92-pages-GUIDELINES-FOR-SECONDARY-SCHOOLS-All-Streams-and-Sections

techniques appropriate to the audience and the situation 15 . These strategies are often used simultaneously.
Therefore, learners should be trained to use them adequately in oral communication.
Helping learners meet the speaking standards
Setting appropriate pedagogy for the teaching of speaking in the Moroccan context requires teachers to be
aware of the differences between spoken and written discourse, and then build on them to design purposeful
tasks and activities. From the point of view of production, it is self-evident that spoken and written discourse
makes somewhat different demands on speakers and writers. The speaker, for instance, functions under the
pressure of time, whereas the writer does not need to monitor, repair or modify her/ his output immediately.
The speaker may also have access to immediate feedback from the interlocutor(s), while the writer can only
imagine the reaction of his audience. The most salient characteristics of spoken/written discourse are
outlined in the table below 16 .
Spoken Discourse
-media is voice
-casual
-with ungrammatical forms at times
-simple ( shorter chunks)
-loosely structured
-reduced forms(e.g. I’ll)
-audience is known
-adjustable with a great deal of redundancy
-extra-linguistic information
-more spontaneous back-channelling (feedback)
- much use of interjections
-social interactional meaning
-more interactive patterns and fillers
-less densely packed with information
-turn place holders
-more topic shifting
Written Discourse
-media is letter
-formal
-complex( longer stretches of language)
-much more accurate and structured
-highly organized rhetorically
-complete chunks (e.g. I will)
-audience is usually absent (at the moment of writing)
-less negotiable, interactional
-standardized
-more of a consensus as what is appropriate
-interjections rarely used
-more specific
-more lasting in space and time
-more densely packed with information
-durable
Several attempts have been made to reduce the above differences between speech and writing to simplified
dichotomies (e.g. contextualized vs. de-contextualized, self-monitored vs. spontaneous, planned vs. unplanned,
etc). While teachers have to raise learners’ awareness to such differences, they have to conceive of the
distinction as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. The more characteristics such as "immediate", "oral",
"conversational" are present, the more "spoken" a modality can be said to be. Other ‘dis-fluency’
15 The situation includes participants and their relationship, the place of the speaking act, etc.
16 For more details and examples, see Gillian Brown and George Yule, 1983.
16
التوجيهات التربوية وبرامج تدريس مادة اللغة الإنجليزية س ت ث ت 2007