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1.2 Productive skills in second language learning
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When one starts learning a foreign language, he surely and subconsciously is exposed to both categories of language skill. As mentioned before, productive skills - also called active skills - mean the transmission of information that a language user produces in either spoken or written form.
Productive language skills, speaking, and writing, are important because they are the observable evidence of language acquisition. The more the speaker or the writer produces appropriate and coherent language the more we have proof of the progress in the learner’s language system.
Nowadays when it comes to English learning, people are likely to say speaking is the most important and difficult part of people’s learning. But actually, writing is also significant even though it is the most neglected skill. Speaking pays more attention to accuracy and fluency while writing highly requires accurate grammar, more formal vocabulary, right spelling and beautiful handwriting. Even though they are too different in many ways, the two carry equal importance. Speaking and writing are both used for the same purpose making successful communication with people.
Teaching productive skills is also important because written and spoken communication are basic life skills. In real life, people generally may need to inform, convince, or share ideas. They are also sometimes required to take notes, fill in forms, and write emails, letters, reports, or stories.
Unlike the receptive skills lesson plan, in addition to understanding and interpreting the discourse, a productive skills lesson aims at helping learners produce appropriate and coherent messages either in spoken or written forms. It is true that making sense of, and being able to process, the input is important, but what is essentially involved in the productive skills is the ability to convey information, convince or share ideas and feelings.
Productive skills would not exist without the support of receptive ones. Passive knowledge - such as listening and reading - symbolises a springboard to active implementation of grammar structures, passive vocabulary lists, heard and repeated sounds of a foreign language. This theoretical background applies to any studied language. This should also prove that both types of skills are inseparable and one cannot exist without the other. When learning a foreign language, receptive skills usually come first and should be followed by practical application of productive ones. If a learning process lacks one of them, the final outcome will not be complete.
As most active users of any foreign language know, speaking and writing are in reciprocal relationship. Undoubtedly, grammatical structures, words and their proper use, and certain extent of accuracy need to be respected. These are implemented in both types of active skills.
As Riggenbach and Lazaraton point out, rather than implementing activities that concentrate attention strictly to accuracy, plenty of language instructors focus on promoting communicative competence in language students by applying “communicative activities”.
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The classroom environment and atmosphere definitely create necessary part of successful teaching and learning. These are highly valued by the learners. Creative teachers, who do not want to let their learners to get bored, work with a wide scope of speaking and writing activities. For the teaching purpose, not only lesson plan but also a term syllabus need to be created beforehand.
More experienced language instructors bear in mind that students´ responses to needs analysis forms bring valuable pieces of information for setting up the core of the language course plan. The content of such a plan should include some general activities, but there also should be a set of tailor-made exercises that suit the specific group of learners and where particular objectives are set. This aspect of selected activities will be dealt with later in the paper.
As Olshtain and Cohen state, ”if we wish to master another language we need to become more communicatively competent”. Their observation proves the idea that language accuracy is necessary but not the most vital feature of speaking activities.
To organize the lesson effectively a wide range of diverse activities should be involved in the lesson plan. Examples of speaking activities that are listed in the “speaking menu” are organized from least to most difficult ones. As mentioned above, some grammatical structures and vocabulary are incorporated in order to suit the content to less homogeneous group of course participants and guide them towards the same or similar outcome.
The teaching experience and long-term observation bring us a long register of activities and exercises in order to practice productive skills effectively. Speaking proves to be one of the main goals when learning English or any other language as a foreign language.
There are favourite activities that are considered to be suitable even for learners- beginners. To name a few and prove that speaking and writing are in mutual relationship we can start with writing or enumerating a list of words linked with a certain topic, and/or writing and simultaneous using of everyday phrases in short face to face conversation exchanges, role-play telephone conversations and picture games in the ESL/EFL classrooms.
At this early stage of learning some learners enjoy keeping their personal diaries, some labelling pictures or images with basic descriptions, or filling in word bubbles in comics with everyday phrases.
