One of the factors that indicates success in ESL classrooms is students’ proficiency in oral communication. Whether the ESL class is for basic, intermediate, or advanced students, students’ ability to articulate simple to complex ideas in English can be checked, assessed, and improved using various ESL techniques. Once students are comfortable using basic approaches to communicating meaning in English, they can begin to engage in conversations in English, either through orchestrated scenarios or in real-life encounters.
In any linguistic context, the conversational process involves listening, the mental formulation of meaning, and speaking. Each participant in a conversation must perform all three tasks in order to remain an active and relevant player in the encounter. Because these tasks are not easy for most non-native speakers to accomplish, the experience of successfully participating in a full session brings a lot of pleasure, excitement, and satisfaction to ESL/EFL students. There is often some kind of eureka moment when the student correctly grasps an idea expressed in English and when a native English speaker correctly and clearly articulates a specific idea that the students are trying to convey in a foreign language. Likewise, teachers of English as a second or foreign language whose students have developed conversational skills adequately affirm themselves in terms of their profession as well as the learning strategies and techniques they adopt.
Obstacles that prevent full participation in the conversations.
However, getting students to develop conversational skills in English is fraught with challenges. The fact is that the various forms of oral discourse – light talk, role play, debate, topic discussion, and recitation – are viewed with awe and apprehension by many students. This results in considerable shyness or hesitation among students to proactively articulate their thoughts in English. A number of factors have been identified as causing or reinforcing students’ reluctance to speak English. These include–
1. The topic is irrelevant or totally foreign to the student.
2. The student does not have an opinion or anything to articulate on the topic.
3. The student does not know how to correctly articulate an idea and is afraid of making mistakes and being ridiculed by the class or conversation partner.
4. The student is intimidated by the increased level of competition exhibited by other students. The possibility of being compared to more articulate learners results in a persistent reluctance to participate even when the learner has valid ideas on the subject.
5. The student is aware of and ashamed of the peculiar accent that he exhibits when speaking in English.
Removing these common obstacles is an important first step for a competent ESL/EFL educator to take. For students to develop acceptable oral communication skills in English, any barriers to active and meaningful participation in oral discourse must be addressed. Here are some logical and common sense approaches to do it:
1. ESL/EFL educators must be aware of the socio-cultural contexts in which they are teaching. Aligning lesson plans that make use of highly relevant and familiar topics (common ingredients of Thai dishes or street foods, Korean TV series, and Borneo’s unique wildlife, for example) will help students easily form ideas and opinions. that they need to express in English.
2. To facilitate a better learning environment, English teachers should strive to get to know their students individually as much as possible. In smaller classes, learning about students’ hobbies or interests can help generate valuable conversation starters. However, this may not be possible in much larger classes. One way to circumvent cases where students cannot form meaningful ideas or opinions about a topic is to assign them fixed, prefabricated roles or opinions. In this way, students can focus on language production skills rather than forming points of view or drawing from their own personal experiences.
3. Creating an open, tolerant, and socially constructive classroom is critical to fostering collaborative learning. At the beginning of the course, the ESL/EFL educator should already have established that mistakes will inevitably occur and that there is no reason to be ashamed of them. The teacher may also choose to give due credit to risk takers, even when they make mistakes. This is an opportunity to correct mistakes and encourage other students to participate.
4. In some learning settings, competition is a strong motivation for success. In others, however, collaborative techniques that fully benefit the group are best used.
5. Exhibiting accents is a normal manifestation in the articulation of a second or foreign language. However, educators and linguists differ in how they view this phenomenon. On the one hand, the spread of English around the world has transformed it into a global language in such a way that no ethnolinguistic group can claim it as their own. The British and the Australians have their respective accents. Why would accent marks indicating a Japanese or Filipino speaker be considered incorrect when the conveyed meaning is understandable to any English speaker? After all, linguists believe that language is organic and continually evolving, with different groups assimilating a particular language and imbuing it with their own characteristic nuances and accents. On the other hand, there are educators who argue that encouraging the use of a neutral accent in English is the best long-term course to follow, especially in global communication. Because some English variants and pidgin forms are difficult to understand quickly, neutral accents are preferred when significantly different sociolinguistic groups communicate in English. Therefore, educators must constructively teach the globally acceptable way of speaking English without marginalizing the specific variant of English characteristic of the place in which they are teaching.
Effective aids for conversations in English
Speaking and listening exercises remain by far the most effective way to improve conversational skills. However, any obstacles preventing students from fully participating in these exercises should be addressed immediately by the ESL/EFL teacher as explained above. The use of conversation cue cards that are used in role-play sessions can also help students feel less apprehensive about participating.
Transition exercises that teach students how to listen and speak about relevant everyday encounters should be an integral part of the conversational English course. Talking about the weather, buying groceries, meeting a new acquaintance, a job interview, and offering to rent an apartment are just a few of the scenarios where potentially useful English conversation exercises can be started.
Because these scenarios are familiar, students are more likely to participate in communicating their thoughts. Once educators have become familiar and comfortable with the speaking and listening exercises, the class can move on to more complex activities. These include formal discussions on different relevant topics. When conducting discussions, remember that it is more important for students to focus on how to articulate than to focus on how they really feel about a topic.
To help students develop a neutral accent in English, teachers should advise students to 1) observe and imitate the mouth movements of competent English speakers; 2) use the dictionary to learn the correct pronunciations; 3) listen to audiobooks in English; 4) read English books or magazines out loud; and 5) record their English conversations and oral readings to identify common mistakes and correct them.
Finally, in addition to classroom activities, ESL/EFL teachers can encourage their students to visit online portals that offer live conversations in English for foreign or second language learners. Most of these are paid services, but other websites offer free audio recordings of various situational dialogues. These audio logs can be good practices to help students improve their English conversation skills.