LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Enhancing oral language learning using the Wimba Voice Tools
Event date: 20 March, 2009
Location: Mansfield Cooper Building - Room 2.1, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester

Spanish: Material for Spanish oral classes
This pack contains beginners, intermediate and advanced classes. Each section includes: instructions and information for the teacher, the topic and learning objectives of the lessons, how to organise students and to conduct each activity, the role/s of the teacher; summary of grammatical points which will be used in the activity or indications of those which need to have been seen before carrying out the activity; suggestions about how to explore the topic of the lesson further by practising other language skills (writing, reading, etc.); and teaching material (ready to photocopy).

French: Difficultés de la langue française
This 2-semester grammar course is essentially geared towards English Learners of French and is intended to improve students' writing skills. Its main aim is to improve writing accuracy at noun phrase and sentence level; nevertheless, it also aims to strengthen students writing techniques and text-production/text-transformation skills through a review of linguistic processes of pronominalisation. It originated from the observation (i.e. via several error analyses conducted between 1997 and 1999) that foreign learners of French recurrently make particular mistakes when they write and that this is often due to a lack of grammatical knowledge. Thus, it is hypothesised that these mistakes can be avoided thanks to an introduction to/a revision of basic grammatical concepts (i.e. What is a Part of Speech? What is a Grammatical Function? What do Gender and Number mean? Etc). Further, though the course mainly focuses on writing skills, register differences, and in particular stylistic differences between written and oral expression, will also be underlined. Finally, this programme also reviews central difficulties linked to the choice and use of tenses in French (second semester).

Spoken language
This article first explains the lack of specific attention to speaking, and the reasons for its study. It then outlines the main aims of an applied linguistic course in the topic. These are the major defining features of speech; the pedagogical options for teaching speech; the impact of oral tasks; issues in the testing of speaking; and the nature of the oral language curriculum. The article identifies key aims and objectives, outlines relevant teaching procedures, and ways of obtaining formative and summative assessment.