Although many students may not progress beyond the level of guided reports, some students will hopefully have achieved sufficient control of the material in order to be able to discuss selected topics related to the content of the chapter. The brighter students should always be given an opportunity to operate at this level before proceeding to subsequent chapters. These students should be permitted to practice speaking in groups.
354 Part Two: Practice
In asking the students to discuss a topic, the teacher should be careful to avoid a subject that may frustrate them by causing them to want to go beyond their language capabilities. For example, if she selects some literary or philosophical topic comparable to one the students discuss in their own language, they begin to think in complex terms far beyond the capacity of their language background. The focus should be simple, more like that of everyday conversations rather than serious discussions. Also, the focus should be on something with which the students are familiar and in which they are interested. Often, the students themselves can provide good ideas for stimulating topics.
One way to limit the general direction and to avoid complicated, philosophical answers is to base the oral work on audio-visual materials. The students may describe pictures, slides, posters, paintings, drawings, etc. or use them as a stimulus for short oral presentations. One interesting idea is to take slides of local points of interest and student hangouts and use them as stimuli for conversation practice or oral reports (Grittner, 1969). A related activity that eliminates the memorized oral presentations common to many classes is to allow the students to prepare an oral presentation based on a picture or drawing. The students are not to describe, but to amplify and create a situation. For example, in viewing a picture of a boy, the students may talk about what he is thinking, his mood, etc. as well as a simple description. While they are talking about their reactions to the picture, the teacher intersperses comments that elicit "real" language replies (Blomberg, 1969).
At a more advanced level (the teacher must be the judge of when the students are ready), more demanding questions can be incorporated into the question-and-answer practice. Sooner or later, the students must be expected to go beyond a simple answer, and this type of question is designed to do just that. Questions such as "What do you think of . . . ?" "What do you know about . . . ?" "Flow do you feel about . . . ?" are employed more to stimulate discussion than to extract a simple answer to a factual question. By this stage, the students should be capable of expressing opinions and making comparisons and contrasts that require more prolonged answers. They need to be given some practice in making sustained responses. For example, they can be asked to describe the difference between some aspect of a foreign culture as described in the text and their own, the typical after-school activities of high school students, their school, their reaction to a character in a story, and so on. The brave teacher may include discussion of opinions regarding school regulations, advantages and disadvantages of studying a foreign language, going to college, etc.
The better students should be provided opportunities toward the end of each chapter to operate beyond the guidelines and call up material from previous chapters in order to expand upon any topic related to the material in
the chapter. Without such practice in going from thought to expression, the students never really learn to use the language, because language is essentially communication, and communication involves the exchange of thoughts or feelings with someone else. Although errors may occasionally crop up in their speech, the fact that they are getting additional practice expressing their own thoughts by means of another language is the essential factor if they are ever to gain the fluency necessary to communicate with a native speaker. Perfect language is only an abstraction at best, and the students will eliminate their own errors as they have more contact with the language.