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LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA ORAL. LA COMPLEJIDAD DE LA COMPRENSIN DEL SENTIDO GLOBAL EN LA INTERACCIN ORAL: DE LA AUDICIN A LA ESCUCHA ACTIVA Y SELECTIVA. LA TOMA DE PALABRA: DE LA REPRODUCCIN IMITATIVA A LA PRODUCCIN AUTNOMA. SPOKEN LANGUAGE. LISTENING COMPREHENSION: FROM HEARING TO ACTIVE AND SELECTIVE LISTENING. SPEAKING: FROM IMITATION TO FREE PRODUCTION.

The present essay aims to study the spoken language. For this purpose, I will first present the notion of spoken language and the main principles that should guide our teaching practice. Second, I will develop the listening skill topic. In order to do so, I will discuss separately the main strategies and the stages involved. Finally, the third part of the essay is devoted to speaking skill. For this purpose, I will deal with the main strategies for developing speaking skills and activities recommended for a balanced approach, providing varied examples. Finally, I will compile the main conclusions and the bibliography used to develop this topic.

Learning a new language means developing skills that allow us to process what other people say in another language and to communicate what we want to say. In order to use language effectively, we need to combine different skills.

We can identify four major skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. These major skills can be classified in relation to the medium of transmission: speaking and listening are expressed through the aural medium whereas reading and writing are expressed through the visual medium. Next, I will analyse in depth the skills that are expressed through the aural medium and thus, are part of the spoken language.

But first, let me present the notion of SPOKEN LANGUAGE. It is the greatest use of language and is the basis of communication; in fact, oral language plays a vital role in the personal and social development.

Language consists on words uttered through the vocal organs and perceived via hearing organs. Speech is time-bound, dynamic and temporary. It is part of an interaction in which both participants are usually present, and the speaker has a particular addressee in mind. Also, part of the message can be conveyed by prosody.But teaching spoken language in school, especially related to foreign language areas, does not mean teaching children to speak using correct forms so much as providing then with the skills and opportunities to communicate more effectively. To achieve this goal, we have to bear in mind the following principles when planning spoken activities, both comprehensive or listening and productive or speaking ones:

a) Give clear instructions: speak loudly, slowly and clearly; demonstrate the task.

b) Have define goals, aimed to the improvement of one or more specific listening/speaking skill.

c) Careful planning, step-by-step.

d) Contextualized tasks, specially related to situations near to real-life situations.

e) Adequate level of difficulty, from easy to less easy topics and structures.

Following factors help to judge the relative ease or difficult of any activity: clear organization of the text, familiarity with the topic, visual support to aid in the interpretation, redundancies of the text, existence of multiple individuals and objects.

f) Active pupil participation and varied classroom interaction modes.

g) Handle errors sensitively and affectively: correct errors in language areas that you recently taught or in structures that need to be used frequently by the student.

h) Monitor students activity continuously.

After having contextualized the topic, I will now deal with LISTENING COMPREHENSION.Listening is the ability to understand and respond to spoken language. But far from passively receiving information, listening activities actively involve the listeners in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge relevant to the information contained in the aural text. Listening does not only enable learners to interact in spoken communication, this is an essential skill that provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition.Apart from these principles, listening strategies are another key element when dealing with listening skill. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input: top-down strategies and bottom-up strategies.

a) In the top-down strategies: the listener recovers information form his/her background knowledge, and this helps the listener to interpret what is heard. This is an essential skill given that, in real-life listening situations, foreign language learners are likely to come across unknown vocabulary or structures. By using their knowledge. They should either be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word or understand the general idea.

To practice top-down listening strategies in the classroom, we can get pupils to predict the content of a listening beforehand by providing some key words or sentences; we can order a series of pictures or events in order, listening to conversations and identifying where they take place, how many participants there are, etc.; or we can read information about a topic and the listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned.

b) In the bottom-up strategies: the listener relies on the language contained in the message. This strategy helps learners to understand enough linguistic elements of what they hear to then be able use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps.

To practice bottom-up listening strategies in the classroom, we can get pupils to pick out details; discriminate between phonemes or word boundaries; recognize words; find the stressed syllable; or use features of stress; intonation and prominence to help identify important information.

In addition to this, if we want our pupils to be efficient listeners we must give them enough practice in both intensive and extensive listening. In intensive listening, students are asked to listen to a passage with the aim of collecting and organising the information it contains. The passages used usually contain concrete information and often its not so easy for the students to understand on first hearing. Passages should be short and played several times. This is the most widely used form of listening practice in classrooms.

In extensive listening, the language level is within the students capacity and they listen for pleasure and interest. It can be used for two different purposes.

To present already known material in a new environment;

To practice vocabulary items and structures which are familiar to them.

We as teacher must bear in mind the aforementioned principles and strategies when using listening activities in the classroom, but it is also important to know when to use them, that is, in which stages the activity best fit. The listening activities can be classified as follows: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.

Pre-listening activities prepare students for what they are going to hear and create expectation. This can be achieved through prediction, vocabulary and grammar exercises.

These activities may include: looking at pictures, maps, diagrams; reviewing vocabulary or grammatical structures; and going over the directions for the activity.

While-listening activities related directly with the aural text and students do them during or immediately after the time they are listening. They must be matched with the aim of the exercise and the students proficiency level.

