Vol. 4 Issue 45 – Research Paper: 'Using Teaching Aids Effectively to Enhance Speaking Skills' by Sunita N Dalvai

** This paper is submitted by S. N. Dalvai.

Abstract

Effective teaching begins prior to the teacher entering the classroom. Teachers must formulate their goals and think about how they will achieve them before facing the students. The teacher must be able to apply a number of different methods of teaching to reach students with different learning styles. In order to encourage critical thinking and real life application, students must be pushed to think outside the box. This means teachers need to be able to create an environment for this to occur.

In this competitive world, where  communication in a global society is a must to ensure our survival, the ability to use an international lingua franca- English – is indeed vital, especially in business, sciences and technology many enterprises and factories offer job vacancies to those applicants who are capable in English both written and spoken.

Speaking is the process of orally expressing thoughts and feelings of reflecting and shaping experience, and sharing information. Speaking is a complex process, which involves thinking, language and social skills. The speaker combines words to form sentences and paragraphs and uses a style that is appropriate to a social context.
Speaking is development for the relationships between a speaker and her hearer. In addition, speaking is determining which logical linguistic, psychological and physical rules that should be applied in a given communicative situation

An important aspect of learning is for students to be able to communicate what they know, or think they know. The best way for teachers to encourage communication students is through classroom discussion or small group work. We learn best when we actually have to teach or explain a concept to someone else. This means being able to verbalize what we know. So teachers need to encourage their students to verbalize their own knowledge so that they can learn more efficiently. Students on the listening end also benefit from hearing their classmates’ explanations. When students listen to each other, they often benefit from hearing concepts being explained from different points and in ways that might be closer the student’s way of thinking. When students listen effectively they generate questions to further everybody’s thinking and learning.

In teaching speaking teachers may use various methods in order to make material more interesting. It is better if teachers are not bound by one method.

Key words: teaching, learning, skills, thinking, global

It needs to be mentioned that nobody is born with good communication skills- we need practice to improve our communication abilities. Many times, inability to express one self clearly arises mainly because of lack of preparation. Does one need to practice his own mother tongue? Indeed no, as he is listening to the language and simulating the same .He need not even think and speak in his mother tongue as there is a constant flow of language. For such, even a small five-minute meeting, one needs to prepare, depending on the agenda of the meeting. There are several ways by which a teacher can teach speaking very effectively. Though the syllabus is already framed by the Universities, the teaching method or even the aids for teaching should be preplanned by the teacher herself. An activity based learner centered curriculum ensures that the student is well rounded to understand the subtleties of the corporate world. The core elements of teaching methodology like pair work, group work, stimulating group discussions, mock interviews, skits, role plays, etc., instill confidence in the students to meet the challenges of corporate work culture.  At the same time the student should understand the LSRW(Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing) to speak effectively. The teacher has to plan some games where the students can involve themselves in learning and teacher in teaching the art of effective speaking. There are some kinds of learning techniques, which serve different purposes and require different resources to implement in teaching speaking. Frequently used learning techniques include: Structured discussions, open discussion, brainstorming, self-test, case studies, role plays, tag team role plays, and management games.

Classroom Activity

For successful language teaching, choose games that:

• are most suitable to your students’ linguistic and maturity level, and purpose of their learning
• match their purposes for using English and the context in which they will use it
• promote students to talk more freely while they play

Be creative and make your own games by studying magazines, newspapers, radio and TV

programs and by asking your learners and searching online

Listening

• Gossip: The teacher holds a card that has a list of sentences. Students line up in two or more rows. The teacher whispers a sentence to the first person and then the student whispers it to the next in line, and so on until everyone has heard the sentence. The last student from each line to hear the message should say it out loud or write it on the board. The teacher writes down the original sentence on the board. The team which has the most accurate sentence in the end wins.
• The students can be asked to make a film review after watching the movies like Rang De Basanti, Chuk de India, Black, English vinglish etc.,
• Listening to speeches of famous people and summarizing the same.

