Communicative activities to enhance oral production in the EFL classroom

Introduction. Speaking is considered one of the most difficult skills to be developed in class when teaching a foreign language. Therefore, teachers need to look for alternatives to enhance learners’ oral production. In this regard, Communicative activities (CA) play a fundamental role in language teaching due to the fact they provide them with opportunities to use language as in real situations. Objective. The main goal of this research is to provide a general overview of Communicative activities to enhance oral production in the EFL classroom. Methodology. This article was based on the qualitative approach. A descriptive - documentary research was carried out through an extensive bibliographic literature review about the main principles of the Communicative Approach, communicative activities, types of CA, and speaking. Results. Results from the reviewed research investigations show that they are quite useful for teachers and learners since CA facilitate learners’ oral production employing the interaction among classmates and teachers. Conclusion. Besides, Communicative activities encourage learners to develop their language competencies due to the dynamic in which these activities are carried out in the EFL classroom.

The Effects of L1 Interference on the Occurrence of Code-Switching in the Algerian Context

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of Code-Switching (CS) was addressed in dramatically different academic contexts where English is spoken as a first language (L1) (i.e., inner circle), as a second language (i.e., outer circle), as well as where English is spoken as a foreign language (EFL) (i.e., expanding circle). Nevertheless, very few studies examined the issue of CS among undergraduate students in expanding circle countries such as Algeria. Basically, this study sought to find answers that would, firstly, help apprehend the overriding reason (s) that stimulate the occurrence of CS in the third year students' oral production, secondly, identify the communicative functions of English-Arabic CS in the students' class interaction, and thirdly, gauge its practicality and effectiveness in multilingual classes. Following a qualitative research approach, a case study design was adopted with a purposively (deliberately) chosen sample. Accordingly, data were collected by means of two tools of inquiry, namely observation and an unstructured questionnaire. The findings revealed that the underlying factor that prompted the occurrence of language-switching was the linguistic interference that germinated from the students' L1, among other subsidiary linguistic factors. Furthermore, it was found that CS grants its appliers the opportunity to reiterate what they exactly said in another way, to hold the floor and continue speaking for an extended period, and to insist on what was being communicated. Regarding CS technique, it was concluded that it might be considered as a productive and, simultaneously, a detrimental communication strategy to develop EFL students’ speaking competence. Finally, the findings of this study supported the initially formulated hypotheses, and, thus, reported positive results.

Oral production skills and pronunciation improvement in MOOCs for migrants and refugees: an unavoidable challenge

This article is focused on the challenges posed by the development of oral production skills (speaking, pronunciation) in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a resource that is totally conditioned by the technologies and has very limited posibilities for individual adaptation. First of all, the difficulties that this goal poses are reviewed and confronted with some successful precedents that show how to deal with those challenges. Next, we present a case study in which some strategies and resources have been used to develop oral skills and improve pronunciation in technologically mediated environments, an Spanish L-MOOC for migrants and refugees, absolute beginners, developed at UNED (Spain).

AVALIAÇÃO DA PRODUÇÃO DISCURSIVA ORAL NO ENVELHECIMENTO E SUA RELAÇÃO COM ESCOLARIDADE E HÁBITOS DE LEITURA E ESCRITA: UMA REVISÃO SISTEMÁTICA

A presente revisão sistemática tem por objetivo verificar quais as tarefas comumente utilizadas para elucidação da produção discursiva oral do adulto idoso e sua relação com escolaridade e hábitos de leitura e escrita. Para tanto, buscaram-se artigos publicados nas bases de dados Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, MEDLINE e LILACS. Os termos utilizados foram (“discourse production” OR “oral production” OR “narrative production”) AND (aging OR elderly OR “older adults”) AND (education OR schooling OR “reading habits” OR “writing habits”). Os critérios de seleção incluíram: (a) artigo original avaliado por pares; (b) com foco na produção discursiva oral no envelhecimento típico; (c) publicado entre 1990 e 2019. Foram encontrados, no total, 456 registros, dos quais 393 foram excluídos pelo título e 12 após leitura na íntegra, por não se relacionarem ao tema. De acordo com os critérios de seleção, 19 artigos foram selecionados. Verificou-se que grande parte das pesquisas utiliza tarefas baseadas em estímulos visuais, sobretudo em seu formato sequencial, enquanto uma pequena parte utiliza tarefas baseadas em eventos autobiográficos, conversações livres ou descrição de procedimentos. Algumas pesquisas compararam a produção discursiva oral da amostra em questão em diferentes tarefas. Poucos estudos incluíram a variável escolaridade em seus experimentos, enquanto nenhum estudo investigou o efeito dos hábitos de leitura e escrita. Devido à sua complexidade, estudos no nível do discurso precisam considerar a influência do tipo de tarefa para a elucidação do processamento, assim como fatores sociodemográficos e culturais dos seus participantes.

