Techniques For Teacvhing Conversations

Thinh Le Van, Viet Nam

Thinh Le Van holds a Master Degree in TESOL at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities – HCM National University. He is currently teaching English at Banking Academy – Phu Yen branch. He is interested in doing research in teaching online and organizing English clubs. He enjoys working with teenagers and young adults. E-mail: lethinhpy@yahoo.com

Menu

Abstract
Approaches in teaching conversations
Techniques in teaching conversations
Methodology
Data comparison and discussion
Recommendations
Conclusion
References

Abstract

Teaching English in context is generally very important and in high school textbooks conversations are often used to introduce grammar and vocabulary for a new lesson. However, few investigations can be found on how these conversations in EFL school textbooks are taught in Vietnam. The purpose of this study is to explore the practices of teaching English to the students of the 14, Year 8 junior high schools in the Phu Yen province. The data for this research came from questionnaire responses from 50 teachers of Year 8 students in 14 secondary schools. The results showed that EFL teachers in these junior secondary schools followed major steps as recommended in their teachers' book for teaching these conversations. However, some aspects in their teaching should be revised to help students develop listening and speaking skills more effectively. Recommendations have been provided to teachers to improve the teaching and learning of English, in particular the development of listening and speaking skills for students in junior secondary schools.

Approaches in teaching conversations

Different approaches have been used to develop speaking skills for the learners via the teaching of conversations. In direct approach, oral communication skills are built up through question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students (Richard and Rodgers, 1986, p.10). In audio-lingual approach, the teaching of a dialogue starts with the learners' listening to the dialogue before repeating each line after the recording. The next step involves further practice with the replacement of certain key vocabulary until learners can form the key structures (Bilbrough, 2007, p. 6). In these two approaches, the learners' imitation of key structures in the dialogue seems to be priotized. By contrast, Dornyei and Thurrell (1994) support an approach which emphasizes fluency tasks and consciousness-raising activities. Via a 10-step procedure, Byrne (1986) focuses on involving students in the context of the conversation and helping them understand the conversation. This approach emphasizes the instruction to help students understand the conversation which is similar to Dornyei and Thurrell’s model.

Paul Sze (1995) includes learners' purposeful use of the language in the teaching process, with speech training, followed by drills and pattern practice, before learners' purposeful use of language. He suggests that the first step is to expose learners to recordings of unscripted conversations before using video recordings to raise students’ awareness and deploying fluency activities. These fluency activities start with getting messages across before focusing students' attention on appropriacy of language. This procedure is similar to that suggested by Nolasco and Arthur in emphasizing awareness activities and fluency activities. Thornburry and Slade (2006) suggest a flexible model which involves exposure, instruction and practice in any order. Similar to Thornburry and Slade's model is Bilbrough’s model (2007) which is even more detailed in that it shows a ‘gradual progress’ in teaching conversations from understanding conversations to free production of similar conversations through nine steps: understanding, analyzing, reproducing and reconstructing, memorizing, rehearsing and performing, co-constructing, creating and personalizing, communicating and dialogue as learning. In Bilbrough’s model, teachers set a listening task by asking students to write down what they remember and then discuss in pairs twice before showing students written copies of the original dialogues. Memorizing and parroting conversations in new and unusual ways are followed and engaging students’ feeling at this phase. Conversation creation in pairs or groups to take advantage of ‘explicit peer teaching’ with stimuli would be the next step. Conversations would be created by changing audience, style, or context before increasing the challenge with modified and expanded contents.

Techniques in teaching conversations

The suggested ways of teaching conversations by Bilbrough are similar to those found in the teaching guide of modern English textbooks, such as Top Notch 2 (Saslow and Ascher, 2006) or Step – by – Steps 2 (Adelson and Goldstein, 2007). The procedure suggested by Saslow and Ascher (2006) is as follows:

• Set the scene to establish the context
• Have students listen and read along silently
• Teach vocabulary
• Ask students to listen again
• Get students to repeat chorally by stressing on intonation and rhythm
• Teach structures
• Ask students to create similar conversations

Similarly, the procedure recommended by Adelson and Goldstein (2007: 11) consists of three main stages: presentation, guided practice, and communicative practice and application. Adelson and Goldstein (2007) also add a listening task in presenting the conversation and asking some students to model the conversation in front of the class.

