A Breakdown of Speaking

In order to help your students navigate the speaking process, it is important that you understand what all is happening inside the minds of your students when they are faced with a particular speaking task.  This way, you can better diagnose what may be causing some break-down in your students’ communication.  

Before an English-learner even begins to think about English itself, when given a task, a learner needs to think about what they would like to say.  For instance, if you gave one of your students a conversation prompt asking them to tell their partner what they did over the weekend, before the student will turn to vocab words and grammar structures, they will reflect on their weekend and decide what they would like to share.  Did they go to the grocery store?  Did they visit their aunt?  Did they see a concert?  This step in speech production is called conceptual preparation.

Once they decide what they would like to say in English, they need to determine how to say it.  They will recall vocab and grammar that they have learned and piece together their thoughts in English.  This is called formulation.

The last step in speech production is the actual speaking—using your breath, tongue, teeth and lips to say the English words on their mind.  This is called articulation.  Below is a diagram that displays this process.  Notice how all three stages pull from the learner’s long-term memory.  One of your roles as teacher is to help your students build the knowledge needed in especially steps 2 and 3 in the speech production process.  You will do this through teaching grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation practices.  (I will discuss pronunciation further in future blog posts.)

As your students practice speaking in your classroom, they will make mistakes, like everyone does.  You will be able to help your students grow as you consider these steps in speech production.  Did your student make a mistake because they did not understand the grammar?  Did they just not have the right words on hand to express their thoughts?  Did the confusion created by their mistake stem from mispronouncing a vowel or consonant?  Did they misunderstand the prompt?  Each root cause requires a different solution to help your student learn from their mistakes and improve.

Another thing to consider when planning your lessons and teaching your students is the areas in which your students can improve their speaking.  As ESOL teachers, there are three areas under speaking proficiency that we consider: accuracy, fluency, and complexity.

Accuracy focuses on how accurately your students use English as they speak.  Vocabulary, subject-verb agreement, articles, verb conjugation… this involves anything related to form. When you think of using English “correctly,” you are probably thinking about accuracy.

Fluency, however, focuses on how fluid a learner speaks.  Under this umbrella lies skills like correct pause placement (pauses at ends of phrases and clauses, not in the middle of phrases or clauses), stress placement (syllable and word stress), and intonation (rising with a question, falling with a statement).  

A “Successful L2 Speaker” is both accurate and fluent.  No matter how accurately a learner may use grammar and vocab, if they are not fluent, their speech will not be comprehensible.  The same is true if a learner speaks in a steady stream but is does not accurately follow English grammar rules.  Both are essential and so both require class-time attention.  

Complexity focuses on how…well…complex your student’s use of English is.  Vocabulary is certainly a part of this (using words like “sneak”, “race”, “scurry”, or “flee” instead of simply using “go”), but a large part of complexity refers to sentence structure.  Your students may be able to accurately and fluently produce a string of simple sentences like:

“My name is Sydney Jo.  I am twenty years old.  I have two brothers and two sisters.  I have two dogs.  I grew up in France.  I moved to the United States two years ago.  I now work at a restaurant on Center Street.”

There is nothing grammatically incorrect with these statements, but, to the ears of a native speaker, it sounds a little choppy.  Students move up levels in speaking proficiency as they learn to fluently and accurately produce more complex sentences.  For example, the previous string of sentences might become something like this:

“My name is Sydney Jo, and I am twenty years old.  Back home in France, where I grew up, I have two brothers and two sisters, as well as two dogs.  I moved to the United States two years ago and recently began working at a restaurant on Center Street.”

While I added a few more complex words and phrases, most of the complexity came from creating complex sentences with appositives and dependent clauses.  

As a teacher, you will help your students grow in all three areas of speaking proficiency: accuracy, fluency, and complexity.