Vol 32 No 2, April - June 1994

Page 22

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Teaching Spoken English for

Informative Purposes
by Thomas Hawes and Sarah Thomas

Teachers involved in developing spoken-language skills in ESL learners

often find themselves in a paradoxical situation. There seems to be a
conflict between, on the one hand, the learners perception that fluency and
naturalness in spoken English are a preeminent badge of success in learning
the language and, on the other, their disinclination to participate in activities
designed to develop competent speaking skills. It is ironic that in the one
skill area where we might expect real enthusiasm and interest, i.e., speaking
skills, we face problems. This suggests a need to reexamine our practice to
see how we can exploit the motivation inherent in the learners positive
perceptions of the ability to speak English fluently.

Research by Brown et al. (1984) questions the assumption that nativeEnglish-speaking children naturally acquire competence in all the uses of
spoken English. Native-speaker children are often unable to express
themselves articulately, and they need explicit instruction in some of the
spoken-language skills.

This fact points to the urgency of the ESL learner s need in this area. It is
too often assumed that spoken-language skills can be developed by
assigning students general topics to discuss or by getting them to give a
short talk on some subject. Not enough attention is given to the factors that
inhibit or encourage the production of spoken language. In order to provide
guidance in developing competent spoken English, it is necessary to
examine the different uses of the spoken language, which learners will have
to master as fluent speakers of English.
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..

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Uses of spoken English

Halliday (1985) has identified three major functions of language: the

ideational, the textual, and the interpersonal. Two of these, the ideational
and interpersonal, have particular relevance to a discussion of how the
spoken language is used.

Halliday describes the ideational component of language as being

concerned with the expression of content. The interpersonal is concerned
with the social, expressive, and conative functions language.

The Interpersonal Function. The interpersonal function of language is

reflected in the kind of social talk that we participate in throughout the day
in conversational exchanges with family, friends, colleagues, etc. This kind
of relaxed verbal interaction is the use of language to establish and maintain
social relations. The ability to use language for social purposes begins early
in the language experience of native speakers, and is not explicitly taught in
formal classroom situations. As Brown et al. (1984) have pointed out, such
chat talk is relatively undemanding, as it is often limited to short exchanges
with people one feels comfortable with, and the topic is determined by the
immediate interests of the participants. In a second- or foreign-language
situation, such a component may or may not be considered necessary. For
example, it may be thought that learners need spoken-English skills only in
specific occupational or study situations, since they use the local languages,
not English, to establish and maintain social relations.

On the other hand, the goal might be to equip learners with the full
repertoire of language skills needed to function with confidence in any
situation. This would necessitate a carefully planned course to teach
conversational skills something that has become a key component of many
ESL courses. The aim of such a course is to help the students learn in
English the kind of sociolinguistic rules that they are so adept at in their
native language. The activities lead to the development of social- relations
skills and provide opportunities for practising common social exchanges

such as greetings, leave taking, introductions, complaints, congratulations,

etc. Students learn the common exponents for these functions and the rules
for their use in both formal and informal situations; then they practise the
expressions in conversational situations in which control is reduced by
stages.

The Ideational Function. Halliday s second component of language, the

ideational, corresponds to a function of language quite different from its use
for social relations. This is the use of language to express content and to
communicate information. It is an essential aspect of most real-life
situations, whether in study or in business, professional, or most other work
contexts. The management and organisation of activities depends on the
efficient and accurate expression and transfer of the right information in the
right ways.

Where the focus is on the transfer of information rather than the

maintenance of social relations, language is used to get things done, to
produce a result in real-life terms. The speaker may communicate
information to a listener who needs it for a particular purpose, as when
giving instructions on how to operate a piece of equipment. Or the speaker
may need to give information to a listener in order that the listener can
respond in appropriate ways.

Where content is the focus, the emphasis will be on transferring information

clearly and effectively so that it can be comprehended quickly and easily.
This obviously differs from interpersonal talk, where the concern is not with
communicating a message but with keeping up a relaxed and cooperative
chat relationship. The language appropriate to each of these two functions
will be different; they are two distinct kinds of speaking skills.

In an ESL spoken-English course it is all too easy to make the mistaken

assumption that students competence can be developed by just any kind of
speaking activities. If the focus of the course is on conversational skills, this
will not ensure that learners will develop the ability to use language for
informative purposes, which is the aspect of spoken English that students
most often have difficulty with. These skills must be introduced as a
component in their own right and explicitly taught.

Part of the problem for students lies in the fact that the use of English to
impart information requires them to produce long exchanges of speech,
which are more difficult to plan and produce than the short turns typical in
conversation. The longer the turn, the more planning the speaker is required
to do. Long turns used to communicate ideational content place great
demands on the speaker to control the flow of complex information
skillfully and efficiently according to the needs of the listener. Students may
be quite competent in producing conversation, including long exchanges
where the transfer of content is secondary to the establishment of an
amicable, cooperative atmosphere. However, when required to impart more
complex information, as in justifying a position, refuting an argument, or
explaining how something works, the need to quickly plan and organise
what they must say often results in an immediate drop in fluency and
confidence. The spoken-English skills that most urgently need to be taught
seem to be those that relate to selecting appropriate information on a
subject, and then ordering and expressing it in a clearly comprehensible
way.

Motivation and the need to talk

How does this need to teach skills for transferring information relate to the
problem of motivation? In our attempt to develop effective instruction in
spoken language, we need to address an important issue. To develop
fluency, we must generate a need to speak, to make learners want to speak.
The learners themselves must be convinced of the need to relate to the
subject and communicate about it to others. They need to feel that they are
speaking not simply because the teacher expects them to, but because there
is some strong reason to do so for example, to get or provide information
that is required for a purpose.

