ORAL WORK ON THE CLASSROOM

 ORAL WORK ON THE CLASSROOM

 Augusto Neves, 2024

Orality it’s an axis that involves the listening comprehension and the oral production. At the basic education I particularly don’t remember any oral activities that we have in the classroom, our lessons back in my day were mostly about the language, but I must tell you that the grammar lessons give me enough knowledge to be a self learner and later I commence to use Italki and even Cambly to practise my speaking and the videos, films and the interviews around the internet to practise my listening.

The BNCC split up the orality and linguistic knowledge as an articulating axis and practices into three different oral categories: discursive, comprehension, production. Simultaneously it’s the speaking, listening and the function of the language. The function of language, can be the vocabulary and the knowledge of the different context in a conversation, for example a conversation with the waiter or waitress while we’re ordering food it’s different than in the way that we communicate in academic context or during a job interview or meeting, since we have to use the formal English as those events are formal. The BNCC as usual defines how the teachers must work for each grade. Overall, the investigative practice defined by the BNCC it’s like a way to highlight the students' background. For example, how would they describe their house? Where do they live? Their favourite square time? Do they splash milk on the coffee or do they splash coffee on the milk? 

 Personally, oral activities in an additional language it’s my favourite competence to work on and again there are a bunch of apps to practise our listening skills, we can go on with any streaming services such as netflix or even youtube and start listening in English with your native subtitle, then you can watch the film again and use English subtitles and finally give it a shot watching a video without any subtitles. This is a very classic method, I used it and I think that depending on your motivations and discipline this can be quite helpful but I admit it can be stressful to do it after hours, days or even weeks. That’s why the video has to be something that you like, it can be a part of a film or a netflix’s episode.

 Furthermore, I like how the authors Borba and Camargo (2023) give us seven strategies to work on the classroom, one of them it’s to encourage the students to speak English outside of the school, for example going to the a snack bar and start talking with their friends in english, or in my orders if they have a social media to post an image or a photo and write a description or a feeling about that image. The authors also highlight the importance of the teacher to recognise that not every student has internet at home which makes it a challenge to practise English outside of the school without it, if they have at least a TV, they can change the language of a movie, in the case of “hollywoodian” films. Also on the radio where they can listen to their favourite song in english while trying to recognise words in english as I did. 

 APPS TO USE ON THE CLASSROOM:

 Borba and Camargo (2023) mention the importance of the digital technologies to use in the classroom in our favour, which means that it will go beyond that the sources from the textbooks. So, there are loads of interesting apps to practise listening including the traditional ones such as the British Council and BBC learn English available on the Playstore. They can be better than watching youtube videos only because it has a series of exercises to practise the comprehension. I used those apps specially British Council which is one of my favourites and the ELLO. In a nutshell, Ello it’s even better since you will find a variety of English speakers including non-native speakers and I think that in my opinion Ello sounds a little more realistic than British Council. In conclusion, I would use them in the classroom to teach, for sure.

 The speaking activities can depend on the teacher’s style. I suggest the use of roleplays with the students as an activity that can be done on the sports court or in a different room, it requires organisation, I know that’s why it can be hard due to our timetable sometimes. However, if you ain’t got experience with role plays or as many of us ain’t got time to prepare a roleplay activity, there are loads of apps that you can use in the classroom to practise speaking. As we are talking about basic education, Italki, Walkie, Tandem are apps that I wouldn’t recommend to use in the classroom. It can be dodgy to expose young students to communicate with strangers and catfish, we never know the consequences. Besides as innocent as some apps sound, it’s difficult to find a free platform to work safely with strangers. 

 THE A.I AS A TOOL FOR CONVERSATION PRACTISE:

 I don’t know about you but I feel so guilty to say that A.I, at least in this case, can be better than practising a conversation in an additional language with real people. So far, I have tried the Gliglish, as far as I know we can use it for free and I ran on my browser. Overall, it’s basically the same idea of roleplays, there are a list of social functions such as ordering a new haircut, going to the bakery and so on. Then, the machine will talk with you and you can either listen and read the balloons, right below there is a list of possible answers for you to respond, and then you click on the rec button and record as you read the answers given. 

 Well, so far it isn’t that bad but an amazing tool to work with. Even though it’s important to know that students may have different answers suggested by the app, it’s a good and a safe initiative in my opinion.

• WHAT ABOUT YOU:

• DO YOU LIKE ROLEPLAYS?

PLEASE, SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS AND SUGGESTIONS ON THE COMMENTS BELLOW:

Ta, xx  

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REFERENCES:

BRASIL. Ministry of Education. Base Nacional Curricular Comum. MEC. Base nacional comum: Introdução. Available at <http://basenacionalcomum.mec.gov.br/abase/#introducao> accessed on 03/03/2024 at 18:05

BORBA, Victor Henrique Rodrigues. CAMARGO, Gladys Quevedo. Sugestões de práticas de ensino da oralidade em língua inglesa no formato remoto. Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Ensino Tecnológico, V9. 2023

BORBA, Victor Henrique Rodrigues. CAMARGO, Gladys Quevedo. Sugestões de práticas de ensino da oralidade em língua inglesa no formato remoto. Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Ensino Tecnológico, V9. 2023