Motivation of students to speaking activities during the teaching process

In this article we try to investigate the development of students’ speaking skills. This is done to complement what Kazakhstan teachers of English already know from methodology resources. As its known, motivation examined from the perspective of a “Trait” and “State”. “Traits” are consistent and persistent and supported by cultural and community reinforcement. “State” motivation refers to the incentive variables existing in the school and classroom and that administrators.

A variety of such incentives are available and many of them have been shown to be differentially attractive to students of different cultural backgrounds. These incentives may involve rewards, punishments and attention or inattention from teacher. In this article we try to give some suggestions to promote a more effective technique of these skills. 

Working as an English language teacherat a Department of International Law in KazNPU named after Abai I have encountered a problem that some EFL learners are silent during the lesson. Those learners hardly ever volunteer to respond to questions, rarely give their opinions and seldom make the first step to start communication with their peers. Actually it’s normal to feel anxiety but some of them. As everybody knows, anxiety plays an important effective role in learning a foreign language. Anxiety could be described as feelings of uneasiness, frustration, nervousness and worry. Most of those students are avoiding eye contact, preferring to stare at their books. They get good marks in quizzes, but they fail in speech presentations. Although it is not too difficult for the learners, suitable for teaching goal, and usable in the series of activities, providing a resource of information and ideas. Different works of scientists try to explain the relationship between the anxiety and the goal achievement.

Causes appeared by a number of potential reasons. I have observed the following assumptions: 1) lack of vocabulary; 2) anxiety; 3) atmosphere; 4) attitude. Speaking activities can fail miserably due to some very real problems in EFL class. The most common problem is student’s embarrassment to speak due to the lack of vocabulary. Speaking activities require the students to have appropriate, sufficient vocabulary, which they can get mostly from reading and listening different texts and get some information from the text provide for interaction of the “new” and “old” and for changing the viewpoints. The “new” and “old” interact in the process of speaking and as a result of this interaction the expectations that the student builds about the text presentations, improving their speaking skills. If the expectations are ruined, we speak of the “deceived expectancy”. One of the greatest problems among the students is their ability to remember key vocabulary words in English Vocabulary So they often lack confidence in their speaking ability and feel they have not enough language skills to express what they want to say. Cultural convention and shyness, as well as lack of confidence may stop students from communication in a foreign language. The study search shows that students might be worried due to some factors like making mistakes, being criticized or losing face in front of the rest of the class. And teachers can guide them to overcome anxiety disorders and reach the success. With regular practice and accomplishment of a variety of strategies and giving new knowledge to what the student already knows about the subject. After searching for possible solutions for this issue, there is a study, selected strategies that might be helpful to encourage students participation in speaking activities through overcoming their anxiety. Here are given some simple techniques to teachers that can help to encourage the students speaking:

Ask a lot ofquestions

Teachers should try to make the first move to a friendly Interaction with their ESL students. It is a good idea to ask many questions and get information from the text that can take the form of “adding”, “correcting”, “refuting”, “critical thinking” and re-confirming”. Many foreign investigators take an interest in research about listening and reading and speaking and pointed out some linguistic features such as:

1. The referential system
2. Lexis (idiom)

Thus it helps you to evaluate their speaking skills and improve their level of English. Give your students the chance to respond however they can, try to find out which subjects are close to students’ hearts, they really likes to talk about. Understanding the language we hear is a process, which can be called “inferential”, i.e. we make assumptions during listening. There is no direct correspondence between what is said and what is heard. Not everything can be perceived by listener or interpreted exactly as was intended by the speaker. The role of the listener is to reconstruct and in many cases to create the meaning of the speaker’s message as encoded or possibly intended in b the speech signals.. Yet, the growing theme in cognitive science is that people not just simply receive the knowledge, which is sent to them by the speaker. People actively construct the knowledge that they hear and the process of listening in verbal communication is thus a construction and reconstruction process. The process of meaning construction is done through the inferences that the listener makes during the process of aural comprehension. The participants in this process get involved in the information that they hear. Some of them can be involved very actively in what they listen to, while the others can be passive and inattentive listeners.

Don’t hurry the student.

In relation to listening students need developed skills, estimating the sense of the words, constructing propositions about the text, relating the incoming message to one’s own backgrounds of course, assigning a general meaning to the heard text, making logical links in the connecting ideas in mind and assuming possible intention of the speaker, we must mention a great importance of writing which involves mastering the mechanics of letter information, mastering and obeying conventions of spelling and punctuation, using the grammatical system to convey one’s intended meaning. The major writing skill that creates problems for students is reasoning. Students’ reasoning, as it comes from experience, tends to make the following reasoning errors. These errors can include sliding from one ides to the other with ambiguous plan in mind, failing to distinguish between facts and opinions, using emotional language instead of arguments, giving false arguments not true to fact and ignoring knowledge, rashly generalizing in their conclusions and simplifying assumptions, asserting instead of proving by proceeding from a single case, self-humiliation, chasing several unconnected propositions instead of one and deviating in logic.

