Developing Adult EFL Students' Speaking Abilities

☆1. What affects adult EFL learners’ oral communication?

Factors affecting adult EFL learners’ oral communication

(1) Age or maturational constraints

Adult learners do not seem to have the same innate language-specific endowment as children for acquiring fluency and naturalness in spoken language.

(2) Aural medium

Listening plays an extremely important role in the development of speaking abilities. If one cannot understand what is said, one is certainly unable to respond.

(3) Sociocultural factors

To speak a language, one must know how the language is used in a social context. On the other hand, ignorance of the nonverbal message often leads to misunderstanding.

(4) Affective factors

The affective factors related to L2 learning are emotions, self-esteem, empathy, anxiety, attitude, and motivation.

☆2. What are the components underlying speaking effectiveness/proficiency?

Within the framework of a speaking course, discuss activities that can be used to address grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.

Canale and Swain’s components underlying speaking effectiveness

(1)   Grammatical competence

Grammatical competence includes increasing expertise in grammar, vocabulary and mechanics. Grammatical competence enables speaker to use and understand English-language structures accurately.

Activities: meaningful oral grammar practice

(2)   Discourse competence

Effective speakers should acquire a large repertoire of structures and discourse makers to express ideas, show relationships of time, and indicate cause, contrast, and emphasis.

Activities: discussions, oral dialogue journal

(3) Sociolinguistic competence

Adult second language learners must acquire stylistic adaptability in order to be able to encode and decode the discourse around them correctly.

Activities: problem-solving activities

(4) Strategic competence

Strategic competence refers to the ability to know when and how to take the floor, how to keep a conversation going, how to terminate the conversation, and how to clear up communication breakdown as well as comprehension problems.

Activities: role-play

☆3. How can adult EFL learners’ speaking abilities be improved?

Review the four kinds of activities discussed by Kang and suggest other activities that fit these categories.

Interaction as the key to improving EFL learners’ speaking abilities

Teachers should provide students with opportunities for meaningful communicative behavior about relevant topics by using learner-learner interaction as the key to teaching language for communication. Communication in the classroom is embedded in meaning-focused activity.

(1) Small Talk

At the initial stage, adult EFL learners should develop skills in short, interactional exchanges in which they are required to make only one or two utterances at a time.

(2) Interactive activities

Effective interactive activities should (A) be based on authentic or naturalistic source materials; (B) enable learners to manipulate and practice specific features of language; (C) allow learners to rehearse, in class, communicative skills they need in the real world; (D) activate psycholinguistic processes of learning.

(a) Aural: oral activities

e.g. jigsaw listening

(b) Visual: oral activities

e.g. films, videotapes and soap operas: opinion-expressing activities

(c) Material-aided: oral activities

e.g. storytelling, oral reports or summaries from articles in newspaper

(d) Culture awareness: oral activities

e.g. discuss cultural misunderstandings

WSI Learning Method

Every human being who attempts to learn a second language has already learned a first language. WSI learning method is based on our first language acquisiton.

The picture showed us how students acquire a second language in WSI.

My Favorite Teachers in Wall Street Institute

My Comments on Wall Street Institute

1.Wall Street Institute is the world leader in English Language Training. I think the courses in WSI can be described as “participatory learning”, “student-centered learning”, “cooperative learning”, “use of authentic, nature of language” and “integration of the four skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing”.

2.I developed a “feel” for the language by experimenting with its grammar and words. I made my own opportunities for practice in using the language inside and outside the classroom. I used authentic language in meaningful contexts.

3.I’m heartily grateful to all of my dear English teachers. Special thanks for Jared Garland and Jacob Powers Helmstadter. Jacob, I’m very appreciate your reading club. It’s really helpful. It’s our treasure. Please keep on with it. Jared, special thanks for your help.

4.If you choose WSI, that means you choose success in English study. Don’t hesitate; seize the best opportunity to study English that comes along. I promise you’ll not regret to choose WSI. Because I regretted why I came to WSI so late. If I had chosen WSI earlier, I would have had been successful before. Thanks, my bosom friend-WSI.