So I've been setting lots of speaking tasks in class recently, and I've had a chance to test out a bit of received wisdom that was passed on to me in my training, and appears in various books etc. It is said that giving students the opportunity to script a speaking task helps build confidence and ability for later spontaneous production.
My experience is slightly different. What I see again and again is students crippled by indecision. I hear them sitting discussing (in French) what to write, and almost invariably deciding that they can't write that. They agree on a great many things that they can't write, and very few that they can. If it takes more than a quarter of an hour to script a minute or two of dialogue, I can't see how that will be of any use to them in later spontaneous production.
I don't think I'll be doing a great many of this type of exercise in the future....
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