Speaking and talking in the Curriculum

-          How students going to learn a foreign language with no opportunity of communicate with it?

1.      Speaking in the classroom.

The knowledge children have of the languages hey know has essentially been acquired through its use. Therefore, this is the way it should be followed in the foreign language. For that reason, the didactic approach should be focused on the use of the target language in the class. The lesson should be given completely in English.

The essential condition to facilitate this process is to focus the didactic intervention on a real and continuous use of the language, which acquires more importance if we consider that, in most cases, our boys and girls do not have more possibilities of contact with the foreign language than the one they have within the school framework.

The fact of starting from a very limited linguistic competence in most pupils makes necessary to guide the educational practice more to the establishment of this competence than to its development and improvement.

At the same time, the communicative context should be used as a support for the verification of the hypothesis formulated through the use of the expressions and the positive or negative feedback that the context can provide.

Interaction can only happen when it is face to face. Pupils should be given the opportunity to put into practice what they have been exposed to.

As a general rule, we can say that, at the beginning, most of the class time should be devoted to listening to an intelligible input and speaking ( by repeating, asking, and answering questions, drilling, etc.).

Once they gain confidence in speaking and iunderstanding messages in the foreign language, they can begin the proess of reafind and writing in that foreign language with vocabulary, set phrases, ... they are familiar with  in the FL and also in their mother tongue. 

Summing up, following a Communicative Language Teaching approach, the time the teacher is speaking, explaining, ... should be reduced and, the time the students are producing the foreign language increased.