Summary of Speaking

In my journal teaching speaking strategies to beginners By Rosa Adriana May Mellendez and etc. volume:1, year:2014. Our main objective was to train the students on these basic speaking strategies so that they could use them regularly. The methodology to develop the session consisted in three stages:

1). A pre-task to know the participants’ previous knowledge of speaking strategies.
2). The training sessions, which were taught thought formal instruction and practice in oral tasks.
3). A post task to show if the frequency of strategy use increased after instruction.

When learning a foreign language some students use different strategies as long as they work for them. Oxford (cited in Murrieta and Hernandez 2012, p.15) for instance. Points out that those students who learn easily use a great number of learning strategies. On the other hand, there some students who see the English language learning as a challenge; even though they have already learned their mother tongue without any problem they see the target language as something hard to achieve especially when they have t speak in English there Is when the teacher has to help and motivate the student.

The purpose of this first session was to find out if students knew about the speaking strategies and the how to use them at the mment of a conversation. At the end of the pre-task we realized that students did not use any of these. A journal was used as well to keep all the details observed during the sessions.

To achieve the requirements, ten students of basic level were chosen to participate in a short workshop that we designed which was divided into three section. The first part of the workshop was classified as a pre-task, a questionnaire was applied and the results were registered in a checklist where we collected the data to find out if students used any strategy, after wards the students had to carry out an activity given by the teacher in order to speak.

This research was both qualitative and quantitative. For the qualitative section we used a checklist which was completed though observation, and a video recording to keep all the necessary evidence. The activities were intended to improve students’ results, which at quantitative technique students answered a questionnaire that we used to college some important information about their language learning as well as each student’s background.
Only ten students were invited to take the training because they were identified s the most responsible students in the classroom so they would not miss any session. From our ten students, five had a good level of communication in English and did not show any fear when they have to explain something, on the other hand the other hand the other five students hardly ever talked in front of the class they just would say a few words, and sometimes they were n even able to communicate a complete idea, so they were the best candidates for this study, basically they had to learn the use of the strategies and use them later on I the post –task freely.

The questionnaire results showed that half of the students (five) used the dictionary when they did not know word, and just 3 of them had previous knowledge of the target language, in spite of the fact they did not use the strategies with frequency they really enjoyed the learning of foreign language. The pre-task showed that students used more the filler strategy than any other strategy, despite mentioning that they did not anything about them; fillers was the most used in the pre-task session. If the compare the three charts and we count the strategies that each student used in the pre-task, training sessions, and post-task we will see that the number of times each strategy was used increases in very section of the workshop. The results will be described below.

The students’ participations were focused on communicating orally through real sets; all students interacted in the beginning of a proposal to motivate basic or elemenstary students to work with strategies at the beginning of their learning experience in order to (Oxford, cited I Carter-Nunan, p.170) increase motivation, strategy knowledge and positive attitudes.