Teaching Oral Skills Communicatively | Page 44

according to West (2000, Unit 2: 12), there are considerable differences between spoken language in the classroom and that used in the real world, a basic factor which determines the success of a lesson is the extend to which classroom practices resemble real life situations. This involves considering the following factors: 1.2.3.1. The input In a speaking session, input is provided to students mainly by the textbook language and the teacher talk. However, Porter and Roberts (1981: 38) stress that there is a mismatch between the characteristics of the discourse we normally listen to and that of classroom language. This mismatch is, according to West (2000, Unit 2: 16) not innocent for the students’ inappropriate output as: “…unnaturalness in the input would, one would think, lead to unnaturalness in the output.” The necessity for providing students with input similar to that of authentic language is not only justified by the fact that it provides students with an appropriate model for their own output but also because, as Krashen (1987 21) argues, language is better acquired through what he calls ‘comprehensible input’, i.e. language which is meaningful and a little beyond the students’ level of proficiency. 1.2.3.2. The activities West (2000, Unit 1:12) stresses that Krashen’s claim for comprehensible input should not overshadow the importance of comprehensible output as: “the greater the opportunities for spoken output, the greater the likelihood that they [students] will develop confidence in speaking in the target language.” There have been many attempts to define the characteristics of speaking activities which would bridge the gap between classroom and ‘real world’. Allwright (1984: 157) stresses that classroom activities should be communicative as it is through such activities that classroom learning can be transferred to the outside world while Littlewood (1984: 53 ) considers a person’s need to communicate about topics that are of interest to her as capable of providing the speaker with the appropriate motivation to learn the language. Finally, Nation (1989: 24-28) identifies five features which he claims are essential when devising communicative speaking activities. These are presented below and further explored with relevant references from the literature: 44