Testing the Productive Skills: Speaking and Writing
1. Testing the Productive Skills:
Speaking and Writing
Presented by:
KEITH A. DOLORIAN
MAT-English Student
Presented to:
DR. ROMMEL R. CASTRO
Professorial Lecturer
Republic of the Philippines
UNIVERSITY OF RIZAL SYSTEM
Province of Rizal
GRADUATE SCHOOL
Pililla Campus
2. Productive Skills
Speaking and writing skills are called productive skills.
They are crucial as they give students the opportunity to
practice real-life activities in the classroom.
These two skills can be used as a 'barometer' to check
how much the learners have learned.
3. Why is it important to teach these
productive skills?
Teaching speaking is vital for it develop a real sense of
progress among learners and boosts their confidence.
Teaching writing is important because written communication
is a basic life skill.
Writing is an effective way of reinforcing what they have
already been studying, and they benefit greatly from seeing new
or unfamiliar language in written form.
4. What is Speaking?
It is the action of conveying information or
expressing one's thoughts and feelings in spoken
language.
to express thoughts, opinions, or feelings orally
(Merriam Webster)
5. Teaching Speaking Skills
The following are suggestions from different authors in teaching
speaking:
a. Form-focused Speaking
It is an approach to language education in which learners are
made aware of the grammatical form of language feature that
they are already able to use communicatively. (Wikipedia)
It is suitable for beginners.
6. Teaching Speaking Skills
b. Meaning-focused Speaking
It is that stage of speaking where the focus is on the
message being communicated.
7. Why Activities are Provided in Teaching Speaking?
There are three basic reasons why teachers should provide students with
activities:
a. Rehearsal – to organize
Example:
A role-play for students in a shop or an airport offers them an opportunity to
rehearse a real-life event and the students get the feeling of what is the
communication in a foreign language like.
8. Why Activities are Provided in Teaching Speaking?
b. Feedback
Having students to present what they know, that means,
to use all the language they have learnt provides feedback for
the teacher as well as for the students.
The teachers can see what the students are doing well and
what is needed to be improved.
9. Why Activities are Provided in Teaching Speaking?
c. Engagement
All speaking activities are highly motivating and the students
find those interesting to work on and to participate fully.
10. Types of Speaking Activities
1. Role Play
Students can pretend they are in various social contexts and
have a variety of social roles. In role-play activities, the teacher
gives information to the learners such as who they are and what
they think or feel.
11. Types of Speaking Activities
2. Brainstorming
On a given topic, students can produce ideas in a limited time.
Depending on the context, either individual or group
brainstorming is effective and learners generate ideas quickly and
freely.
The good characteristics of brainstorming is that the students
are not criticize for their ideas so students will be open to sharing
new ideas.
12. Types of Speaking Activities
3. Storytelling
Students can briefly summarize a tale or story they heard from
somebody beforehand, or they may create their own stories to
tell their classmates.
Story telling fosters creative thinking. It also helps students
express ideas in the format of beginning, development, and
ending, including the characters and setting a story has to have.
Students also can tell riddles or jokes.
13. Types of Speaking Activities
4. Interviews
Students can conduct interviews on selected topics with
various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides a
rubric to students so that they know what type of questions
they can ask or what path to follow, but students
should prepare their own interview questions.
14. Types of Speaking Activities
5. Reporting
Before coming to class, students are asked to read a
newspaper or magazine and, in class, they report to their friends
what they find as the most interesting news.
Students can also talk about whether they have experienced
anything worth telling their friends in their daily lives before
class.
15. What is Writing?
It is a medium of human communication that represents
language and emotion with signs and symbols. (Wikipedia)
Pertains to the activity or skill of marking coherent words on
paper and composing text.
16. Aspects of Effective Writing
Before looking at how to teach writing skills, aspects of effective writing should be
considered. Correctness and accuracy are needed in the following areas.
1. Grammar
Grammar is important for writing. In writing every grammar error stands out, which is
why it is important to know the rules.
2. Vocabulary
Being able to choose the most accurate words to express your thoughts in writing is the
key to being understood.
3. Spelling
There are few spelling rules in English, and the connection between how a word is spell
and how it is pronounced is less clear-cut than in many other languages. Our students
need to learn the spelling of each word.
17. Aspects of Effective Writing
4. Punctuation
This helps us understand written text the way intonation helps us understand another
person’s speech.
5. Layout
Students must be made aware of the conventions of certain forms of writing, for
example, informal letters, formal letters, poems, scientific reports, diaries, faxes, notes,
and postcards.
6. Linking
Learners must consider linking ideas and information across sentences and paragraphs
to develop a topic or argument.
7. Style
Appropriate styles should be taught to the students. For example, our written English on
a postcard to a friend is completely different from a letter to a government office asking
for information.
18. Types of Writing Activities
1. Letters
Students can write to make complaints, thank, ask for and give information or advice or
prepare job applications.
2. Creative Writing
You can use pictures or begin a story and ask students to finish it. Or you can use a
personal situation where the student was happy, sad, surprised, shocked, etc.
3. Diary
Ask your students to keep a diary.
4. Discursive essays
Students need to present an argument, state points for and against in a logical way, and
write a conclusive paragraph.
5. Dictation
A dictation can have a calming effect on young learners. It is also useful for teachers who
have limited resources and need to dictate a text for a reading skills lesson.
19. Approaches to Teaching Writing
a. Product-oriented Approach
The concern of this approach is on the correctness of final
products of writing.
The product-oriented approach to the teaching of writing
focuses more on the linguistic knowledge, such as the appropriate
use of vocabulary, grammar, and language devices.
