Challenging Speaking
Communication or speaking may be defined as a major learning task. Students learn better if they have positive attitude to what they are doing. Interest is a crucial factor. Teachers get excited about the lesson when they feel that their students have communicated on a level that goes beyond going through the motions, when they have engaged with the topic on a personal level. Engagement can be triggered by anything from understanding and laughing at a cartoon to what life was when you were 8 years old.
The aim of speaking tasks. Speaking tasks, presented at the lesson, are not intended principally as a grammar practice. They are connected with the certain topic, certain vocabulary and grammar. Everything is aimed at turning input into output. Such tasks are easy to set up and enjoyable to use. Most of them encourage students to talk about things that matter to them. The students can play roles, exchange invented information.
What is linguistic risk taking? Personalized, authentic tasks challenge and engage students and this encourages linguistic risk taking. When students take risks they are experimenting, testing theories about how the language works. This is an essential part of language learning. A series of challenging speaking tasks focuses on learner`s own experiences and opinions. The choice within tasks encourages students to take charge of interactions. Teachers tend to refine and improve their set pieces: jokes and stories. Students do the same. When they have the opportunity to take risk, they become more adventurous and more precise in the language they use. The first time the students do a speaking activity, they are more likely to concentrate on the content; repetition of the task means that they have more time to process the language, increase the range of vocabulary and use more syntactically complex language. While taking linguistic risk students as well as teachers achieve the main purpose of speaking tasks – they develop fluency.