Teaching English in a Secondary School !

It is true that it is easy to be impressed by the technology to the point of forgetting that perhaps a more traditional approach might work better. Technology in itself does not ensure quality either.

Teachers have realized that new technologies can help our students’ learning process a lot, they are…

· motivating

· offer a great amount of input

· develop learner’s autonomy

· give a lot of opportunities for practicing the language

Trying to be effective in our work is a hard work and it very tiring. However, we have the feeling that the teachers do not get burnt-out so much by the teaching job itself, they feel disappointed when they detect that their learners are not interested in what they are doing. We think that the more we give to our students, in terms of preparing our class sessions, the more they receive from them and the learners are motivated, enjoy their lessons and succeed in learning English.

Scott Thornbury in his book How to Teach Speaking explains that teachers must find ways of raising the learner’s awareness about some special features of the speaking, for example by…

· Re-performing an original task, attempting to incorporate their own targeted features.

· Focusing in vocabulary and speaking grammar…

· Observing more skilled practitioners.

This new-found knowledge must be gradually integrated into the learners’ already existing speaking competence. That is, the knowledge needs to be appropriated. Activities aimed at appropriation provide learners with a supportive framework in which they can practice, some are:

• · Drilling

• · Reading aloud

• · Making some writing task which allows longer processing time than does any other speaking task…

The support needs to be gradually reduced so as to encourage a degree of independence, which in turn requires a degree of appropriation, we can do it by reducing the planning time, withdrawing our teaching support, performing a task in public…

These are two stages of the three-stage model of this skill development. The third final step is: autonomy. Learners can achieve greater autonomy in speaking and even a capacity for self-development with activities such as:

· Giving presentations and talks

· Telling stories, anecdotes

· Performing drama activities, discussions, debates…

Feedback on such activities need to be handled sensitively so as to respect the learners’ need to experience autonomy, but at the same time, to provide a useful feedback loop for the improvement. Some ways of learners can take responsibility for developing their speaking skills outside the classroom include:

· Taped dialogues, or podcasting.

· Computer-mediated communication.

· Reflective journals or portfolios…

Having our own experience and the opinion of the experts into account, we see that good language teaching, and especially speaking, as a slow process: it is important to get students involved in activities which develop their speaking confidence and it can require a lot of patience, especially at early stages, but when the students finally overcome their limitations they are able to express themselves quite confidently