Strategies for developing speaking skills in a beginning level

Minimal responses to develop listening comprehension in a beginning level.

Students often think that the ability to listen a language is the product of language learning, but listening is also a crucial part of the language learning process.

 Effective instructors teach students listening comprehension strategies -- using minimal responses, recognizing scripts, and using language to talk about language -- that they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it. These instructors help students learn to recognise some words and utterances which the  students can use  in a conversation.

1. Using minimal responses

Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way to encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges. Such responses can be especially useful for beginners.

Minimal responses are predictable, often idiomatic phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying. Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.

2. Recognizing scripts

Some communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges -- a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.

Instructors can help students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they are going to hear and what they are going to say as response.It can be through interactive activities, instructors can give students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.

3. Using language to talk about language

Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realize that a conversation partner has not understood them. Instructors can help students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participants' language skill levels. Instructors can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension check.

By encouraging students to use clarification phrases in class when misunderstanding occurs, and by responding positively when they do, instructors can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself. As they develop control of various clarification strategies, students will get confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.

These are really useful  for developiing listening comprehension in a beginning level but i am going to focus just in "Minimal Responses" as the aid strategy and it was got from The National Capital Resource Center from Whashington.DC.(2003-2004)

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/speaking/stratspeak.htm

Note.- I made some changes of my topic so it does not seem to have relation with the video as you realise.