a classroom and indeed whether this is actually the kind of thing teachers say. And I have very serious doubts as to whether it is the kind of thing good teachers say. My guess is that good teachers would produce something much more like this:

Here you have some of the features of spontaneous interactionrepetition and checking moves. This is much more the kind of thing that would be produced in real time andmore importantit is the kind of thing that would be readily processed in real time, the kind of thing learners will find easy to understand. It is the kind of language that good teachers use.

Now, what is the point of this little anecdote? Well, we had two people working at a high level, both with a sophisticated knowledge of teaching and of language. But the examples they were using were not real examples of classroom language, and showed little understanding of the way spoken language really works. If our aim is to teach conversation effectively, there are three basic conditions.

So I would like to start by looking at a story and outlining some of the features of the telling that are typical of spontaneous speech. I will then go on to ask why most of these features are ignored in pedagogic grammars and teaching procedures. I will suggest ways of making learners aware of spontaneous speech and encouraging them to speak with freedom and spontaneity.

Before we look at the story, let me tell you how it was recorded. Back in the 1980s my wife, Jane, and I were commissioned to write a series of coursebooks for Collins. It was to be a task-based course. Once we had decided on what we were going to ask learners to do in the classroom, we collected together a group of native speakers and asked them to carry out the same tasks in a recording studio. This gave us samples of spontaneous language for use in the classroom. First, learners could attempt to use the language for themselves to achieve a given outcome. Then, they could listen to accomplished speakers of the language doing the same thing. This story is one of the recordings we made for use in the classroom.