Teaching oracy to adolescent students in L1: trainee teachers’ approaches
Submitted by:
Ana Isabel Mata
Abstract:
In the last decades, the development of oracy has gained increasing interest in projects, programs and publications aimed at training L1 teachers in several countries. Nowadays, spoken language knowledge and skills are seen as one of the key components of language learning in the area of L1 education. In practice, however, this remains in general one of the most neglected components of classroom instruction. In European Portuguese (e.g. Mata, 2006), despite the place given to orality in the national curriculum and in the explicit set of goals for learning Portuguese as L1, it has been difficult to integrate spoken language skill development into the body of knowledge and competences which form the basis of language teaching, along with reading, writing and grammar.
In this presentation I will focus on the initial training of Portuguese language teachers for developing adolescents’ skills in oracy, based on research results and on supervised teaching practice experiences. Research on oral presentations (e.g. Mata et al., 2014) shows how students adapt to speaking styles required at school. Supervised teaching practice suggests that using oracy as a key component of the process can have positive effects on students' speaking and writing skills (e.g., Alves, 2012, on differences in argumentative speech between target and control classes; Alves, 2014, on classroom practice results in the teaching of imitative writing to adolescents). Examples of trainees’ design, selection and use of teaching materials will be analyzed. Results of trainees’ classroom practice in one secondary school in Lisbon will be discussed.
Keywords: oracy, adolescent students, European Portuguese, initial teacher training
References:
Mata, A. I. (2006). Impressões digitais: linhas de identificação de um professor de língua portuguesa. In I. Duarte & P. Morão (org.), Ensino do Português para o Século XXI. FLUL/Ed. Colibri, Lisboa: 83-97.
Mata, A. I., H. Moniz, F. Batista, J. Hirschberg (2014). Teenage and adult speech in school context: building and processing a corpus of European Portuguese. Proceedings 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 2014, European Language Resources Association (ELRA): 3914-3919.
Alves, M. (2014). O oral como estratégia para o desenvolvimento da escrita na disciplina de Literatura Portuguesa. Master in Portuguese and Spanish Teaching, University of Lisbon.
Alves, P. (2012). Argumentação Oral em Contexto de Debate: uma Proposta de Intervenção Didática no Ensino Secundário. Master in Portuguese and Classical Languages Teaching, University of Lisbon.