ESL | Writing | Oral Communication | Quantitative | Content
ESL Oral Communication Tutoring – Skills and Tasks
ESL oral communication tutoring at Lawrence is different from “conversation practice.” Although conversation is central to a communications session, it is important to also have specific skills-based goals in mind. Tutoring sessions should focus on helping students set and achieve concrete goals for improving specific language skills. The following list of speaking and listening skills should help tutors and students set their session goals together.
Skills involved in Conversational Speaking
- Initiate and close conversations
- Sustain a conversation
- Circumlocution
- Transition/change topics
- Interrupt
- Repair errors of self and other
- Use a variety of routine phrases for specific functions (i.e. agree/disagree, invite, apologize, etc.)
- Use discourse markers
- separate ideas
- show time relationships
- indicate cause/effect relationships
- emphasize, etc.
- Use appropriate registers, from casual to formal
- Use/not use slang as appropriate
- React verbally &/or nonverbally (juggle sociolinguistic & discourse rules)
Tasks for Teaching Conversational Speaking
- Role-plays (fluency, pronunciation, discourse routines, register)
- Gambits (games for interrupting, changing subjects, using circumlocution, etc.)
- Taping and analyzing a conversation between tutor and student
- Taping and analyzing a conversation between two native speakers
- Practicing icebreakers
- Follow-up questions games
Skills involved in Academic Speaking
- Arguing and supporting a point
- Debate
- Fluency
- Pronunciation
- Using academic vocabulary
- Using idioms and colloquial language
- Discourse routines (complaining, requesting, apologizing, etc.)
- Adapting register to context
- Participating in discussions
- Presentations, public speaking
Tasks for Teaching Academic Speaking
- Role-plays (fluency, pronunciation, discourse routines, register, debates)
- Presenting an argument (arguing and supporting a point)
- Creating stories from word lists (pronunciation, vocabulary, idioms, fluency)
- Question Cards (discourse routines, fluency, vocabulary, debate)
- Minimal pair practice (pronunciation)
- Self-evaluation (all skills – use a tape recorder of video recorder)
Skills involved in Academic Listening
- Aural comprehension (the listening side of “pronunciation”)
- Organizational structure
- Discourse markers
- Vocabulary
- Notetaking (writing, spelling, abbreviating, organizing, etc.)
- Bottom-up processing (meaning from discrete elements of speech)
- Top-down processing (meaning from prior knowledge/expectations)
Tasks for Teaching Academic Listening
- What to listen for:
- Organizational structure
- Main ideas
- Supporting details
- Argument structure
- Discourse markers
- General comprehension
- Pronunciation
- Sociolinguistic element
- What to do with it:
- Take notes
- Answer comprehension questions
- Answer response questions
- Write questions
- Discuss topic/issue
- Repeat after the speaker (shadow)
- Transcribe
Listening Materials
- Look for authenticity
- Task (lecture, discussion, etc.)
- Speaker
- Language (made up for a textbook or from a real lecture/discussion?)
- Possible sources:
- ESL shelf in CTL
- NPR broadcasts and/or website
- Television shows/movies
- Conversations of LU students