Dealing with shy students you should let them take their time. When you allow the student to speak at their own individual pace he will feel more comfortable, and over the times this should decrease the shyness Register is a variety of language associated with a set of specific vocabulary, which is typical of a certain field and is best for achieving the communicative goals. Besides, the process of writing follows a certain thread of meaning towards a conclusive goal. The final goal in mind makes the whole text “hang together” and adds to it the quality of coherence. A coherent discourse possesses a full and whole prepositional meaning. One of the ways to teach “cohesion” is working with paragraphs. Students should be advised to eliminate from the text such phrases as: “there are many different kinds of”, “in other words” so that they restrict themselves to information- carry words.

The advantages of taking independent topics and annotating their handouts in English should be encouraged to recognize and take advantage of their topics cues.

Students should be told:

1. When it is appropriate to interrupt the peer’s
2. How to ask questions politely with correct intonation and
3. How to make
4. How to seek clarification when the presentation uses anecdotes or elaborations and ask whether the information is additional or

All these suggestions play a great part in motivation of students.

Students even could check their partner’s notes of presentation in order to draw their attention to the necessity for complete and well-organized presentations.

Find out what interests your student.

Keeping students interested and engaged in the current topic or activity is a daily challenge for teachers in the EFL classroom. If the teacher does njt clearly set the goals and strategies of the activities, students may lose interest, learn little, or both. One of the common problems is that students sometimes think they have nothing to say on a particular topic. In reality, they may be bored or feel that the topic is unrelated to anything they know. Find a subject your student enjoys. Everyone has one or two topics that really turn them on and get them talking nonstop. Once you settle on a favorite topic you have a key to unlock students who would otherwise remain silent and uncommunicative.

Limit corrections.

Limit your corrections until the student feels more comfortable with you. It’s very important to build a relationship in which student feels comfortable interacting with you. It can take the time to learn the pace of working together. Many shy people feel embarrassed when they are corrected, so don’t feel that you need to correct every mistake. You might choose to give the student some written correction notes after lesson so he can review them. Once you have built a good relationship, it will be easier to point these out to the student.

Easy language.

Make sure that language is not complicated. Simple language makes it easier for students to speak for longer without hesitation and gives them a sense of achievement. Necessary vocabulary can be pre-taught or reviewed before the activity enabling students to complete their speech with more interesting sentences and rich language.

Clear guidelines.

Stating clearly what is expecting from each student – is essential in ensuring that everyone in the group contributes towards the discussion. Feedback reveals the results of the discussion and motivates each student to follow the guidelines. Whether speaking activities are topic or task-based, a successful EFL speaking activity will follow the rule of engage-activate-study. It engages students by getting them interested, and activates students by getting them to perform what they have been asked to do. At the end, students and their teacher study the activity by reviewing and resolving language problems encountered during the process. EFL speaking activities make a lesson fun and help students understand that they really can speak English. Students may be shy through lack of confidence, but once they have become adapted to using communication activities in their EFL class they are often very motivated to continue. So, summarizing we can say that speaking is a highly complex activity which simultaneously involves listening, writing, reading skills. Students must listen to the teacher, each other, select and organize what they are going to say and modify.

Some examples of oral activity include:

Describing pictures or photos: students work un pairs and tell their partner what their picture looks like. Their partner can either draw or describe what he understands. This is very simple and productive activity for beginners. Picture differences: students work in pairs to find out what the differences are between their pictures and their partner’s. This exercise produces plenty of good questions and answer exchanges.

Things in common: Students who do not know each other well must talk to each other to find out how many things they have in common. This activity is an excellent ice-breaker and introduction exercise.

Role-play: Role-playing exercises demand that students become someone else, forcing them to use appropriate language for each character in the situation that character finds him in. Students can role-play by putting on a play or by working in small groups without an audience.

References:

1. Davis, Success in English Teaching. Oxford University Press. 2000, p.57-62
2. Harmer, How to teach English. England. Pearson Education Limited. 2007,p.68-70
3. Scrivener, Learning Teaching. Second Edition, Macmillan Publishes Limited, 2005,p. 22-27
4. Cassidy How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993, p. 14-21/
5. Speaking Skills in the ESL Classroom – From Acquisition to http://www.efl-law.org/efl/tesol/speaking-skills-in-the-esl-classroom-from-acquisition-to-participation.html(дата обращения: 14.03.2017)
6. Jenny Evans Esl Techniques for Working with Shy Students. http://www.articledashboard.com//Article/ESL-Techniques-for-Working-with-Shy-Students/15876477(дата обращения: 14.03.2017)