Speaking discussion.

< Discussion Questions>

1. What is a goal to teach speaking? How can English teachers to achive this goal?

       The goal of teaching speaking is communicative efficiency. 
       "communication" means  are the systems and processes that are used to
       communicate or boradcast imformation.   
       so for this goals, teacher should provide comfortable atmosphere which  
       student feel low tension.
       

   2.Explain the following terms and types of speaking activities

• content-oriented vs. form-oriented input 

            - content-oriented input focuses on information, whether it 
              is a simple weather report or and extended lecture on  an
              academic topic or drama , movie.
            - form-oriented input focuses on ways of using the language
              for example, the sound of dictionary, chant and songs focusing on 
              grammar   

• communicative vs. structure input(output)

            - communicative output - self-introduction.  

• information gap

            - what's the diffrent between information gap activity and

• picture narrating vs. picture describing

             -picture narrating activity means
             sequesce of the picture. they have
             picture describing activity  means describing one picture . it can be a

• role play vs. simulation

             - role play is small and simulation is bigger.
               and role play is pieces of simulation.           
             scenery and it can be a room.
             role play. the answer is imformation gap is more meaningful than 
             role play.

Speaking tools

1) Voki
I think 'VOKI program' can be very interesting to middle school students .
voki's user can create a their own characters . they can  change  character's face, skin, eyes, hair,mouth, and even nose's height. and then they choose voice type US male or  UK female ....etc.
and finally type a message. so their characters will pronounce it.
I think this program encourage students to participate in class and decrease student's tension.
student can write something and native speaker pronounce it .
so this program is vert interesting. 



2) twiddla
this is white board program online. classroom member can join this program,
and can write something or can draw something.


3) chat robot
this is very communicative.

Listening

Explain the two listening techniques: top-down vs. bottom-up and tell us when you employ each technique for what purpose.

Bottom-up focuses on linguistic elements like words or structures. In contrast, Top-down use background knoweldge to understanding meaning and guess it from the context. and find something important information. so this can have a  benefit to listening American drama or pop-song to L2 learners. In my case,

in fact, when I listen to the english lecture , I can't understand  it totally , but I grasp the general meaning of lecture.  So bottom-up is suitable for comprehension achieved by dividing and decoding the sound signal bit by bit like listening to direction to a friend's house. And top-down is suitable for the way you listened to the holiday anecdote.
What type of listening materials do you think good for top-down or bottom-up strategies? Review the listening materials and select some for each.

top down is good for real life situation like news listening. in contrast, bottom up is good for academic lecture or explaining the scientific phenomenon or dictation activities, fill in the blank activities, weather forcast,advertising information for lenter car ...etc.

What is podcasting? Discuss the benefits of doing podacasting for L2 learners

potcasting is useful and authentic listening goldmine. we can download on mp3 files listening material like lecture, drama, radio broadcast  from i-tunes.
this offer  authentic material for L2learners so this is beneficial. and  in case of students proficiency levels,
we also can select the right material suitable for student's levels.

vocabulary

There were many interested ways to teach vocabulary in text. Some are very familiar with me but others are not familiar. For example, ‘reading the word’ and ‘ writing the word’ are very familiar. On the other hand, ‘parts of words ‘ is not unfamiliar relatively.

The thing which I’m most interested in is ‘ self-defining context ‘ . there are so many words to memorize in foreign language. And we can’t memorize all words. So I think we should know the way of inference.  Inference can help us to know the words’ meaning. In my opinion, ‘self- defining context’ is one way of inference.  

I think this method is acquired to reading many authentic materials. If teacher has enough time to show students many authentic materials , this method may be useful  in class room.

For example, if teacher has plan to teach students word “go “ , he can use several material to cover “ go” . In some context, “go” means ‘ go to bed’ but in other context “go” means ‘ fighting ‘ .

I think students can learn word-inference through this process. The more material is given , the more context can be inferred .