[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 5 | February 8, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
To develop speaking skills, teenage learners need to practise speaking a great deal and over an extended period of time. But real improvement requires more than just practice – it requires learners to expand their language abilities: grammar, lexis, pronunciation and so on. Chief amongst these is lexis – individual words, multi-word items, lexical chunks and fixed phrases – since most breakdowns in language production are caused by lack of access to the right word or phrase. In this webinar, Jeff Stranks will look at the relationship between lexical competence and spoken fluency, and suggest materials and activities that can be used to help learners increase their lexical range and thus become better and more confident conversationalists in English.
Jeff Stranks (BA, M.Phil. Linguistics) was Senior Tutor in ELT at Bell College Saffron Walden from 1981 to 1991, and then worked as an Academic Coordinator with Cultura Inglesa (Rio de Janeiro) between 1991 and 2001. He is an external assessor for the UCLES DELTA, and a moderator for the UCLES COTE scheme. He is now a freelance author. He is also co‑author with Puchta et al of English in Mind (2004), More! (2008), and THiNK.