Improving Oral Interaction Competency

Good morning/afternoon/night everybody! today we are going to make a list of some advices to take into account if we want to enhance our pupil’s communication skills and to stimulate the oral interaction in class.

We have based our work in different articles and some notes that you must study for the coming exams so we hope it to be helpful to shore up the acquired knowledge. First of all, what we have to know about the oral interaction competency is that its objective is to promove a spontaneous and natural use of the english, and there is needed an important condition: The english must be the only language used in class.

Another factor wich is very important is to be very carefull with the preparation of the class, given that we will have to take into account our pupil’s level, and also to aware that we will find some gaps in our pupil’s knowledge and we will be ready for compensate them.

So we will pay attention to prepare the class to elements like: the focus of the task; pupil’s needs; resources (audiovisual support is usually the best); previous knowledge; strategies and methodology...

Talking about resources, wich one would be a good resource to improve the oral interaction competency? Well, students should have access to different kind of resources like banks, cards, posters, computer programs...wich will introduce the vocabulary and expand the record of words that pupils must use. Also these resources shall contains expressions and others useful english expressions.

It’s important for pupils to have access to different resources because through managing and handling them, they will take control of their own learning becomming more autonomous.

What should we teach them first? Pupils don’t need a lot of vocabulary, expressions and general language to interact each others, they just need what they will use. This functional language that they will learn must be related with the daily activity in class, but that does not mean that it have to be a specialized or technical language, they must lacquire the basic knowledge to start to interact with their classmates and with their teachers as well.

To implement this vocabulary we can use some technics (and also we must use the mentioned resources as well) like the association between physical actions and the sounds that does actions means, like pointing the door, waving our hand...

Also we must stablish some routines (greetings,pleasentries...).

But what we is the most important thing to improve the oral interaction competency? Practice. We have to make sure that our pupils have enough opportunities to interact in class and we shouldn’t scold them for speaking in class (always that they were speaking in the right language of course). In our didactic sequences we should include a lot of activities that implies oral interaction, otherwise, pupils will not retain the learning because they can’t practice their new skills.

See you soon!