Teaching  oral  communication

being in front of the whole class. She says that in some classes the dynamic between the students makes it hard for them to trust each other and wanting to participate orally. In these cases she either organises smaller groups where the students practice oral communication or she allows them to practice it with her one by one.

Even though the respondents in general do no think teaching oral communication is particularly challenging, several of them find it challenging to assess oral communication.

Thomas thinks devising appropriate assessment tasks for oral communication and for

practicing oral communication is difficult, and points out that it was hardly focused on during his university education. Jane finds it challenging to assess oral communication due to a lack of guidance material and common criteria. Besides that, she also finds assessing oral

communication quite difficult because of her limited experience as a teacher, and adds that many of the more experienced colleagues seem to cope just fine with it. She is uncertain of what the assessment criteria for oral communication really are, or could possibly be. At her school another teacher has made a set of assessment criteria for oral communication, which she employs. She adds that she really does not know what she would do without these.

However, she is still uncertain about these criteria because they are devised by one person only, and she fears that, with the possibility of her students having an oral exam, their external examiner might have another idea of what oral competence is. Jane says she in particularly struggles with justifying and explaining her assessments: “I can sit here and say that probably deserves the mark 4, but then the next problem is how to explain to the student when he asks what made it a 4”. She says it is a shame that the criteria are not more specific.

She also adds that one should be able to agree on what is quality in oral competence when it constitutes a substantial part of the subject and the students may have to have an oral exam.

Jane says “I really miss some help, in order to confidently know that my assessments are not only based on my very own beliefs.”

Sara says that she does not feel fully confident that she has the professional

knowledge required to teach oral communication effectively. However, she says that she tries out different methods, and sometimes something seems to work in one class and not in another class. She thinks that it is hard to believe that as a teacher one can be truly confident that something will work and that the students will learn from it, because in her experience, one thing that works in one class may not work in a different class. Sara says that her way of working with oral communication is that they have to do a lot of it, so they can get as much practice as possible. She also focuses on working with vocabulary and trying to get the students who do not want to speak out loud in class to do so. Sara explains that one method

she uses is to pretend not to understand when a student speaks in Norwegian instead of English, when she knows that they are able to express themselves in English. She says that she tries to lure them to just get going with talking, but that sometimes she has to do this individually with the student and not in the classroom.

Several of the teachers express that they enjoy teaching oral communication because it allows many students to excel. Both Jane and Sara explain that oral communication is generally the students’ strength in the English subject, as opposed to written communication, and especially writing formal texts. Jane is glad that they can feel that they really master a part of the English subject, and it seems like they practiced oral communication a lot during lower secondary level. Martin also experiences that that even the students who struggle the most with English are in fact quite good at speaking English, but that they nevertheless have a limited vocabulary. For some of his weakest classes he has to repeat quite a lot in

Norwegian for his students to understand.

Even though the teachers say that their students often show strength in oral

communication, it is, however, mainly by using informal English. The teachers seem to face some of the same challenges with both written and oral communication. As described in the previous section (5.2.2), the teachers say that their students have a high level of proficiency in English, but struggle with writing formal and academic texts. The teachers find it

challenging to guide their students who already know a lot of English, to reach an even higher level of proficiency, especially when it comes to situational awareness and using formal English. The teachers express that they also have this challenge with oral

communication. Kristine says that she pays particular attention to formal English during her students’ oral presentations, and that she works on expanding her students’ vocabulary, and tries to get them to use more precise expressions than informal expressions such as “stuff”

and “things”. She says it is not hard to understand what the students want to communicate, but mention that they need to be challenged in terms of style and learn how to be more precise and formal. It is important for them to learn this because many of them will go on to university where a higher level of formality and precision is required. Thomas thinks that learning to adjust ones oral utterances according to the situation is one of the most important parts of the English subject. He says that his students are quite good at speaking English, but they have to be taught how to adjust their spoken language according to the situation, and especially for more formal situations.