I use the term integrated speaking to delineate the type of speaking I teach in much of my test-based EFL context. Teaching speaking in high-stakes test-based contexts bends speaking pedagogy toward the test type and tasks.

This English wiki illustrates Part A of the high-stakes speaking examination, which includes a text with three guiding statements to help participants, usually four, independently organize their ideas around similar topics within the text. It offers a fourth guiding statement, which reads “anything else you think is important,” which gives students an opportunity to bring their own ideas into the group interaction. The students are given 10 minutes to independently organize and develop their topic-based ideas on their data cards before starting their 8-minute group interaction.

This test type requires learners to initially read and write and then, in their performance task, read, listen, and speak. This requires a high degree of planned and spontaneous interaction and therefore, this integrated-speaking task may be the most challenging of all their public examinations.

INVISIBLE CULTURAL HURDLES

Cultures may have very different culturally held learning beliefs, so whatever your context, start reading, observing, asking local questions, and yes, start jumping! Hitting an invisible hurdle makes it more visible. For example, in my context, learners benefit from being given time to self-practice or self-perfect before performance-based tasks because a strong culturally held learning belief is that mastery precedes performance (Biggs & Watkins, 2001; Chan & Rao, 2009). Speaking is performance personified and magnified. It is not always easy to assess the reason(s) why some students do not speak: some reasons may be shy personalities; lack of motivation, confidence, or proficiency; and culturally held learning beliefs.

ON BECOMING A HURDLER

The first hurdle for me was to find a way of accessing students’ performance personas and speaking capabilities. After being knocked down at the first hurdle time and time again, I’ve come up with the following strategy that has helped me clear it.

I start with a short, simple performance-based oral reading task. I assign all students a different oral reading text. This is important because students will self-perfect while watching others perform the same text and this will skew their performance and speaking capabilities. Second, I give students outside class time to pre-practice and self-perfect their oral reading before presenting it to the entire class while being videotaped. This allows learners to choose their preferred learning resources while self-perfecting. I do this to help neutralize their self-perfecting culturally held learning belief. Videotaped student performances help to establish initial performance personas, speaking capabilities, and motivation baselines. Videotaping is important in my context for a number of reasons: 1) it allows students to self-perfect their performance personas; 2) it supports high-stakes public examinations and school-based assessment (SBA) formats, which are videotaped; and 3) it gives teachers and students opportunities to re-assess presentations to better address personal speech problems.

HARNESSING THE HURDLE

When you rewatch the videotapes look for the following: 1) segmental enunciation (specific speech sounds, such as clear and well-blended consonants as well as vowel sound clarity); 2) segmental errors; 3) prosodic features of English (intonation, rhythm, stress); 4) prosodic feature errors or irregularities; 5) performance personas (vocal confidence and variety, expression, and internalized personification―an obvious cognitive-emotive connection with the idea).

I use the information I gather to improve my general speaking lessons, by choosing or writing my own speaking exam samples which incorporate texts that help my students develop speaking skills and better situate them for their high-stakes speaking assessment. Although the linked wiki illustrates examination-based integrated-speaking texts, I also incorporate a wide variety of phonetic-rich authentic texts, such as Dr. Seuss books.

SPEECH HURDLES

This interview with Steven Chan helps to illustrate how even stronger English language learners who are highly motivated to speak English, find English pronunciation the most difficult aspect of learning English in a EFL context.

HURDLING INVISIBLE PRONUNCIATION SYSTEMS

Invisible pronunciation systems (IPSs) may be a manifestation of fossilized interlanguage (Acton, 1984; Selinker & Lakshamanan, 1992) as they are quite unique to each individual student.

I’m hoping that I’m not the only one trying to hurdle IPSs and that this article might help start some much needed dialogue at a pedagogical level on how EFL teachers can help to resolve IPSs within their local contexts. For, example, in my context, there is a greater emphasis on receptive reading and productive written English language than on receptive listening and productive speaking. It is possible that this imbalance reinforces IPS development. Possibly students construct IPSs to help create associations between what they already know, which may be related to their L1, to what they are trying to learn. For example, in my contexts, students often have very different word pronunciations: äu-tō may be auto; ā-too, ău-tū, or any other possible student-created pronunciation variation. Although IPSs may not be as problematic for reading and writing as students tend to memorize word meanings and spelling, they most certainly wreak havoc with students’ speaking and listening capabilities. It is not unusual for students to spell and read words which they cannot decipher or pronounce when listening or speaking. A common comment from students is that, for the most part, they can read their listening paper and do the written tasks, but that they struggle to understand what the speakers are saying because most of the words are unfamiliar to them.

Lau Yim Ching, a senior student, explains that native English movies with English subtitles help her notice her IPS errors. She concedes that most often her invisible pronunciation is her way of coping with having limited access to spoken English and speaking English. She also acknowledges that correction takes a lot of time and hard work.

It’s not like I hear the correct pronunciation and I know my mistake. I read the word while hearing it. This difficult because I am reading the text and don’t hear the words all the time. I watch movies again and again.

Lau Yim Ching’s comment supports my observation that IPS creation may be a precursor to fossilized interlanguage (Acton, 1984; Selinker & Lakshamanan, 1992) because an IPS seems to impede listening and speaking―communicative competence. If these IPS observations exist in other EFL contexts, I’d love to hear how EFL listening and speaking teachers are hurdling and neutralizing IPS creation in their contexts.

REFERENCES

Acton, W. (1984). Changing fossilized pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly, 18, 71-85.

Biggs, J., & Watkins, D. (2001). Teaching the Chinese learner: Psychological and pedagogical perspectives. Hong Kong, China: Comparative Education Research Centre & Australian Council of Educational Research.

Chan, C., & Rao, N. (2009). Revisiting the Chinese learner: Changing contexts, changing education. Hong Kong, China: Springer.

Selinker, L., & Lakshamanan, U. (1992). Language transfer and fossilization: The ‘multiple effects principle.’ In S. M. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning (pp. 197-216). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Ruth M. Smith has taught English for 25 years and has been working in an EFL context for the past 2 years. She currently works as an EFL instructor in Hong Kong and is the founder of Smith English Education, which specializes in Adaptive Animated Language Learning.

Facebook: English Friendship Exchange (a global social site I organized for EFL students to chat with other English-speaking people around the world).  It has 200+ members.
Facebook: ruey smith
Twitter: rmsmithstudio