Build confidence and fluency with model texts for speaking

Abstract

<p>If you have learned a new language, you may be familiar with the anxiety and emotions that often come with being asked to speak up in a second language. As TESOL professionals, we know that confidence is a major factor affecting the willingness of multilingual learners of English (MLEs) to take risks, participate in class, and make mistakes during lessons that focus on oral skills. By regularly integrating oral skills teaching into your classroom practices, giving students clear instructions, and making the expectations or guidelines for a speaking activity clear at the beginning of the task, you can encourage MLEs to participate more confidently in your classroom (Playsted, 2020).</p> <p>One way to scaffold this experience is to work with a text that models the features of spoken language you are targeting in that lesson.</p><p>Model texts are often used in functional, text-based literacy teaching approaches such as the Teaching and Learning Cycle (Derewianka & Jones, 2022). In that approach, teachers introduce an example of the target genre or text type and continue working with that model text through multiple stages to develop students' writing skills.</p><p>Although model texts are more commonly known as a tool for teaching writing, Goh and Burns (2012) suggest these ideas can be also applied to the English language oral skills classroom through an adapted approach called the Teaching–Speaking Cycle. Using this approach, a teacher introduces a model text of a spoken, rather than written, text type (e.g., a family conversation, a job interview, a formal conversation between a university professor and a student). Then, the students use the model text to practise skills important for the targeted style of spoken interaction. In this way, model texts work to support MLEs' fluency and confidence so they can transfer practised skills to new, unfamiliar spoken interactions of the same genre.</p>