BOOK REVIEW DEVELOPING ORAL SKILL ELLEN MEASDAY EMEASDAYCOMCASTNET MADDEN

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Discussion & Interaction in the Academic Community

Book Review: Developing Oral Skill

Ellen Measday, [email protected]



Madden, C. G., and T. N. Rohlck. (2000). Discussion & Interaction in the Academic Community. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.


Abstract:

The text is divided into three units: interacting, participating, and presenting in the academic community. Taking the student from an introductory chapter created to familiarize students with the topic, it offers well-designed activities to develop facility in these three levels of oral skill.


Full Text:

In teaching an academic ESL discussion course, it is extremely challenging to convince students of the relationship of discussion to success in the academic arena. Here is an additional tool for the discussion instructor. Discussion & Interaction in the Academic Community offers a wide variety of activities to elicit appropriate oral production by nonnative speakers. It is designed with a lot of white space, so the text appears very approachable. Though there is no index, the table of contents is extremely detailed and makes it easy to locate particular functions. There is a logical progression from interacting on a less formal level to participating in a productive manner in the classroom and office, to presenting data to colleagues. Reproducible pages for homework and surveys are included. Many activities assume a small class size (12 or under); for example, some homework is audiotaped. Although these activities are labor-intensive for the instructor, taping does necessitate oral clarity and comprehensibility on the student’s part. Audiotaped homework aside, most activities can be adapted for use by larger classes. Occasionally, classwork or homework requires a skill not detailed in the preceding chapters; instructors must be prepared to teach skills, such as interrupting, before asking students to take part in these activities.


The text contains myriad examples from real newspapers, published research, and journals. Although some of these examples now seem outdated (for example, ETS exchanging paper and pencil for computer by the 1996-97 school year), they are nevertheless authentic and offer opportunities for discussion of changes occurring since publication of the text in 2000.


The book includes campus surveys that require oral interaction on the students’ part. It has become difficult to design verifiable activities that require speaking, since students can obtain information from the Internet without speaking to anyone. These surveys are one way Madden and Rohlck encourage interaction with other members of the campus community. The authors also point out how to take advantage of office hours and how to use appropriate language there. They discuss differences occurring in instructor/native-speaking student and instructor/nonnative-speaking student interactions. Other activities include planned presentations and class discussions with particular roles assigned to participants. Model interactions for clarification of appropriate feedback and learning how to keep a conversation going contrast native speaker/native speaker interactions with those of nonnative speaker/native speaker. These, among many models in the book, recognize the nonnative speaker’s desire for appropriate paradigms.


The unit on participation offers opportunities to both participate in and lead discussions, along with an explanation of their importance in academic success. Helpful appendixes include reproducible evaluation forms for use by the teacher and the student. Emphasis is placed on active listening as a necessary component of effective communication.


Throughout the text, the authors present appropriate vocabulary in several ways, including many useful phrases and idioms with multiple examples and opportunities to analyze their use and record other examples. Madden and Rohlck address collocation, with exercises involving semantic distinctions of synonyms commonly used in academia (e.g., comment, mention, discuss, talk, converse), and provide divided newspaper article titles to be matched as one engaging activity.


In most fields of study, understanding the presentation of numbers in data is required. The third unit of this text provides clear explication of various types of charts, graphs, and tables, and methods of orally presenting this kind of data, with appropriate and accurate vocabulary. Activities include oral presentations, asking and answering questions, summarizing, and paraphrasing. Another useful skill addressed is hedging, a technique frequently employed by Americans and frequently misunderstood by nonnative speakers.


Discussion & Interaction in the Academic Community offers the instructor and student a useful book of reasonable size for a one-semester course. It covers topics that are crucial to academic success but that are frequently missed by larger, broader texts. Mastery of the skills clearly laid out by Madden and Rohlck should lead students to much greater comfort and achievement in the academic environment.



Ellen Measday received a BA in French from George Washington University and an MA in linguistics with a specialty in ESL from the University of Oregon. She is an associate professor of ESL at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey, where she teaches in all skill areas.



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