UNINTERLINGUA 2015

U N I N T E R L I N G U A 81 to very easy to speak only English in class should be covered in about forty hours. The program activities will depend on the group and the teacher, but some suggestions for it could be the next ones: o Know basic tenses and vocabulary. It is supposed the students already got to this point. o Starters to generate conversation (explain natural way to chat with others). o The water body metaphor. Finding different ways to cross a body of water could be similar to dealingwith the use of language. o Retrieving information, the most difficult brain activity. Even basic language could be forgotten when trying to communi- cate in a second language. o The first 5 minutes of speaking time. A big challenge but a great result. A lot of the students cannot concentrate enough to speak only English, but after doing it, it becomes easier and easier. o Increasing time according to the groups’ need, first 5 minutes, then ten, could be helpful. o Vocabulary construction. Meanwhi- the students and class advancement and objectives. Another competence should be the teachers’ ability to use a textbook. Since most of them are created with the objective of making students communicate; it is also true that many of them (if not all) lose track of directing total attention to making the stu- dents develop, in a programmed form, the oral skill. That connected to the fact that some teachers just follow the book without observing the achievements in the students, makes necessary a certain competence to exploit the possibilities to get English spea- king students. However, if the book does not provide a strong direction over the develop- ment of the communicative competence the teachers should be able to change the rest of the activities in every unit of the book into a communicative one; that would be another competence for the teacher. Those are then some of the important competences the tea- cher should have in order to have a com- municative class with preference on focus in the oral communication. Integrating all of the before said ele- ments a scheme could be articulated (see figure 1). Important to say, however, that it includes some of the elements in represen- tation of all of the ones mentioned in this pa- per in some of the columns not because of the irrelevance, but because of the space. Figure 1: Diagram of the oral skill de- velopment in the teaching process. Then, when the teachers have put all of these elements together, a process to make the students development and obtain an English speaking class can be started. The time to cover that program will depend on the group’s abilities, but after, eighty to one-hundred and twenty hours, they started taking the first class, could be the moment. Then following a program is important, and the time to get from getting very complicated Developing speaking skills in ELT