Developing aural/oral skills in the students
How can we develop aural and oral skills in our students? This could be the one-million shekels question, and it has been undoubtedly being asked for years by all language and music teachers. Music teachers involved in developing oral skills? Yes, and also in developing aural skills indeed. Have you ever thought in asking the help of a musician to enhance your own aural skills? Search one and do it. Let’s hear with our hands (it reminds me that great and beautiful lady named Helen Keller, deafblind since birth. I invite you to watch the film “"Land of Silence and Darkness", 1971, directed by Werner Herzog). We speak by imitation, and babies look at interlocutor lips when trying to reproduce sounds and words. If we ask a singer, be he or she a folk one or a bel canto diva to speak our own language, a beautiful intonation we will hear. If we ask the singer to sing and put one of our hands in his/her throat we will feel vibrations. Let’s do it in our own throat and ask our students to do the same, themselves and with each other. Perceiving those vibrations will give us an idea of how good is our pronunciation. This is a simple way to begin improving our listening skills.
Our oral skills will develop without problem (considering our phonological apparatus is in good shape) if we practice reading in silence. Reading exactly as you have just read this words: in silence. All elements included in uttering sounds will automatically position to actually reproduce the sound or word we are reading. What we have to do, then is actually producing those sound and words we read. If we do this in our own language, and reading with the characteristics we should (e.g. pause, stress, intonation) we are practicing in our own language and daily improving our oral skills. Have we ever asked our ESL students either in beginners or advanced level to read in silence? I am almost sure you have not, because we think it is unnecessary; what we want is to listen them speaking the foreign language… and speaking it aloud. Own experience has demonstrated that good listeners are good speakers, and good speakers are good readers, everything in a cycle. The more developed are our aural/oral skills in our own language, the better will be in another one.
Foreign accent? Of course, except we begin learning several languages since our birth… and even so, the accent we listen more frequently (mother, father, nanny, uncle, etc.) will predominate in us.
The tools and strategies we have learnt about this week do help to improve our oral/aural skills, and those of our students. Using them and sharing experiences from colleague teachers all over the world will certainly improve those skills, including mine.
Fernando