Introduction: Background and Course Context

Addressing spoken accuracy can be a daunting challenge for current language teachers, as so much of what we do in the era of communicative language teaching is rooted in building confidence and fluency. While these aspects of language learning are undeniably important—and no one seems to be clamoring for a return to more forms-focused instruction—accuracy is certainly critical to student success, especially as students advance into more academic or professional realms. In our own program, as in many other programs across the country, we have received a recent influx of Middle Eastern students. On a whole, these students come to us relatively fluent, but often have ingrained errors in their grammar and pronunciation.

In part because of this phenomenon, in the winter of 2012, we were tasked with creating an elective course targeting spoken accuracy for the spring session, which we would then have the opportunity to coteach. Generally, full-time students in our program take two such elective courses—one skills-based (like ours) and one content-based. These electives are taken in addition to core classes in reading and writing and oral communication. Because of the small size of our program, as well as its mission of student-centered learning, instructors typically have a lot of freedom in designing courses. Thus, as we undertook the task of designing this course, we attempted to keep open minds and ultimately learned a lot through the process about how to address and assess spoken accuracy.

Course Design

Issues in Course Design

Designing a course with a focus on spoken accuracy presented a variety of challenges. As alluded to above, the vast majority of oral communication textbooks and teacher training materials (see, for example, Bailey, 2004) focus primarily on fluency, resulting in a general lack of resources to consult. Additional challenges included creating a class for an extremely diverse group of students with a relatively wide range of L1 backgrounds, English proficiency levels, and future goals. In order to make the class beneficial for all and include a variety of materials, we researched options for course content by using an array of books and websites, and we worked to adapt materials originally designed to address written accuracy. From there, we narrowed the skills we actually needed to cover and created a three-pronged approach to teaching the course.

Narrowing Content and Skills

Due to the short length of this course (4 hours per week over 10 weeks), we had to select the content in a way that addressed the common concerns of the students without overwhelming them. In order to do this, we administered a diagnostic test on the first day with items in categories such as word, sentence, and discourse-level stress; sound discrimination; and extemporaneous speaking. The test was designed so that we could determine whether students could identify and produce accurate grammatical structures, pronunciation, and “discourse style,” which is a blanket term we used to cover register, dialect, and other context-specific language features. We also incorporated additional needs assessment activities, including a self-assessment and a guided small-group discussion. Once the results were in, we created specific course outcomes based on the most common issues among our students.

A Three-Pronged Approach

After selecting specific course content and skills, we organized the schedule in a way that focused on the alignment of our grammar, pronunciation, and discourse style outcomes. As such, we decided that Mondays would be dedicated to pronunciation, Tuesdays to grammar, and Wednesdays to discourse style; Thursdays would then be utilized for integrated practice and review. So, for example, one week students worked on intonation on Monday, followed by question formation on Tuesday, formality and politeness in questions on Wednesday, and then had Thursday to further practice combining these skills. We found that structuring the course in this manner gave students a better and more holistic understanding of the concepts, in addition to scaffolding them and allowing multiple opportunities for practice, which is critical to building automaticity in using accurate forms.

The Project

While we had worked to develop a series of accuracy-oriented assignments and assessments, including an audio journal with a self-transcription and error analysis component, we also wanted to incorporate something a bit more creative and engaging for students. Because the elective courses in our program typically involve project-based learning, we figured the best way to achieve this, as well as the best way to allow students to further review the skills covered in class, would be an extended project. The drama scene project we ultimately created did just that, but it was also adaptable to individual student needs, in that it allowed students to choose which features to focus on. Additionally, it allowed them to receive and incorporate feedback on the same work multiple times, thereby purposefully and incrementally improving their spoken accuracy.

The first phase of the project involved pairing the students strategically based on L1 backgrounds, problem areas, and/or goals. Once students were paired, they were to choose a short, 2–3 minute movie or television scene clip that told a contained story and had approximately equal speaking parts. After selecting a scene, students worked together to transcribe it, including annotation of salient pronunciation features. The goal at this point was then to reproduce the scene, so that their performance of it sounded as close as possible to the original. After practicing for about a week, the scenes were performed live in class, and each pair received both teacher and peer feedback. Students also watched a recording of their performance and did a self-assessment.

In the second phase of the project, students wrote either a sequel or a prequel to their scene. This meant that they had to match not only the characters’ style of interaction, but had to think specifically about the language features that were used in the original and then create a fully accurate extension. After getting teacher feedback on their script and once again practicing for a week, they performed the original scene once more, as well as the sequel or prequel. As in the first phase, teacher, peer, and self-assessments gave students feedback on their performance.

In the final phase, students had the opportunity to again create their own script, but this time by revisiting the original scene and shifting its discourse style. For example, if their original scene was conversational and used a significant amount of slang, they might adjust the style into a more formal, academic manner of speaking. This allowed students to investigate different registers and dialects and to have fun changing the vocabulary and grammar, as well as the pronunciation features, of their scene. Again, students performed the original scene first, followed by the discourse style-shifted scene, and then received feedback and had time to reflect upon that feedback and their progress in general.

Conclusion: Adaptations and Implications

The Accuracy in Spoken English class, and particularly the three-phase project, ultimately helped to improve some of our students’ common accuracy-related errors and raised their awareness of far more. This increase in awareness proved to be something they very much appreciated, especially as it has enabled them to continue to make progress on their own, long after the course concluded. While we were dealing with relatively advanced students, the ideas presented here could certainly be adapted for work with lower-level students, as well as with homogeneous groups. A smaller-scale version of the project using pre-selected scenes, for example, could be used to target the errors common to a particular L1 in an EFL context. Similarly, the option of turning this live performance project into a dubbing project (similar to those recommended in Burston, 2005), could reduce some of the challenges of a “one-shot” performance for lower-level learners. For while it is clear that spoken accuracy is something that can and should be addressed in line with students’ goals, and needs, it is equally clear that this instruction should at once be targeted and engaging in order to maximize student success and satisfaction.

References

Bailey, K. M. (2004). Practical English language teaching: Speaking. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Burston, J. (2005). Video dubbing projects in the foreign language curriculum. CALICO Journal, 23(1), 79–92.

Jennifer Grode and Adrienne Stacy both teach in the Intensive English Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. They created an Accuracy of Spoken English course together and have since been interested in incorporating more creative accuracy-oriented activities into oral communication classes. They presented on their course at the 2012 TESOL convention in Dallas.