You Need to Speak Up!

To many general notions, SPEAKING is a difficult skill to master, yet many learners truly acknowledge its power as a dynamic instrument to communicate, interact, advise, educate, and more as the list goes on. If you spend one day just to count the values of being a good speaker, then I believe you would need a long stick of pencil and a dozen of

blank pieces of paper to jot down the advantages as your thoughts flow through the extent of your attention. The point is there are numerous positive effects from being a good speaker (I bet know them too clearly).

It upsets me every time my students come admitting the false facts that because they are not native English speakers, they then don’t have to be good at speaking. Some added that they have tried to their hardest, yet they couldn’t be consistent enough to be conscious of their own speaking, and subsequently produced explicit errors (undesirable). While people may come up with different views regarding good speaking, I would recommend my students to highlight EFFECTIVE speaking, more than just being good.

Understand the Silent Enemies

1. Fear

Fear is the number ONE foe, intimidating you to give up on your speaking practice. Fear of people; Fear of making mistakes; Fear of being judged; Fear of being different; Fear of fears. They are parts of human. So, how to get rid of them? I suggest you to stand firm physically and psychologically, and believe that you can do because a thousand good speakers somewhere have won these same battles you are facing now. As a matter of fact, they are no different from you. They are humans like you, share common feelings, and have limitation like us. Yet they found their ways winning their fear. Here is what you need to bear in mind--Nothing is beyond your capability. The problem lies at the point whether you are willing to take a step in or not.

1. Carelessness

I witnessed a friend of mine who was doing a graduate degree in TESOL with me in Phnom Penh. Tep Livina is a good speaker for any situations he was in. He was careful with his speech, and took every moment seriously (and enjoyably). He always read books from home, and came to class with awesome ideas and interesting questions. That’s how things work! We plan, and plan, and plan in order to be effective. On the opposite side, carelessness causes you to doubt your own capability and allow fear and discouragement to take control your thoughts. Carelessness lowers down the degree of your consciousness and awareness of situations, and it then allows pressure to besiege. Thus, I suggest you to prepare and predict what might happen up on stage.   

Be a Good Observer 

More problems arises because students do control their attention that would lead to producing right language. A good speaker is, too, a good listener and observer. Pick up a role model! A role model is someone whom you believe to possess skills and are able to perform good/attractive speech. For example, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Malcolm X., ...etc. Observe his/her verbal and behavioral qualities such as the following:

1. Patterns: Stick your head to the melody of speech as the person speaks. Notice sentences, pauses, and accent.
2. Pace: It’s the speed of speech operation.
3. Intonation: The up and down of stress and tone
4. Meaningful and musical pauses: It’s so important to understand the messages of pauses. Some pauses are used as silent communicative instruments to make the message loud and clear in listeners’ head.
5. Rhythms: Key the attractive and interestingness in voice projection
6. Voice Purity: A good speaker wouldn’t choose to adopt a fake voice. Voices are the human identity and they are unique and particular.
7. Natural Voice Projection: Pretensions in voice are less acceptable by many, except for some explicit reasons.
8. Pitch and Tempo: It’s the highness and lowness of your voice. Remember, circumstances and purposes determine your pitch and tempo.
9. Voice Flexibility: A good speaker is not a robot. Voice and tone of a speaker need to vary to ensure readers’ full attention.
10. Chunk Creation: If a speaker is well planned and well-reheased, he/she would know the catch-up phrase, and the important ideas s/he wish to hand on.

To communicate clear and expressive ideas, you need to consider physical emphasis feats, because they will help intensify your messages, put more weights to the speech rigors, and more interestingly they light up attractiveness and clarity. Consider the following:

1. Postures
2. Facial Expression
3. Hand movements
4. Body movements

Be a Consistent Practitioner

Knowing how to operate any tasks is not the end yet. There are more factors you need to strengthen and cooperate when you proceed the task in action. I suggest you to build unshakable passion regarding the issue of Speaking. Know that you are practicing your speech everywhere, and with everyone you meet. Call each time you talk to people an opportunity for your serious practice, yet do it naturally and enjoyably.

