|
6.Factors enhancing specific speaking skills
Factors that might have helped the experimental group students
progress in grammatical competence:
1. Following grammatical rules correctly:
Before the program, students commented that their impression about the
grammar they could use during speaking was negative. Most of them had difficulties with finding proper grammatical expressions, and this affected their speech. The most problematic areas in grammar were the use of the present simple tense to express routines and feelings. Moreover, students committed many errors in the use of irregular forms of past simple tense and subject-verb agreement.
On the posttest, the results show that students used more correct structures.
The students, also, used grammatically more complex utterances, i.e. "There was anincrease in the number of subordinate clauses".
This progress can be attributed to different factors at the pre-task stage, the
during- task stage and the post task stage. Among the major factors that might have
affected students' performance at the pre-task stage was engaging learners in
discourse analysis activities. Discourse analysis was practiced via authentic listening texts that were closely related to the genre students were required to communicate in. Throughout these texts and accompanying activities, students could: (a) see how grammatical rules are applied correctly by native speakers in real time speech, (b) identify the relation between the grammatical rules adopted and the spoken functions realized and (c) understand how when we speak, we use lexical phrases that are learned and retrieved as units rather than combining words each time we speak.
Besides, both consciousness raising activities and teaching drew students'
attention to some special characteristic of spoken grammar, which distinguishes it
from written grammar such as: ellipsis, tag questions, contractions, and short
incomplete sentences called "utterances".
Requiring the students also to plan for the upcoming task by determining the
grammar needed in terms of tenses, word order, and structure of complex utterances was very effective. It helped drew their attention to form and accuracy rather than focusing solely on fluency.
During the task, students could use easily the grammatical structures learned
before the task. Given adequate time, students could plan online in terms of
grammar, for their own oral performance. At the report stage, books available to
which students resorted to plan, draft and redraft their oral presentation- and the
teacher, who was always ready to answer questions related to grammar when
necessary, enabled students to improve their grammar during speaking. These
resources encouraged students to become autonomous active participants in their
learning. Furthermore, the group observation sheet applied during the task, helped
students pay attention to their spontaneous grammatical errors that was hardly
perceived in deliberate production.
The self- evaluation checklist, used at "altering the attention phase" enabled
students also to self- correct the grammatical mistakes they made spontaneously
during speaking. Students discovered their grammatical errors by themselves and
this helped them to learn the correct rules easily and effectively. Furthermore, the
teacher’s feedback through the use of previously agreed upon criteria helped
students integrate the correct more complex structures in their existing language
system. Besides, the consolidation and reflection phase remedied students' common errors and various opportunities were provided to practice and focus deeply on the speaking skills. Besides, the consolidation and reflection phase remedied students' common errors and various opportunities were provided to practice and focus deeply on the speaking skills. Students' progress in speaking genres might be due to the specific activities that were geared towards every genre and that addressed the grammatical points relevant to such genre. For instance, the present simple tense was stressed to help students "express and inquire about personal information" "describe personality and appearance" or "talk about daily routines. Similarly, modal verbs were tackled deeply to help students sound more polite in all "social every day encounters".
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
