Sarath Samaranayake's Official Blog: Mid semester oral examination for conversation course

Getting foreign or second language learners to talk naturally in the target language seems to be a perplexing problem for most L2 teachers on one hand. On the other, it may be a challenge in terms of teaching conversational English to learners who study English in contexts where English is not widely used for interactional and transactional purposes in social situations.

However, as a teacher of English, one’s preoccupation should be to help his/her learners improve oral proficiency in the target language. In order to help L2 learners improve their oral proficiency, a teacher can make use of a number of teaching techniques that may be easily applied in the class. One effective way is to use role-playing activities in which two or more learners play their parts previously assigned or they have decided to depend on the situation given. In my classroom teaching, I use role-playing activities to provide learners with adequate opportunities to interact with their peers and me so that they can receive modified language input. As Long (1985) indicates, modified interaction will make language input comprehensible and compressible language input will help learners to acquire it with ease. This is the basic theoretical view of second language acquisition.

On 4^th April 2012, I conducted an oral examination for my students who study English conversation course. I first put them into groups (where necessary into pairs) and assign each group with a different role-playing activity. They were given 10 minutes to prepare for the activity and after the preparation, I called each group to present its role-play to the class. The role-playing activities included real-world situations such as shopping, asking for directions, visiting a doctor, talking about holiday plan, borrowing money, eating out, inviting someone to see a movie on the phone, making a seat reservation on a plane, and having a birthday party.

While the students were presenting their respective role-plays, I observed that most of them could produce a lot of languages relevant to the situation because the situations are related to their day-to-day life. Furthermore, I noticed that some students extend their role-play with preceding events. For example, while some groups were role-playing the shopping situation; they included suggestions as follows;

A: Mini, we have more time today. Let’s go to see a movie.

B: That’s a good idea. Let’s go to the 5^th floor and see what is on. (They were shopping at a mall where a movie theater is located on the 5^th floor).

Two students are talking about their holiday plan

The language most of the groups and pairs produced was authentic and appropriate to the context given. I, furthermore, observed that most groups could speak naturally rather than regurgitating chunks of sentences from a scripted dialogue with no paralinguistic features found in commercially produced textbooks meant for teaching oral English.

The pictures below show students’ presentations in the oral examination which counts 20% of their total scores.