Research blog

      My research question is “how can teachers best help high school L2 students improve their speaking and listening?” I revised my question so that it specifies a more specific group (high school students) and I included listening into my research as well. I am going to focus on three main points for how to best help these students improve on their speaking and listening. I am going to focus on conversational discourse, teaching pronunciation, and accuracy & fluency. These can be covered with speaking and listening because when you are having a conversation there is one person speaking and one person listening and then vis versa. So far, I have found a few articles and the Brown book can help me a little as well.

Kayi, H. (2006). Teaching speaking: Activities to promote speaking in a

            second language. The internet TESL journal, 12(11), Retrieved from

            http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kayi-TeachingSpeaking.html.

·      Although this is a short article, it gives me a few points and ideas I can talk about in my paper. It first talks about how they believe one of the best ways to help students’ practice their speaking is through communicative language teaching and interacting with their classmates. Also, it has a whole list of ideas of different activities you can do with students to promote speaking. This is extremely helpful as a future teacher and for my topic.

Jenkins, J. (2006). English pronunciation and second language speaker identity.

            (pp. 75-91). New York, NY: Tope Omoniyi, Goodith White and

            Contributors.

·      This article will help me with one of my main points: pronunciation. It will give me good insight on teaching English pronunciation to second language learners. There was research done on how if non-native speakers learn pronunciation in a target-like manner, then they will learn correct pronunciations.

Ying, Z., & Elder, C. (2011). Judgments of oral proficiency by non-native and

            native English speaking teacher raters: Competing or complementary

            constructs?. 28(1), 31-50.

·      This article discusses the oral English proficiency by the College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) of China. They researched on whether the proficiency differed when non-native teachers were speaking or native teachers; they tried figuring out whether that had an impact on the oral proficiency of students who were taking this test.