Orality of the written language

How oral can written language be? This was the question that arose when re-thinking ways of planning my lesson on Words.Moreover, deciding what grammar activities I should involve my students in when dealing with this kind of topic, was indeed a challenge for me. I have just "visited" Scott Thornbury's blog and while reading the post another problem struck me: "How to set creative automaticity on a written language-based lesson?"
So I thought of some simple tricks that we can use in order to have the students speak and write but never lose the "conversational stream" they are meant to follow.
One activity was based on the difference and the usage of OLD/NEW English words.Basically this topic allows us to teach the English chunks, the collocations or idioms that actually represent the basis of easily learning useful expressions. Understanding how collocations function helps the students use them later on in their conversations.I also presented a series of new words that have been introduced in the language in the last decade.Making the presentation "attractive" only requires a funny betting game:
-you need one student to be the auctioneer (he shows the words and asks for the highest bet) and the rest of the students form two groups.They try to guess the meaning and they need to make a logical sentence with that word after they had already won the auction of that word.If the group that offered more money doesn't solve the task, the other group has the chance and, if they know, they become the winners of the auction.
In contrast with the new words, I created a quiz based on the Shakespearean language that entertained them greatly(they had to guess the meaning of the words). As a follow-up,on sheets of paper I wrote samples of dialogues that they had to transform into old English by replacing the underlined words with their old/archaic replicas. It seemed fun and, hearing themselves pronouncing those lines, offered them the pleasure of testing"live" these ancient flavors.
But the greatest challenge of all was to teach the functionality of letter language by "discussing" the letter in stead of writing it. Of course you need to also write a letter but that should be a home-to-do task, so that you can work on their own ideas and written text.
What I did was to cut out extras-es from their letters, fold them and mix them in a bowl.Then I asked the students to pick them one by one and make sure it is not their own letter extras. The 2 requirements were:
- read the extras and decide what type of letter it is (letter of complaint, invitation letter, cover letter,etc)
- and guess the author of the letter.
Using a series of conversational cards (letter composing tasks) the students had to "orally" create the main body of the letters. This was a role-play that had my students actually "speak" the letter instead of writing it.
The success was not only on conversational basis but , by having them "talk the written language", I realized they actually selected from the written letters those expressions that made them sound "writtenish"; they repetitively used "I am looking forward to seeing you", "I am writing you on the behalf of...", "I need to remind you", "I can't find myself in the position of...", "My enclosed resume..." although they had never used them before when leading a complaint/requirement conversational task.
In conclusion, if we want our students to learn the structures mainly found in written language we might sometimes step away from the classical written/reading practice and try a "conversational" approach.It can actually work vice-versa for the oral structures- have them compose their task-based dialogues and then ask them to act out in front of the class.
Moreover, why not trying planning a lesson on "story markers"(starters or linkers) that the students need to act out as a part of their conversational exercises.For example, Ale will like this :), cut out Cinderella's lines from the story and make the students use those lines as logically as possible in a customer-shop clerk discussion (complaining, refusing). Or using "descriptions" from famous novels for a "talk about my family" activity.
Even though it might be viewed as an inappropriate usage of written language, considering the experimental values, this tasks can build the students apprehension of the language, by raising awarenesses; to complete the task, the students need to learn these structures and fully understand their meaning in order to re-formulate and use them into real-time conversations.