Introduction

• 1 How do your students feel about speaking and writing? Do they enjoy it? Why / why not?

• 2 What are the main barriers to your students being able to develop speaking and writing skills?

Teaching speaking and writing

Students may have good grammar, a wide vocabulary, and strong ▸receptive skills in the L2. The main goal of language learning, however, is to be able to say and write what they want to. In challenging circumstances, there are many factors which may obstruct or prevent students from being able to do this. This chapter looks at some of these issues, and provides a range of solutions and activities to address the situation.

In a blog post, Jack C. Richards identifies two particular challenges related to speaking and writing: ‘1. While learners’ receptive competence continues to develop, their productive competence remains relatively static. 2. Language items that learners recognize and understand in the input they hear do not pass into their productive competence.’

When teaching ▸productive skills, there may be a gap between what you want to teach and what you are able to teach, in terms of textbook or curriculum content (see ▸Chapter 1). Even if you recognize that it's vital that your students can speak and write in the L2, many factors may prevent you from doing this: e.g. class size, seating plan, a grammar-based ▸syllabus, the fear of creating too much noise, the amount of time it takes, and the fact that productive skills are often sidelined in exams.