Discussion Questions 6) Speaking approaches

• What aspects of language does "speaking" include? In another word, what do you have to teach in order to successfully develop an English speaking ability?

    To successfully develop an English speaking ability, L2 language teachers have to teach abilities to select appropriate words and sentences that are what students want to say and to organize their thoughts in a meaningful and logical sequence.

• Discuss speaking approaches that you have read. What are familiar or unfamiliar to you? What activities have you experienced for your school years?

    'Interviews', 'Role Play' and 'Discussion' are familiar to me, because I sometimes experienced these activities in class. However, most speaking approaches such as 'Find the Difference', 'Picture Describing', 'Picture Describing', and 'Picture Describing' are unfamiliar to me, because Korean English education does not focus on oral-English. I rarely have chances to experience speaking activities in class for my school years.

• What is CMC? Discuss the characteristics of CMC from L2 pedagogic perspective.

   CMC is an acronym of ‘Computer-Mediated-Communication’. By using CMC tools such as e-mails, chat rooms, discussion rooms, video or audio conference, users worldwide can easily achieve communication, without boundaries of time and space. It is therefore proposed that CMC can be used to compensate the deficiency of interaction both inside and outside of EFL.

• How does CMC help foreign language learning?

    With CMC in L2, teachers can encourage a greater amount of interactions by using CMC tools both inside and outside the classroom. Learning is no longer restrained in time and space, through the internet, learners are offered opportunities to communicate and learn collaboratively with learners worldwide. EFL learners do not need to passively listen to audio tapes alone after class; through the use of the internet and CMC tools they can easily participate in more interactions by posting and replying messages on discussion boards, writing and replying emails to their key-pals or joining online chat rooms whenever suitable. Learning becomes a 24 hour process. This new way of learning that engages learners in authentic social interactions can greatly expose learners to the TL and enable them to practice what they have learned in the classroom.