Speaking

• Cue cards- Here, some cues or notes or a situation is written for the speakers to get a clue on what they have to speak. The students are asked to pick the card and speak on the situation given on it For eg;. The situation on a card says you live with your friend in a room and your room mate has a bad habit of using your cell phone without your permission. What and how will you tell your room mate to stop all the nonsense which you don’t like.
• In order to have good discussions teachers need to provide problems that have multiple solutions or methods of solution. These types of problems are best in simulating discussion, creativity and risk taking. When teachers are trying to encourage a meaningful discussion it is crucial that they give their students plenty of time to respond and think about what they want to say. Teachers should avoid yes/no questions and short answered question if they want to have a quality discussion. Open-ended higher level thinking questions are the best choice to get students thinking and communicating their ideas. The teacher should stay involved in the discussion to correct wrong information but should be careful when pointing out mistakes. It is very important to create and maintain an environment that students feel comfortable participating.
• Role plays: Assign two students their roles one as an irritated customer and the other as a hotel manager where the customer comes to the manger saying that the sound coming in from a neighboring wedding ceremony is disturbing his peace of mind. The manager is assigned to handle the customer and the customer has to fight for his benefits. And many more role plays of opening a bank acc in a bank, asking queries in a post office or taking an appointment in an office to meet the manger.
• Another way to encourage students to communicate, especially if they are too shy to speak up, is to have them journal (diaries). Research suggests (Terrell Young, 1990 that dialogue journals provide a purposeful activity in which students communicate their thoughts and feelings. It is important that teachers collect these journals and respond to them. The teacher doesn’t necessarily need to evaluate them, but she/he could ask the students questions to further their thinking. Such as, “Why do you think that?”, “What could be another reason?”, and so on. Students can also exchange journals to share their ideas and get responses from others.
• Debate – Debate is another way teachers can provide their students with the opportunity to practice their communication skills. Research suggests that debate encourages different types of responses, helps students to develop convincing arguments, and allows teachers and students to learn from one another (Leonard, 1999). This also encourages students to back up what they believe and it allows teachers to really get a good idea of what kind of conceptual knowledge students have about certain topics.
• Just a Minute sessions: It is also called as JAM session, in which a student needs to choose a topic of his own or a judge will provide the topic name, and need to speak something about that topic for 1minute.
• Pick and speak: The teacher puts the topics on chits of papers and the student has to pick and speak for a minute or more than a minute. If the topics are pertaining to current issues the students will automatically adopt reading skills.

Speaking is used for the purpose of conveying speech and speaking also is more formal in meaning. The teachers should invite the students to speak to improve their abilities in expressing their ideas automatically. Speaking is more used and important to make students able to express their feeling, thoughts, happiness, anger, and emotion. Students have to learn and master speech skill, which is, necessary in good articulation. They have to learn how to pronounce the words correctly and sensitively to their listeners.

The advancement of facilities and methods in teaching-learning speaking process are really needed to get good result. Systematic and continuous instruction should be developed in order to reinforce the basic attitude skills and abilities of students’ expression in meaningful communication situation.

What makes a good teacher? Well, that probably depends on the subject matter and the level of the students. However, some teachers can make even the most boring material seem interesting (and alternately, some teachers can make interesting materials boring). Some of it has to do with personality and charisma, but part of a teacher’s effectiveness is due to his/her knowledge and application of good teaching practices. These teaching practices range from setting goals for the class to making effective presentations to listening to students questions.

Reading

Students need to know how to read a business article, comprehend it and analyze it. They also need to realize that they cannot understand it if they are not familiar with the jargon of each industry.

Students often complain of a tight schedule and inability to find time to read the newspaper. This does not mean that they can remain unaware of National and International happenings. The newspaper can also be read in 20 mints.

Students are often questioned about current business happenings in the interviews and in the G D’s the students must be able to talk few sensible sentences which will add tremendous value.

It also increases the confidence level of the students if they are well read and prepared to speak about it

Reading, comprehending and analyzing of business news requires a fine tuning of the mentioned skills in addition to thinking, sifting, organizing and presentation skills. The ability to look at events from different perspectives and see a link is of utmost importance in today’s context. A headline is only the tip of the iceberg

Writing:

• Students can be told to develop some age old stories like The clever Crow  or even Cindrella as to Develop a story on the situation What if the prince had not found Cindrella’s shoes? How would she get out of the clutches of her aunt? Or how do you think the Crow would reach out to the water in the pot if he did not find the pebbles?
•  Creating stories based on some pictures and cartoons.
•  The cartoon clippings can be given to create dialogues between the characters. By writing dialogues – here the students learn to be more creative.

Selecting games for language teaching

For successful language teaching, choose games that:

• are most comfortable to your students’ linguistic and maturity level
• match their purposes for using English and the context in which they will use it
• promote students to talk more freely when asked to

One should be creative and make your own games by studying magazines, newspapers, radio and TV programs and by asking your learners

Collect and file games for use whenever you happen to come across them. If you don’t, you may not be able to find them later when you need them.

Have students create their own games in a group and use them as a review. This is a great way for students to review the concepts they learned by creating and including what they have learned in their games.

Conclusion

The researcher hereby concludes with a positive note that the teaching of speaking skills become very effective with different activities and learning takes place because the students are involved in learning. Since the teaching is based on activities the teacher will also enjoy teaching with the games he already has with him and will also put efforts in inventing new games and activities.