A popular approach used by teachers to encourage students to speak is to

assign a topic and require them to discuss it or to come up with a short talk.
Such discussions, which do not lead to any outcome apart from the talk

itself, intimidate most students. This approach assumes that the students are
highly articulate and able to argue and express abstract notions in rapid and
comprehensible speech. Often such discussion sessions become boring and
talk quickly peters out. Student participation fizzles out because they have
nothing more to say and look to the teacher to supply most of the language
and ideas. The underlying problem is that students have no reason to say
anything more. We have to recognize that we cannot expect students to
produce long turns of speech by simply giving them topics and requiring
them to get on with the discussion. We must arouse in the learners a
willingness and need to talk by providing them with something they feel
they have a need or reason to talk about. Telling students to talk about
popularly offered topics like pollution or abortion is not very helpful. This
seems to require the students to create talk simply for the sake of talking for
a required amount of time. Students recognize the artificiality of the
activity. The resultant lack of interest and motivation can be attributed to the
purposelessness of the language they are being asked to produce.

Two specific difficulties

Brown et al. (1984) point out that many of the general essay-type topics that
pupils are asked to talk about are particularly difficult for inexperienced
speakers to control. They see one aspect of the problem in the difficulty
speakers have in assessing the background knowledge of their listeners.
When speakers are required to talk about something they know about and
their listeners do not, they make judgments about the uneven distribution of
background knowledge their listeners have and tailor the talk so that it
presents an appropriate amount of new information.

Brown et al. (1984) suggest that a second difficulty lies in the problem of
constructing a reportable event out of what is felt to be a relatively
unstructured experience. In apparently straightforward tasks that require
speakers to talk about experiences they have undergone, e.g., talking about
films they have seen or describing how to play a game, they have to abstract
from that total experience some portion which can be detached and
presented meaningfully on its own (Brown et al. 1984:41). This makes
demands on speakers to organise the experience and abstract it into chunks

that can be identified as self-contained and "tellable."

Task-based activities

Thus, learners often have tasks imposed on them that may seem on the
surface to be simple and direct, but are, in reality, formidable in terms of
what it takes to select appropriate information and structure it according to
listeners needs and states of knowledge.

It is perhaps inadvisable to require students who are not competent in

spoken English to perform such complex tasks. However, without having to
abandon the traditionally popular class discussions, a possible way of
stimulating more informative talk might be to provide a lot more support for
the learners by introducing activities that are more structured, organised
around a definite purpose or objective. There might be some advantage in
placing greater focus on purposeful, task-based activities for developing
competence in the use of spoken English for transactional purposes. The
task-based approach has been gaining prominence in recent years, and it
appears to be particularly relevant for eliciting spoken language for the
transfer of information. Brown et al. (1984) describe a variety of task-based
spoken-language activities. These have been categorised into:

1. Tasks that involve the speaker in describing static relationships among

objects.

2. Tasks that involve dynamic relationships among people or objects, with

events that change over time and space.

3. Tasks that require the speaker to communicate abstract ideas for instance,
in argument or justification.

Such task-based activities are one way of encouraging the production of

spoken English that learners recognize as a means to achieving an objective.
It is possible to transform general discussions into different tasks with
definite objectives/purposes in the form of expected outcomes resulting
from the long turns of student interaction and talk/discussion. A practical
example of this: Instead of a free talk or general discussion on a topic like
"cigarette smoking should be banned," it might be possible to have a
structured activity in which a group of students are required to organise a
propaganda campaign to convince the authorities or the public that smoking
ought to be banned. This is likely to be more meaningful and motivating
than the traditional approach because the speaker s attention is focused on
performing a real-life activity. He/she is speaking not because the teacher
expects him/her to say something for a certain length of time, but for the
real purpose of convincing people of the need to ban smoking.

The teacher who organises such speaking activities will be required to do

careful planning and to give consideration to providing appropriate stimuli
of all sorts, pictorial or textual, with suggestions and guidelines for their
exploitation. This will encourage interaction in the course of interpreting
and discussing the stimulus material.

Conclusion

In this article we have suggested that there is a serious gap in our learners
ability to use spoken English effectively for communicating ideational
content. This is a vital aspect of developing speaking skills, and, to a large
extent, academic and job-related success will be affected by the students
ability to communicate orally and transfer information accurately and
effectively.

It has been shown that a number of the traditional approaches, such as free

talk and general discussion, do not offer the kind of support that many
nonfluent learners need to produce long turns of informative speech on a
range of cognitively demanding topics. We believe that a more structured
approach organised around realistic tasks that lead to specific outcomes has
many advantages in eliciting extended talk. These activities require the
learners to participate actively because their attention is on performing a
lifelike task. The task orientation gives the student a purpose for talking
and, in this way, provides the speaker with interest in and motivation for
speaking.

References

Brown, G., A. Anderson, R. Shillcock and G. Yule. 1984. Teaching

talk: Strategies for production and assessment. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Byrne, D. 1976. Teaching oral English. London: Longman.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar.

London: Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English.

London: Longman.

Ur, P. 1981. Discussions that work. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Thomas Hawes is a lecturer at M.A.R.A. Penang, Malaysia. He has taught

at all levels in U.K., Germany, France, Morocco, and Malaysia. His
interests are discourse analysis and language and ideology.

Sarah Thomas is a lecturer at the Language Centre, Science University of

Malaysia, and chairperson of language and literature courses for students
and teachers. Her interests include discourse analysis and ESP.

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