In teaching conversations, Goldstein-Adelson (2007, pp. 10 – 11) seems to emphasize the teaching of pronunciation practice in various stages. First, the teacher allows the students to listen and repeat to have general pronunciation practice. Then, they suggest extracting some utterances in the conversations for students to practice the target intonation pattern. The last task is to ask students to read the conversation with the appropriate intonation pattern.

Besides, Ascher and Saslow (2006:16) recommend the use of pictures to help the students to visualize the content to the conversations. These scholars tend to divide the time for various aspects in the conversations of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Nolasco and Arthur (1992) categorise the activities conducted to teach conversations into controlled activities, awareness activities, fluency activities and feedback tasks in order of the teaching procedure. While controlled activities are aimed to develop the students' confidence, awareness activities are to develop their sensitivity to what they are learning, fluency activities are for the students to practice communication and feedback tasks are for students to reflect on their own performance. Thus, Nolasco and Arthur‘s model is similar to the previous suggestions, but it also adds feedback tasks to help students reflect on their performance.

By comparison, those proposed by Nguyen at al. (2008) for teaching conversations in ‘Tieng Anh 8’ that secondary school teachers often use as a guiding in designing activities for their classes tend to be simpler as there are only three activities of listening to the conversation, pronunciation practice and comprehension questions. These activities only carry out some steps in Bilbrough’s model (2007). The instruction does not cover the steps to help students create similar conversations such as co-constructing, creating and personalizing, communicating and dialogue as learning. As presented in the teacher’s book (Nguyen et al., 2010, p.143), recommended steps and activities in teaching a conversation are detailed as follows.

1. Introduce the context
2. Let students listen to the recording while reading the conversation
3. Ask students to listen and repeat the conversation
4. Explain some vocabulary
5. Bring students' attention to the structure(s) in the conversation
6. Ask students to do role-play to read the conversations
7. Ask one or two pairs to perform the conversations in front of the class
8. Ask students to do the task in the textbook and then correct it

Methodology

The investigation was conducted to reflect the real situation in teaching conversations at various schools in Phu Yen province to identify useful lessons for the improvement of English teaching practice in high schools. Data was collected to answer the following research question:

How were these conversations in this textbook taught?

To carry out the research, a set of questions consisting of two main parts: Part A asked about personal information such as age and teaching experience, and Part B asked about their regular teaching practice of how conversations were employed.

A total of 50 teachers (21 from a district and 29 from the city) from 14 different schools were selected for the questionnaire data. A copy of the questionnaire was given to each English teacher in these 14 schools via the Heads of the English section. A total of 50 copies of the questionnaire were sent and collected after one week.

Data comparison and discussion

Conversations as a context to show the meaning of the vocabulary, structures and practice pronunciation were used by all the teachers in the questionnaire. The data results showed that all the teachers in the questionnaire (50/50) carried out the following activities: introduce the context, let students listen to the recordings, ask students to do role-play with the conversation, present the meaning of the vocabulary and ask students to answer reading comprehension questions about the conversation as provided in the textbook.

Table 1: Core activities in teaching conversations

These activities were similar to suggestions made by various scholars; for example, controlled and awareness activities (Nolasco and Arthur, 2002), speech training and pattern practice (Sze, 1995), exposure and instruction (Thornburry and Slade, 2006), or understanding and analyzing the conversations. (Bilbrough, 2007); therefore, teachers had some reasonable grounds to carry out such activities:

1. Introducing the context
2. Letting students listen to the recordings
3. Teaching new vocabulary and structures
4. Asking students to practice pronunciation via role-play in pairs
5. Asking students to answer reading comprehension questions in the textbook

However, though teachers were recommended to ask students to repeat after the conversations, (teacher's book) only 3/10 of observed teachers and 23/50 of surveyed teachers did this activity. Besides, only 44/50 (88%) of the surveyed respondents reported to present the structures, compared to 10/10 (100%) observed participants.