In sum, be consistent with the journey you are going to take, and believe that your success await you somewhere at the corner. For more, to engage the effective speaking skill, you should never undermine the key principles (as I call them central and dynamic for productive speech):

• Sincerity: Be clear and natural to your points communicating; It’s not embarrassing to talk about your mistakes.
• Friendliness: Establish positive and relaxed environment for speech.
• , and Authority: Be clear of your expertise; Don’t try to cover things you are not good at.

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Posted in: Learning Tips,Self-Development,Speaking,Strategies

Why Needs Analysis?

Experiences tell us that different approaches work best within various, distinctive contexts and conditions, determined and driven by meaningful plans. So to say, it would sound too obvious and negatively light as process activated recklessly without featuring users' significance in that sphere. With all the respects, both learners and teachers could not experience the taste and beauty of the climax as much resources and effort have been invested.

Most modern classrooms are preferred to be a theater or a forum that everyone can experience equal chances of letting go their opinions. Drill a little deeper; don't you think that would be a kind of high risk of wasting time as too much of such activities are overspent? Maybe you and I as teachers need to direct our imagination a little bit. May be there are other ways round that lead us to deliver messages of any contents efficiently. Let's consider of analyzing needs as we try our feet into students' shoes.

To be clear of my stand, I am not by any means against friendly/open style of teaching. I am just vigilant of the quality of learning that our students would absorb. Now, in the most common ways of thinking--as many teachers do--students bring different different sizes and capacity of input into classrooms. To such aspects, we teachers may need to be alert of our teaching strategies.

Clearly, we fully understand that students come to school with different assets and needs. Let's get down into students' assets. Genders, races, cultures, family, ethnicity, and background understanding must be brought up into discussion among teachers. Without further analysis over psychoanalysis, these factors are quite enough to underpin students' interest, needs and vision in learning.

Now, here is the most an interesting part of discussion we should deal with; it's called "STUDENTS' NEEDS." Truism in learning is that students are not meant to determine what they need to learn, especially in GEP compound. It is quite a wise ideal to let students clarify what they WANT to be or to do. However, to go further, it's left up to us as teachers, curriculum designers or education experts. WANTs are tools to enforce goal, not much into solidifying processes. To end this post, I can't leave without advising that teachers, especially, need to be curious about procedures of teaching they are designing. Employing ESP approaches into dissecting activities is highly recommended. Never forget to explain every objective of each learning lesson.

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Posted in: Resources,Strategies

Simple facts bluffingTeaching and Learning

The effectiveness of conceptualizing language in term that language users could grasp up to the extensive viability of language operation is not totally left up to language educators. It was almost a century that most educational stakeholders in both Western and Eastern world appreciated conservative classroom paradigms, such as Audiolingualism, Grammar-translation, and many Direct approaches. ‘Conservative’ here is another term that I must approach, that I believe to have set cultural, social and relational mindset in the field of educational history in both developed and developing countries.

Humankind no different from other types of planetary creatures is suggested, persuaded, colonized, governed, controlled, and commanded to undergo compromises, submissions and changes. I believe that theoretical and empirical discoveries on descriptive, correlational and experimental researches of learning and teaching were totally a natural fitness to their social-ecology. These untwistable facts basically evidence that in the early narrow world learners and educators were slaves of their social bounds, facilitative shortages and limitation in creative ideals. On the contrary, the modern world seeks to uplifts the value of humanity as it opens the front door to creativity, opportunity and round-table discussions on mystical aspects to quests of knowledge. The democratic world believes that everyone is creative, inventive and artistic in many ways. At this point, we as educators no longer oblige to spoonfeed learners in their learning process. That so-to-say, we take the roles as triggerers instead of shooters; Monitors instead of classroom rulers; motivators instead of dictators; Classroom supervisors rather than full-time service educators; outliners instead of narrators. Through the lenses of CLT techniques, the educational responsibility does not become a heavy yoke upon the educators’ shoulders, yet it helps balance social interaction and objectively helps enhance learners’ capacity to reach deep structure level of understanding language.

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Posted in: Strategies,Teaching