Speaking, as a communicative competence, has been a neglected skill in the teaching process of the Portuguese language over the middle school grades, unlike what happens in secondary school. The absence of enough demanding level in this area, mainly based on the difficulty that teachers experience in assessing it, reflects in student’s performance, revealing difficulties at the level of interaction and oral communication skills. These skills must be developed along with reading, writing and grammar, so that students' training can be implemented in full, throughout a formative process, based on methodologies and active pedagogical strategies that promote the development of these skills.
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If you have not already, you can try using their favourite social media such as Facebook and choose topics that connect to their prior experiences/reading/local or global issue. See this example for a successful strategy:
Conference Paper Social Media in Education: Bringing Your Classroom to Life -...
Best,
Debra
Thank you, Sajda Taha Mahmood , for your contribution. Students do like a lot working with that kind of network, and I really don't mind if they use it, since they speak and discuss about some interesting content. They should be given some time to prepare their speech and classes will surely be more creative and stimulating.
We have witnessed the impoverishing of communication skills among students in Spanish language too in several Latin american countries.
Students are not compelled to expose their thougths on the subjects they are dealing with in class, neither those they face in their lives outside the classroom. Reading and acquisition of vocabulary is quite often restricted to several pages in the text book, a task that is considered by many , as tiresome and lacking of interest. It is necessary that both reading and oral communication should be proposed to the students as remarkable as being trending in social networks. The absence of atractive for young students for reading is proportionaly inverse to the interest assigned to inmediate, colloquial and limited exchange in social networks.
Communication skills are intended to the transference of thougths, conclusions, concepts, but complex thougths can not be expressed properly with emoticons and abbrevations. If oral and personal communication during class is resignified by the group, it is possible to recover certain lost terrain in this field.
Elio A. Prieto Gonzalez, I completely agree with you. In Spain, there are a few researchers working in this field, and with great results. In Portugal, I had huge difficulties in finding valid research. Baring in mind my own experience, it is very difficult to work with teachers, since they are used to work with their text books, as you said before. It's much more easy than listen to the students and their opinions, and work with them in order to get their oral skills better. It's really sad. But, fortunately, there are a few of us who try to change this situation. Become open minded it's the solution.
Dear Carla. To be open minded is a requisite in the range of an universal one.
But the specific way in which can be open minded is certainly difficult to grasp.
When I was younger (as Beatles says) there was "cool" to be related to books and my fellow students used to admire those guys or girls that became attractive because their nice way to speak.
Nowadays there is different.
Social networks, abbreviations and the over dimension of distance as the best way to be in touch, characterize our landscape in schools.
Those are the new rules.
I think that it is mandatory to ride in those new techno horses.
How?
By proposing a better language for the community of social networkers.
Youtubers are very poor in language skills but are dominating some areas, where we simply are not allowed to reach.
May be we must substitute some youtubers?
We must promote the skillfully speakers among students but without compromising their popularity in the students group.
Find the way is a true investigation question.
Learning is cognitive process ,student learn a lot when they get together in the form of small manageable sized group ,share knowledge ,experience, improve their communication and through this process the burden of the teacher will be minimized . teacher should make a learning environment conducive to his /her student interactive learning and must play supervisory role.
Carla
I agrre with you in your evaluation of this situation. Maybe the researchers that are involved in the elucidation of this problems among students belomngs to others areas like, Informatic, Linguistics or Comunnity management.
Dear Elda Alemayehu
Of course a group of manageable size for reading progressively more complex texts can be a good dispositive in order to increase the self confidence and develop communication skills. The enjoyable side of reading must be emphasized through a wider spectrum of texts, speccially those related to their social lives. If that kind of materials are interspersed with that of the specific topics of the asignatures, may be the process goes easier.
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