Although it wasn’t suggested in the teacher’s book, teachers also carried out the above activities in teaching conversations. Similar to the observation, a few teachers (14/50 or 28%) asked students to translate the conversations into Vietnamese. However, teachers shouldn’t translate the conversations into their mother-tongue (Byrne, 1986) because this could create a dependent habit and students will not display initiative to decode the meaning of the conversations, but wait for the teachers’ translation. Moreover, translation does not encourage students to use target language in their answers. Besides, translation is a separate skill and does not need to be studied at this level.

Furthermore, asking the students to create similar conversation might be useful for more able students; however, it could be too challenging to many other students in this contexts and make weaker students feel frustrated and lost; therefore, when this was done, weaker students seemed uninterested and felt lost.

Table 2: Additional activities in teaching conversations

As found in the data, the teacher followed the procedures recommended in the teacher's book. However, some teachers did additional activities which were very good such as true / false or question / answer exercises. This approach assisted students to better understand and memorize the conversation, and improve self expression. Asking students to translate the conversations into Vietnamese is not necessary as some students will place less effort on learning English and revert to their mother-tongue. While some teachers asked students to create similar conversations, they should be mindful of competency levels and the impact to each individual student.

In teaching pronunciation, the teacher did allow the students to listen to the recording as suggested by scholars (Byrne, 1986; Thornburry, 2006) and asked them to repeat (Byrne, 1986). Nonetheless, not enough exposure was given to the students regarding the oral form of the language, as they often listen to the recording only once and this was not enough for them to have an adequate overview of the sound or the meaning of the conversation. Thornburry (2006) believes that the lack of exposure would result in students' making a lot of mistakes in pronunciation and students would ‘underuse formulaic expressions’ (Thornburry, 2007) which might cause some difficulties in speaking. The teacher asked students to practice structure which took time and gave students fewer opportunities for pronunciation practice which could be useful to the students. Grammar was not a priority as it’s usually explored at the end of the unit.

Conversations play a crucial role in teaching and learning English in the secondary schools because they are a basic form of spoken English and contain a lot of spoken features such as vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. Therefore, teachers have to present all of these features when teaching conversations. Based on the results from the data analysis of questionnaire responses, a number of following findings could be considered significant.

First, most teachers seemed to follow the teachers' book in teaching conversations. The activities they conducted showed that teachers tried to implement the objectives set in the teachers’ book with conversations regarded as a context to present language. This implementation seemed to coincide with the idea given by Byrne (1986) who stated that introducing the context of the language taught in the conversation helped students to understand the conversations more quickly because it stimulated prior knowledge, socio-culture and discourse knowledge which helped students understand the language more easily.

Second, teachers exposed students to the language by letting students listen to the recordings with the purpose of making students familiar with the spoken form of conversations, as is recommended by scholars (Byrne, 1986; Thornburry and Slade, 2006). However, this exposure in these schools was still limited, so students did not have enough opportunities to familiarise themselves to the language presented.

Third, students practiced pronunciation in pairs which gave opportunities for peer correction and more opportunities for each student to practice; therefore, this activity should be continued. However, students also made some mistakes in intonation and rhythm because of lack of focus of the teachers in these aspects of pronunciation. Fourth, teachers tried to help students to understand the conversations by giving more activities such as true / false or question and answer exercises. These types of exercises are very appropriate because they can check student’s understanding and give them a better chance to understand the conversation in detail.

However, in teaching conversations, teachers might need some changes to improve the teaching and learning conversations.

First, translation was more commonly used than using pictures or gestures or examples in teaching vocabulary. This technique may seem to save time for the students and the teachers but it may not be a useful one because ‘an over-reliance on translation may mean that learners fail to develop an independent L2 lexicon’ and ‘the word is less memorable’ because the learners did not have to work hard to get the meaning. (Thornburry, 2002, p.77).

