Конспект семинара "Spoken English"

1 slide

The material of my qualification workshop, which is presented to your attention was undertaken from our sessions’   and from different sources. Training plan form

 Target teacher group: Yamalskaya boarding school

- experienced school teachers of more than 3 years of teaching  and who have no experience at all 

- their level of English should be Upper-Intermediate or Advanced

- graduates from Philological Institutes

3 slide.Before the beginning of the workshop there are some bins on this slide

4 slide.We should well organize our work and divide into main parts as you see there are 5 of it.

5-6 slides

What is the topic of our workshop? With the help of warming-up we can guess it. Why is the speaking is more important than the others?

Well, Speaking is one thing that we cannot do alone.
So we should practice as much as possible where there are people to speak to.

As far as we know nobody will create English speaking environment for us unless we do it for ourselves.
We should choose a partner or a friend with who we can practice speaking English every day. 

7 -8slides 

Before we start the theoretical part we should   give some instructions or recommendations:

And identify problems of  speaking:

Now let's face the problems during the speaking (here you may ask your colleagues name these problems or just give them your ready-made list):

* fear of being laughed at

* lack of vocabulary

* grammar mistakes

* pronunciation

* time pressure

One way to tackle this problem is to find the root of the problem and start from there. If the problem is cultural, it is unusual for students to talk out loud in class, or if students feel really shy about talking in front of other students then one way to go about breaking this cultural barrier is to create and establish your own classroom culture where speaking out loud in English is the norm. One way to do this is to distinguish your classroom from other classrooms in your school by arranging the classroom desks differently, in groups instead of lines etc. or by decorating the walls in English language and culture posters. From one day teach your students classroom language and keep on teaching it and encourage your students to ask for things and to ask questions in English. Giving positive feedback also helps to encourage and relax shy students to speak more.

A completely different reason for student silence may simply be that the class activities are boring or pitched at the wrong level. So maybe you need to take a closer look at the type of speaking activities you are using and see if they really capture student interest and create a real need for communication.

Another way to encourage your students to speak in English is simply to speak in English yourself as much as possible in class. If you are shy about speaking in English, how can you expect your students to overcome their fears about speaking English? The more you practice the more you will improve your own oral skills as well as help your students improve theirs.

Make sure you give the students all the tools and language they need to be able to complete the task. If the language is pitched too high they may revert to their L1, likewise if the task is too easy they may get bored and revert to their L1. Also, be aware of the fact that some students especially beginners, will often use their L1 as an emotional support at first, translating everything word for word to check they have understood the task before attempting to speak. In the case of these students simply be patient as most likely once their confidence grows in using English their dependence on using their L1 will begin to disappear.

The timing of a speaking activity in a class can be crucial sometimes. After break-time, why not try giving students an activity to calm them down and make them focus before attempting speaking activities that involve groups or pair work. Another way to discourage students speaking in their L1 is to walk around the classroom monitoring their participation and giving support and help to students as they need it. Explain to them the importance of speaking English and ask them why they don't feel comfortable speaking English in the class. Maybe they just need some extra reassurance or they don't like working with certain students or there is some other problem that you can help them to resolve.

Sometimes when all the students speak together it gets too noisy and out of hand and you lose control of the classroom. A classroom full of students talking and interacting in English, even if it is noisy, is exactly what you want. Maybe you just feel like you are losing control because the class is suddenly student centered and not teacher centered. This is an important issue to consider. Learner-centered classrooms where learners do the talking in groups and learners have to take responsibility for using communicative resources to complete a task are shown to be more conducive to language learning than teacher-centered classes (Long & Richards 1987). Once the students have calmed down you can return to the original or another interactive group activity.

9 -10 slides.Learn to speak is like learning to swim. The more you train, the better you succeed, until, finally, you will not be able to do it without thinking about it. Here are some examples of activities and tasks how you can practice the language as much as possible:

10 slide.And certainly all your participants and you should make some conclusion about this workshop.

It can be held in different way

Well done . At the beginning of the workshop, participants were asked a task which considered all kinds of speech activity, and determined how much time is devoted to each. Then analyzed and found thaton   the 1st place -Reading, the 2nd-Writing,the  3d -Translating, 4 th -Listening and the 5 th  -SPEAKING. During the training, participants have listened to and discussed the theory of speaking skills and their problems. Each of the participants shared his opinion. After analyzing all the existing methods of activating skills spoken language, it became clear that these methods are not as complicated as they seem, and each teacher can choose those or other, which it considers more appropriate for the students according to their level of proficiency in English. Emphasis was placed on the fact that when speaking in the first place to overcome their uncertainty and the most important thing is not strictly find mistakes.

The best way to express your thoughts are simple words and phrases. You can train the ability to understand the meaning of speech, using keywords. Moreover, it is very important to find and offer interesting topics for discussion. And, of course, the conditions of dialogue should be favorable.

During the practical part we were offered a variety of tasks that could help overcome the problems with speaking, explaining the final result - the struggle with fear. Participants were eight people so divided into two groups and held a joint brainstorming. Students were to discuss each activity. All the proposed tasks were  interesting . Summing up the training workshop, we came to a conclussion that in order to overcome the language barrier, it is necessary to include and fairy tales, poems and songs, not just the standard activities.

In my opinion, there is a language barrier or not, we should try to overcome it and find a better way. Otherwise it will be impossible to improve our speaking skills and learn to speak fluent in any foreign language.

At the end of the training there was a reflection. It was necessary to evaluate the content; on methods of interaction; the group’s activities; your sown activities ,forms and methods, then an analysis has been made of reflection. All participants took an active part in the seminar-training,  goals and objectives have been achieved, we have proved that the integrated use of modern methods can yield positive results and lead to the improvement of communicative competence. New methods  of learning  English help us to overcome the language barrier. This kind of work has been approved, the participants expressed their wishes, it was mentioned about  necessity of such workshops  with an invitation of  other teachers of their school and between schools and in the future  between districts.Thank you very much!

References:

1. Celce-Murcia. M. (2001). Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (3rd ed). USA: Heinle&Heinle.

2. Long M.H & Richards, J.C. (1987). Methodology in TESOL. USA: Heinle&Heinle.

3. Nunan. D. (1991 Language Teaching Methodology. UK: Prentice Hall International (Chapter two & three)

4. Tanner .R. & Green.C.(1998) Tasks for teacher education. UK. Addisson Wesley Longman. Ltd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p51wLfw_QSc