These activities may include:

Listening with visual, for example, listening to physical descriptions and matching with the appropriate famous character picture.

Filling in graphs and charts with relevant and preciously known data.

Following a route on a map.

Picture dictation.

Checking off items in a list.

Searching for specific clues to solve a mystery.

Post-listening activities are used to check comprehension and assess. A post-listening activity may expand on the topic of the listening text: or may transfer what has been learned to reading, speaking or writing activities.Following on the listening passage, a lot of activities are possible: extending lists, summarising, matching with a reading text, answering multiple-choice or true/false questions, problem solving activities, ordering and completing a conversation, writing texts as a follow-up to listening activities, speaking in a form of debates, interviews, discussions, role-plays, simulations, dramatisation, etc.

After having dealt with the training and development of listening activities, I will do on to address the SPEAKING SKILLS.Speaking is the ability to communicate in speech, which has to be appropriate to specific contexts. Language learners need to recognise that speaking involves three areas of knowledge: Mechanics or the uses or the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation.

Functions or the knowledge about the different uses of language.

Social and cultural rules and norms or the importance of the context.

Apart from these key aspects, students of a foreign language should be taught effective speaking strategies that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and, mainly, their confidence in using it. Following speaking strategies are essential:

Using minimal responses: in order to encourage learners to participate, it is recommendable to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Recognising familiar situations: students have to learn to recognise different communicative situations which are relevant to their nearest environment, such as greetings, apologies, invitation, etc.

Using language to talk about language: learners have to learn to overcome the misunderstandings in any communicative interaction.

In order to help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, teachers may follow different stages in a balanced approach that combines language input, structured output and communicative output activities. It can be:

Language input comes in the form of teacher talk, listening activities, reading passages, etc. it gives learners the material they need to begin producing language themselves.

Content oriented, which focused on the information; or

Form oriented, which focused on the structures of language.

Structured output activities focus on correct form and make learners comfortable producing specific language. In these types of activities, students may have options or models to complete.

Two commonly used structured output activities to practice speaking are information gap and jigsaw activities. In both types, students complete a task by obtaining missing information:

Information gap: one student knows something that another student doesnt. the gap should be bridged by means of negotiation and interaction techniques. These activities may be organised to practise more than just grammatical and lexical features.

Jigsaw activities: each partner has one or a few pieces of the communicative puzzle and the partners must cooperate to fit all the pieces into a whole communicative interaction. This communicative activity may be based on graphical aids, such as comics, photos, stories, etc. Communicative output activities allow students to practice using all the language they know in situations that are similar to real life. In these activities, students must work together to develop a plan, solve a problem or complete a task. The most common types of communicative output activities are: Role plays: students are assigned roles and put into situations that they may eventually encounter outside the classroom. They have to use appropriate language according to the situation. Students often benefit from role-plays, as they lessen their inhibitions taking on another identify.

To prepare successful role-plays, we have to bear in mind these guidelines:

Provide clear instructions.

Take students personalities into account when selecting role-plays to do.

Pre-teach or check students know the language and vocabulary needed to carry out the dramatisation. If its a complicated role-play, consider giving students prompt sheets with key vocabulary/questions for their characters.

Allow them a few minutes to study the role cards and work out come key sentences. Give help where needed. Each role play should be performed at least twice with the students changing roles.

Avoid making corrections until the role play is finished.

Recording role plays can be a very useful tool for giving feedback.

Discussions: they can be a powerful means of enabling students to engage actively with the topic and develop their own views based on critical thinking. But, in order to achieve these goals, classroom discussions have to be purposeful and require careful preparation. Having a good class discussion depends on four basic factors: The discussion must have a purpose.

Students must have something to say. Students must feel comfortable participating.

Meaningful questions must be asked.

As a CONCLUSION, I would like to highlight that communication is the main purpose or any language, and it is a key word for us as English teachers. In this light, spoken language has a key role at this stage of education and should be given priority over the written language.

By increasing students awareness of listening and speaking as skills that require active participation, and by teaching listening and speaking strategies, we can help students to develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communicative situations. In this way, we give students the foundation for communicative competence in a new language.

LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA ORAL. LA COMPLEJIDAD DE LA COMPRENSIN DEL SENTIDO GLOBAL EN LA INTERACCIN ORAL: DE LA AUDICIN A LA ESCUCHA ACTIVA Y SELECTIVA. LA TOMA DE PALABRA: DE LA REPRODUCCIN IMITATIVA A LA PRODUCCIN AUTNOMA.

AIM

To study the spoken language: listening and speaking skills0. INTRODUCTION

Learning a new language means developing skills

To use language, we need to combine different skills1. SPOKEN LANGUAGE Definition

Features (spontaneous, irrevocable, transient, both participants present, intention clues) Teaching principles 2. LISTENING COMPREHENSION Definition + active involvement

Strategies:

Top-down strategies, bottom-up strategies

Extensive listening, intensive listening

Stages:

Pre-listening

While-listening

Post-listening

3. SPEAKING Definition + areas of language (mechanics, functions, social and cultural rules) Strategies: Using minimal responses Recognising familiar situation

Using language to talk about language

Stages following a balanced activities approach Language input (content oriented or form oriented)

Structures output activities (information gap, jigsaw activities)

Communicative output activities (role plays, discussions)

CONCLUSION

Main aim: students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations (communicative competence).

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