Task Project to improve oral production

Task project to improve oral production

Audience:

EFL student. Beginning level. Adolescents . Environmental engineering students.

Teaching objective:

To improve oral production

Specific objectives:

To let the students gain confidence in the use of L2 to interact in the language classroom.

To motivate the students to take risks in the English language classroom

Skills: Speaking, vocabulary, writing.

STUDENTS’ PROFILE:

The population for the English first course is of twenty-five people (25), fifteen women (15) and ten (10) men. They are middle class students, all of them adolescents, their average age is 17. They are high school graduates; all of them speak Spanish fluently, but their English level is very low. They study English because it is a school requirement, they are starting Environmental Engineering program; a few of them have taken English courses before (1 or 2).

Problem: Scarce oral production

Rational:

Communication in L2 is one of the biggest concerns of modern English teaching, and oral production is one of the most important tools to achieve it. This task aims to motivate the students to jump into the fascinating world of using English to interact with their classmates.

Most students are eager and highly motivated to learn a new language, but they do not feel confident enough to take risk and use L2 to communicate with their peers. That is why, this task attempts to let the students use familiar expressions in English and using already known vocabulary. In other words, this work pretends to motivate the students to take advantage of their background knowledge, lower the affective filter and lead them, step by step, to the fascinating world of speaking in another language.

OBJECTIVES:

To improve oral production

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

To let the students gain confidence in the use of L2 to interact in the language classroom.

To motivate the students to take risks in the English language classroom.

PROCEDURES:

1. (Group work). The teacher sings a song called “the days of the week”, and the group of students must adapt it to any Colombian rhythm such as: Vallenato, Sanjuanero...

(See videos 1 and 2)

2. (Speaking). The teacher shows the students some cards with useful expressions about daily routines.

After showing each card, he uses the previous expressions to talk about his life: I get up at 5:00 a.m; I have breakfast at 6: 00 a.m, and so on... Then he asks the students about their daily activities: Kelly, What time do you get up?, Jose, what time do you have lunch?...

3. (Whole group). The teacher shows a transparency on the board, about a man’s working day. The transparency is divided into nine ( 9 ) scenes. The students must number the scenes in the correct order and write the time of the day that the man performs each activity.

(See picture 1)

4. (Individual work). The students must come up with a picture about their daily life or about someone else’s life.

(See pictures 2 and 3)

5. ( Pair work and group work). In pairs, students must tell each other about their daily activities, then, they must get together in bigger groups (4 to 6 ) students, they must re-tell their stories .

EVALUATION:

I had the possibility to apply the task previously to foster the students’ oral production. It was successful and enjoyable. All the students got involved in the different activities. They felt stress-free and highly motivated to use the English language to interact with their peers. They asked and answered questions about routines and they were also able to talk about themselves.