Second, students still made a lot of mistakes in pronunciation. The lack of adequate practice and the influence from the Vietnamese local accent with the vowel inserted between two consonants or changed the vowels, such as /kəlu:/ instead of /klu:/ or /asiə/ in stead of /eɪʒə/. As a result, English sounds were greatly distorted when spoken and it might be ‘extremely difficult for a speaker from another language community to understand’ (Kelly, 2000, p.11).

Third, most teachers focused on word pronunciation and largely ignored other features of pronunciation, such as basic intonation patterns. Therefore, many students did not raise the voice at the end of Yes/No questions. This could make it very hard for the students to have a comprehensible pronunciation and to be understood (Kelly, 2000).

Recommendations

Some recommendations are drawn from the findings to improve the quality of teaching and learning English in Phu Yen junior high schools.

First, since the conversation was used as a context to introduce new language, the teaching of vocabulary and structures was aimed to show students the meaning, rather than helping them to practice new language. Therefore, pronunciation should be also an important focus at this stage as it is the oral form of the language introduced. Specifically, teachers should spend more time helping the students practise pronunciation so that they can speak with comprehensible English. Also, not only the pronunciation of individual words but also the supra-segmental features of pronunciation, such as intonation and sentence stress should be introduced to the students as these features ‘have the greatest impact on the comprehensibility of the learners English’ (McNerney and Mendelsohn, 1992 cited in Celce-Muria, Brinton, Goodwin, 1996, p.10). Teachers need to read the conversation or play the recordings a few times so that students can have more exposure to model pronunciation. This will help them in practising the pronunciation later. Apart from this, more practice in different forms should be given to the students before they are asked to read in front of class for error correction. Pronunciation activities should be varied to raise students’ awareness of features of spoken English. For example, teachers could ask students to underline the words that they mispronounce and then work in pairs to find some help from their friends. After that teachers could let students listen to the recordings carefully to check the words they mispronounce.

Second, to give more opportunities for students' practice, teachers could divide the class into 2 groups such as left – right, front – back, boys – girls to practice students’ pronunciation before asking them to read in pairs. By doing this, teachers give students more exposure to pronunciation practise before they can do it themselves.

Third, a variety of vocabulary teaching techniques, such as gestures and pictures, should be used as they are visual and, thus can be easy to remember.

Fourth, asking students to create similar conversations is too challenging for weak students. Another way which might help the less able students is that teachers could cross out some words, and ask students to do a substitution drill when doing the role play to practice the conversation. One more way is that teachers only write some of the words for each utterance on the board and ask students to restore the conversation and read it aloud. After students are able to dramatize conversations, teachers can erase all the words on the board and ask them to produce the whole conversation.

Conclusion

The study does make contributions to the conversation teaching carried out by secondary school teachers from a considerable number of aspects. First it causes the teachers to increase activities, such as question and answer or true / false exercises to help students understand the conversations, without translating it into Vietnamese. Second, it also causes the teachers to practice more pronunciation, especially intonation and rhythm for students to improve their oral skills and less structures because students could study them in the language focus period. Third, it caused teachers to use a greater variety of techniques to present vocabulary, not only translation so as to make the lesson livelier, but to attract students’ attention and to increase retention.

References

Bilbrough, N. (2007.) Dialogue activities: Exploring spoken interaction in language class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Byrne, D. (1986.) Teaching oral English. Longman.

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (2002.) Teaching pronunciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dornyei, Z. & Thurrell, S. (1994) Teaching conversational skills intensively: Course content and rationale. ELT Journal, 48, 49-9

Kelly, G. (2000) How to Teach Pronunciation. Pearson Education Limited.

Nguyen, et al. (2008) Tiếng Anh 8. Education Publisher.

Nolasco, R. & Arthur, L. (1987) Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Paul Sze. (1995) Teaching conversation in second language classroom: Problems and Prospect. Education Journal. Winter 1995. Vol. 23. No. 2

Saslow, J. & Ascher, A. (2006). Top Notch 2: Teachers’ Edition and Lesson Planner. Pearson Education.

Thornburry, S. & Slade, D. (2006) Conversation: From description to Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Please check the Teaching Spoken English & Grammar course at Pilgrims website.