09 November 2012

Speaking tasks.

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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