A Heuristic Approach Towards Teaching Conversational Skills at the University Level
Ezana Habte-Gabr, Colombia
Ezana Habte-Gabr is a teacher from Ethiopia. He is based at the Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia. E-mail:ezana.habte@unisabana.edu.co
Menu
Introduction
Background
Informal Language and conversation skills
Formal Language and Conversational Skills
Evaluation
Lesson planning
Final reflections
Acknowledgements
College level speaking courses tend to require academic considerations in planning for them to be effective. Generally, students take such courses as language electives or they are part of a required course. Speaking courses at the intermediate or upper intermediate could be redundant and hence of little significance given the student's course load and level of satisfaction with the English. Based on a conversations skills course I taught this year, I suggest that emphasis must be placed developing a content based approach towards teaching conversation skills and completely incorporate immediate coursework concerns for a conversational skills course to be effective. Students should be aware of what they learned during a session and what more they could learn as they are exposed to websites and readings. If classes are concluded with an overview of conversational areas such as vocabulary and pronunciation, students will begin to visualize their bank of information. Furthermore, real life concerns of students such as other courses being taken or taught by the instructor should figure into the course, creating a meaningful context for conversation.
I contingently developed a speaking course this year as I began to discover the diverse interests of my students who came from a broad array of disciplines such as Medicine, Communication Studies and Business Administration. All eleven students were within the B1 and C1 range within the European Common Framework. In addition to their level, they also had traveled to the United Kingdom or the United States at least once in their childhood. Once the first session was over, after a lively discussion about ourselves and their strong interest in my Ethiopian background, I realized that we had established a high level of empathy. However, previous conversational skills courses that I held with adults in companies taught me that students at these levels rapidly reach a point were they see themselves not making the strides they did at earlier phases, resulting in high indices of dropout rates as they felt they were not learning, resulting in have to develop a meaningful curriculum based on Cummins notion of formal and informal language as many conversational skills courses revolve around informal language.
A heurestic approach to teaching contributed to the courses success. Identifying and discussing student's interests and hobbies or even concerns of the day without necessarily retreating from the days objectives, greatly enhances motivation. Here is an example.
The objective of the day was to teach adjectives related to fear based on a movie students were to watch. The students did not find the movie that interesting nor did they seem to have much time to analyse it with significant rigor as they were in the midst of midterm exams. When I began to sense disaster as there was a disturbing level of apathy, I gradually shifted the conversation towards culture shock and fear, issues that they were all able to relate to given their travel experience. Gradually, I inserted the vocabulary and asked them to try and use them as they continued speaking.
Students between the B1 and C1 range who have traveled have a broad exposure to informal language. These students are used to exercises which require them to talk about themselves, their family, holidays, hobbies etc. Perhaps, given that they are in an EFL content, they lack practice and mistakes as opposed to errors, such as "people is" or even errors with verb agreements. However, these are naturally corrected once students acquire about an hour of practice. After, the first two sessions student burn out is quite evident because at this stage, they have recycled their existing language and begin to see the need for further learning. Once fluency has been reestablished again a plan to teach new vocabulary and language structure could be developed through websites which provide more idioms, slang and "small talk". This permits students to be conscious of how much more there is to learn. There are many websites for building conversation skills.
Students in advanced levels who have strong conversational skills often have a very limited exposure to formal or academic conversation in and are often surprised at how much there is to learn. Medical students in our context are very much accustomed to reading texts in English. Furthermore, given the rich Latin based technical vocabulary in both English and Spanish tend not to find serious difficulties when talking about medical procedures. They were very motivated to participate as they rarely talked about issues in their field of study in English. Other students, particularly business students saw formal conversation as a way of reviewing material they had obtained in courses taught in English. Given the broad scope of areas of study, it became necessary to search for material which was academic in nature, but interdisciplinary such as ethics, population, materialism and globalization. These were addressed through magazine articles which were assigned a week in advance. Following each discussion, students provided a list of new vocabulary and phrases. Students were prompted to use new vocabulary and structure in subsequent conversations through their notes.
Students were evaluated in both contexts by their ability to demonstrate newly acquired knowledge as well as the ability to maintain conversation flow, attitude and coherence. Students at either end of the fluency spectrum experience tend to risk being poorly evaluated given their reluctance to participate in conversation. Students who are advanced in conversational skills, if not probed to talk about new topics and use more sophisticated language genre, easily lack motivation and develop a survivalist mentality, doing the minimum once they notice their fluency level is higher and are convinced that that their grade would be higher from the offset. Furthermore, if the instructor subconsciously assures them from the beginning that they are masters of the language and need not make an effort, their learning attitude is minimal. On the other hand, students whose fluency level is lower, tend to shy from participation as they are overtly overwhelmed by other speakers. Mastery, of the English language tends to have this effect on those non fluent. However, this is an issue to delve into in another paper.
The director and academic coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department suggested the use of rubrics in evaluating students as opposed to an impression grade, which provided very limited and constructive input to teaching. Contingent modification of rubrics to specifically grade tasks shows students how they will be evaluated and generally avoids discrepancies over grades as students are clear on how they would be evaluated. Emphasis was placed on vocabulary and tone of the context of the conversation, formal or informal. Hence, all students were able to see that evaluation was based on what they had learned combined with existing knowledge. Having students use the rubrics to evaluate one another also reinforces learning and without doubt students view evaluation as an integral part of the learning process as opposed to a mere mark or grade.
It is of utmost importance to have classes planned as opposed to an "anything goes" approach. Once students see flexibility with a structure, a heuristic approach could effectively unfolds. Students, themselves begin to naturally plan the next class - "Why don't we talk about ...." , "Could I bring photos from my trip to New York next class?" "Could I give a presentation on AIDS?" (a proposal from a medical student) " Could we talk advantages to video games in learning" ( a student vehemently responding to a critical comment I made" - Put simply, these are topics which they will discuss much better than one suggested by the instructor. Therefore, adapting topics to a well structured scheme of conversational skills such as specific vocabulary, colloquialisms, pronunciation, to mention should be considered in planning.
Teaching other courses during the same semester also helps in terms of finding conversational material and this saves time as the instructor already has performed the task. For example, I taught courses on Africa and Population during the same semester and was able to assign the same readings and propose the same class discussions in the conversation skills course, permitting me to work two courses simultaneously.
Teaching a conversation skills course requires being aware of the academic regimen of the both the student and instructor and incorporating other courses and activities into the course for it not to be merely an appendage. Instructors should have the objectives of the course made clear to students from the beginning and remind them that they are being met even if there is a deviation from planned topics.
I am very grateful to Nohora Bryan, Director of the Foreign Languages Department and Claudia Acero, Academic coordinator of the Foreign Languages Department at Unvierisdad de La Sabana for providing me the opportunity to teach the course and their insights
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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