The interaction of working memory capacity and engagement with recasts on different L2 outcome measures: A replication of Révész ()

We report on a conceptual replication of Révész (2012) in order to investigate the idea whether learners provided with recasts do engage in different kinds of behavioral engagement as a function of their working memory and if/how this engagement comes to bear on performance on different measures. Engagement with recasts was measured through a coding method categorizing responses to the recasts running the gamut from: (1) no opportunity, (2) opportunity, but did not repeat, (3) repeated the recasted form, (4) negotiated the response, to (5) used the recasted form later in the discourse. Consistent with Révész (2012), though with lower effect sizes, the results showed that recasts were most conducive to gains on an oral task and less so on a written description task, but non-effective on a grammaticality judgment task. Furthermore, it was revealed that learners with a high phonological short-term memory were more prone to recast-induced engagement on an oral production task, whereas those enjoying a higher reading span were considerably less so. We propose that learner engagement be deemed more important in future interaction research.

Impact of task preparedness on L2 oral performance and strategy use

The present study sets out to explore the effects of pre-task planning and unpressured on-line planning on L2 learners’ oral performance and their choices of planning strategies in a dialogic task condition. Forty-eight intermediate Chinese EFL learners were invited to perform the task and were then assigned to four groups, each with a different planning condition. Complexity, accuracy, and fluency of their oral production were measured. Results indicated that in the dialogic task condition, unpressured on-line planning raised syntactic complexity. Strikingly, pre-task planning did not improve L2 performance in all dimensions. Additionally, a trade-off effect was found between complexity and accuracy. Retrospective interviews were conducted to explore strategies employed by the participants and their perceptions of task preparedness. Results showed that the participants preferred to use metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies in the dialogic task. Both advantages and limitations were identified by the participants regarding different planning conditions.

(In)felicitous use of subjects in Greek and Spanish in monolingual and contact settings

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers, were analysed to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun, expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were also found to be felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.

Adjectival and verbal agreement in the oral production of early and late bilinguals

Extended oral production has seldom been used to explore adjectival and verbal agreement in L2 Spanish. This study examines oral narrations to compare the agreement behavior, speech rates, and patterns of errors of highly proficient Spanish heritage and L2 learners (early and late bilinguals, respectively), whose L1 is English, with those of native controls. Although both bilingual groups displayed high agreement accuracy scores, only the early bilinguals performed at or close to ceiling. In addition, the L2 learners spoke significantly more slowly than the heritage and native speakers, who displayed similar speech rates. Explanations accounting for the differences in speech rates and agreement accuracy include age of acquisition of Spanish, syntactic distance between a noun and its adjective, and task effects. All of these factors favored the early bilinguals, enhancing their advantages over L2 learners. Findings suggest that the integrated knowledge and automatic access needed for native-like attainment in agreement behavior in extended oral production is more easily achievable by early than by late bilinguals.

Can online translators and their speech capabilities help English learners improve their pronunciation?

This study investigated whether a translation tool (Microsoft Translator – MT) and its built-in speech features (Text-To-Speech synthesis – TTS – and speech recognition) can promote learners’ acquisition in pronunciation of English regular past tense -ed in a self-directed manner. Following a pretest/posttest design, we compared 29 participants’ performances of past -ed allomorphy (/t/, /d/, and /id/) by assessing their pronunciation in terms of phonological awareness, phonemic discrimination, and oral production. The findings highlight the affordances of MT regarding its pedagogical use for helping English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners improve their pronunciation.