During the latter stage of learning students get acquainted with more specialized vocabulary and previously mentioned activities can be replaced with more advanced levels of those and/or new types of tasks. With respect to certain factors that may influence the final outcome of the language teaching, the following activities can be used: more complex conversation role-plays with stress on proper grammar structures and extended vocabulary register of certain topics, description of real-life topics and more serious local and global issues in a form of writing tasks, and e. g. oral summary of a recently seen film, read book or heard story.
There are numerous ways how to raise learners´ awareness of adequate phraseology of any foreign language and grammar accuracy but one important and necessary part in the process of learning is teacher´ s evaluation and provided feedback.
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Traditionally, the teacher evaluates his learners either by giving grades or verbally. The teacher´ s feedback involves criteria such as focus on content, i. e. clarity, original idea, organization and delivery of the speech, and whether the goals of the activity were kept.
A common tool to collect some information of this kind is to design the evaluation sheet. An interesting outcome is revealed when the instructor distributes self-evaluation sheets to his students and they evaluate themselves. The teacher may even discover originally unexpected assessment from his students when comparing his and the student´ s grading.
Besides those previously mentioned traditional activities supporting proficiency of productive skills there are new and modern trends that proved to become very popular with young and middle-aged learners. Not all of them are popular with everybody but some seem to be gaining their audience. With the expansion of the Internet services and applications, a number of innovative methods how to support productive skills became highly valued and frequently used.
The development of speaking skill is not paid enough attention in most of the English classes, because the teacher does not feel confident and competence to do it or learners do not feel the need for the skills. In most of time classes or school or college, we have found that the teacher that only speaks and the learner hardly gets opportunities to speak in front of the audience or class or school; if they speak, it is often repeating what the teacher says.
In English spoken classes or school, learners should have given opportunities to speak, because speaking skills can be developed only through engaging the learners in the act of speaking and interacting only. Most of the time we ponder over the classes’ teacher tends to neglect the speaking skill that has to use by learner. The teacher should give more opportunity to interact only in English language not mother tongue.
The ability to use a language is called language skill. When learners learn a language they usually learn four language skills for communicating in that language. When they learn their first language, learners usually learn to listen first, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. These are called the four language skills. So, for learning a second or a foreign language they also need to follow these steps. Teachers tend to talk about the way learners use language in terms of four skills- reading, writing, speaking and listening. They are often divided into two types. Receptive skill is a term used for reading and listening, skills where meaning is extracted from the discourse.
Productive skill is the term for speaking and writing, skills where students actually have to produce language themselves. The productive skills are speaking and writing, because learners need to articulate words and write to produce language.
Learners receive language by listening to conversation, music, video and also by reading comprehension, newspaper, poem, book, etc. Then they move on to the next stage where they produce the language to express their thoughts by using productive skills. Speaking is an oral production of language. McDonough and Shaw stated that, speaking involves expressing ideas and opinions, expressing a wish or desire to do something, negotiating or solving problems or establishing and maintaining social relations[1].
So, speaking is the oral process to produce language. On the other hand, writing is a productive skill in written mode. When scientists talk about writing there is usually two-way distinction of writing: institutional and personal writing. Institutional writing includes textbooks, reports, applications, business correspondence whereas personal writing covers personal letters and creative writing. Ur said that, “Speaking is the productive aural/oral skill. It consists of producing systematic verbal utterance to convey meaning”[2].
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According to Gower, Philips and Walters every opportunity for speaking in classroom should be taken. It can be done by trying to communicate that students realize their need for language and by speaking that they increase their fluency and confidence. At first students may be self-conscious and reluctant to speak in front of people. However, there are ways (repetition work and pair work activities) of providing a safer, less public environment in which the students can begin to practice speaking.
As a productive skill speaking is very important. Previously speaking was not a popular activity to practice in our classrooms. But nowadays the process of speaking activity has changed a lot. Teachers now try to encourage the students to improve their communication skills through speaking.
According to Nunan, to be successful in acquiring the speaking skill in the target language, the following sub skills should be developed: - “The ability to articulate phonological features of the language comprehensively; - Expertise on stress, rhythm, intonation patterns, - An acceptance degree of fluency, -. Transactional and interpersonal skills, - Skills in talking short and long speaking turns, - Skills in the management of interaction, - Using appropriate formulae and fillers”.