20. Four Stages of Learning Writing under
Product-Oriented Approach
1. Familiarization
2. Controlled writing
3. Guided writing
4. Free writing
21. b. Process-oriented approach
This approach concerns more on the process of how the
students develop ideas and formulate them into effective
writing works.
Students are seen as the language creators in which they
are given chances to experience the process of writing, try to
organize and express their ideas clearly.
22. Roles of Teacher in Writing
Teachers are required to have various strategies and great
interest when they are teaching writing to the students.
The success of students in learning writing is also determine
by the teacher’s performance in helping them learn writing.
In the process of teaching writing, the teacher has to help the
students to understand and learn how to write effectively, give
clear explanations and instructions and guide the students in
each step of the writing process.
23. Tasks that the teachers must perform before, during,
and after the process of writing (Harmer, 2004)
a. Demonstrating
b. Motivating and Provoking
c. Supporting
d. Responding
e. Evaluating
24. Reference
Mohammed Iqram Hossain, “Teaching Productive Skills to
the Students: A Secondary Level Scenario”, http://dspace.
bracu.ac.bd:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10361/7671/
11263001_ENH.pdf?sequence=1
Hayriye Kayi, “Teaching Speaking: Activities to Promote Sp
eaking in a Second Language”, http://iteslj.org/Technique
s/Kayi-TeachingSpeaking.html
Notas do Editor
Teaching speaking is vital unless someone is learning English purely for academic reasons and does not intend to communicate in English, which is quite rare.
Writing - Students may need to take notes, fill in forms, and write letters, reports, stories etc.
Writing - is a good way to practice grammar structures; it helps learners to recycling and look up new vocabulary and to learn English punctuation rules. It encourages learners‟ autonomy when they are asked to keep journals or turn in regular writing assignments that they carry out at home.
Speaking is more frequently used than writing. The main function of spoken language is to socialize individuals.
We teach speaking as learners consider this particular skill as one of the most important and also the most challenging skills. Speaking communication is the most common way of building interpersonal relations. Furthermore, speaking is important if we want to get things done, find out information and give instructions.
This approach goes deeply into details of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
An effective way how to start teaching foreign languages is to base speaking on some simple, useful phrases and sentences e.g. greetings, simple questions and answers or personal descriptions which are easy to remember.
These can be practiced by repetition drills. By repetition drills the teachers can change speed, the learner who is to repeat, the content of the sentence and the way of choosing the substitution.
In this approach we give more attention on the meaning of the statements being conveyed by the speaker and less on its grammar structure.
We can relate this into communicative approach, for example you have given an essay. You will focus on the content of the essay of your student and not on its lapses in grammatical construction.
Role plays are an opportunity for students to produce natural, semi-spontaneous speech. It is a wonderful low-prep activity to boost your students’ confidence and speaking skills.
When setting up a role play, you should give enough information about the situation to evoke the vocabulary you are targeting, but it should leave enough to the imagination to allow the students to construct their speech on the spot. Students will get more from the exercise if they can correctly use the appropriate vocabulary on their own.
For instance, at the very beginning of each class session, the teacher may call a few students to tell short riddles or jokes as an opening. In this way, not only will the teacher address students’ speaking ability, but also get the attention of the class.
Conducting interviews with people gives students a chance to practice their speaking ability not only in class but also outside and helps them becoming socialized.
Writing is slightly different from speaking in terms of communication context.
Speaking is always intended for face-to-face communication among the audience present, while writing is always used by the writers to express and communicate their ideas to the readers who are actually separated by both time and space distances. Therefore, it requires clearer and more comprehensive message.
However, when we speak we are more likely to use simple grammar and its easier to get away with incorrect sentences
In this approach, students writing works will be measured based on some criteria. The scoring criteria commonly involve content, organization, grammar, vocabulary and writing mechanics; for example spelling and punctuation.
Familiarization aims to make the students aware of certain features of particular text.
While in controlled and guided writing stages, the students practice the skills until they are ready for the free production activity.
So we can say that, the product-oriented approach puts emphasis mostly on students‟ final products of writing. Since final products are the concerns of this approach, the activities of writing are also controlled by the teachers. They need to do particular efforts to avoid errors in the text composition, for example by focusing more on the correctness of the grammar.
The process-oriented approach views writing as the activity of linguistic skills and writing development as an unconscious process that occurs when the teacher facilitates the students in learning the exercises of writing skill.
After discussing the characteristics of both product-oriented and process-oriented to teaching writing, we can say that the process of teaching writing must focus on both approaches. Teachers of English must be able to keep the balance of both approaches. In the teaching and learning process, firstly the students are exposed to learn the organization of the writing because the clear expression of ideas is the main point in writing and the grammatical problems will become the focus in the following step.
The first task that must be done by the teacher in the process of writing is demonstrating. It is a need for the students to be able to
understand writing conventions and genre constraints of particular types of writing.
b. It is difficult for some of the students to write in English. Besides, they sometimes have no idea of the words used to write their messages. This is the situation where teachers can help them by provoking them to get the ideas and then persuading them to work on their writings.
c. In the process of writing, teachers become the main supporters for the students when they are writing in classroom, especially when the students face difficulties. They must be available and well-prepared to help them solve the difficulties. Thus, the students will be motivated in doing their writings.
d. Responding refers to how the teachers react to the students‟ writing works. Content and construction are the focus of this task. After looking at the writing works produced by the students, the teachers can give feedbacks or suggestions for the students‟ improvement in writing.
e. This task refers to how the teachers will evaluate the students‟ writing works and then grade them. This is done by the teachers to see the students‟ progress in writing.
By doing these tasks, it will enable the students to be better writers, especially when they are hesitant to express the ideas.
