[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 7 | March 14, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Teaching talk as performance requires a different teaching strategy. Jones (1996:17) comments that:
Initially, talk as performance needs to be prepared for and scaffolded in much the same way as written text, and many of the teaching strategies used to make understandings of written text accessible can be applied to the formal uses of spoken language.
This approach involves providing examples or models of speeches, oral presentations, stories, etc., through video or audio recordings or written examples. These are then analyzed, or “deconstructed,” to understand how such texts work and what their linguistic and other organizational features are. Questions such as the following guide this process:
- What is the speaker’s purpose?
- Who is the audience?
- What kind of information does the audience expect?
- How does the talk begin, develop, and end? What moves or stages are involved?
- Is any special language used?