According to Gower, “Accuracy involves the correct use of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. In controlled and guided activities the focus is usually on accuracy and the teacher makes it clear from feedback that accuracy is important”[3].
In speaking, accuracy is very important and teachers should encourage the students for the correct use of language. He also added, “Fluency is the ability to keep going when speaking spontaneously”.
As the main aim of fluency is to give the students the opportunity to speak so, Scrivener suggested that, teachers should reduce their talking time to give the students more space to talk. He also added that, if the teachers correct students middle of a fluency task it can interrupt the flow of speaking and students often find it hard to continue after a correction, whilst others in class may become more reluctant to speak for fear of similar interruption.
So, teachers should give a proper instruction before an accuracy-focused work or a fluency-focused work.
To conclude, the above mentioned ideas, we may say that, teaching productive skills as speaking and writing require the teachers a hard work. It is necessary to get information about strategies of teaching productive skills in order to teach them step by step.
Language acquisition works better if teachers are well informed about the theoretical background teaching productive skills and can exploit them in the classroom perfectly.
The productive skills lesson plan should take into consideration the following points:
1. The lesson aims at helping the learners communicate.
2. It is unhelpful to provide a topic and ask the learners to speak or write.
3. Some preparation is needed before setting the task.
4. Generally, we cannot talk or write about something we know nothing about.
5. The choice of the topic is important. The learners should be familiar with it.
6. Before asking the learners to produce language, we have to equip them with techniques and strategies to facilitate their efforts to speak or write effectively.
7. Communication breakdowns may happen.
8. When difficulties arise, learners have to be able to use specific communication strategies.
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Since the aim of teaching receptive skills is to produce language that makes sense to the listener or reader, the lesson should be designed systematically to include stages that prepare the learners for the main activity (i. e. speaking or writing), activities that help them to actually produce appropriate messages and finally some sort of feedback that is either peer or teacher regulated.
Ideally, teaching a productive skill procedure involves the following steps:
§ Providing a model text
§ Comprehension and model analysis (e. g. studying the genre’s distinctive features)
§ Practice
§ Working on the language needed to perform the task
§ Task setting
§ Understanding the topic/situation (what is the desired outcome)
§ Planning
§ Structuring the output
§ Production
§ Preparing for the spoken task.
§ Going through the process of drafting, revising, and editing
§ Feedback
§ Self or peer-regulated feedback using a checklist or teacher-regulated.
Teaching productive skills involve the following steps:
1. Provide a model of the target genre we want our students to produce.
2. Work on the model; focus on the meaning and form. The teacher should guide the learners to analyze the text so that they can discover by themselves its linguistic and formal features.
3. After isolating the different linguistic and formal features of the model text, the learners have to work on accuracy activities. The objective at this stage is to practice the form and use of the language that will help them produce accurate messages in terms of pronunciation, spelling, verb tense, sentence structure, and text layout, etc…
4. After we feel that the learners can use the target language satisfactorily, they are introduced to a similar task where they have to personalize the language and produce effective messages.
5. Some planning or preparation is needed before production.
1. In the case of the writing skill, the learners have to go through a specific process that involves them to collect ideas, plan, write the first draft, revise it, and edit it.
2. In the case of the speaking skill, the learners have to structure their discourse, individually, in pairs, or in groups before actual production.
6. Feedback can be given by the learners themselves or by the teacher.
7. To give much more value to the learners’ productions, it is advisable to post the video recording of their conversations or their writing on social media such as YouTube, Facebook, or on the class blog if there is any.
An important aspect of communicative competence is to be able to adjust our language according to the status, sex, and age of the audience. The way we communicate with a child is different from the way we communicate with adults. Responding to a formal letter is different from the way we respond to a personal letter. Moreover, we adapt our interaction according to the social status of the participants. Addressing a person with higher status – such as a judge during a trial – differs from addressing a friend. Language output may also be adjusted according to whether we are interacting with a male or a female participant. Consequently, in any type of communication, the elements that constitute the audience should be taken into account. Otherwise, the communication might not be appropriate and may even be flawed.
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