“Ma’am, thank you for your ‘teach’”: Oral Reporting

Abstract

Teaching vernacular-medium students (those who have had their mother tongue as the medium of instruction at school) how to speak English is a challenge that teachers face because they know these students would not be able to produce meaningful sentences as they lack vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure. This study was conducted at SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India, for a batch of 25 vernacular-medium learners who were admitted under a rural scholarship scheme in the academic year 2018-2019. To teach oral reporting, this teacher-researcher (I) designed five activities, and found out by the end of the fifth activity that the learners could take part in them successfully because similar tasks were repeated. An analysis of the spoken data was conducted to measure their success at the functional level. The samples of the spoken transcripts are documented in the paper to show the difficulties the students faced while participating in the activities. This article confirms that in teaching oral reporting to the lower proficiency learners (A1 and A2 levels), three aspects -- the type of task selected; giving enough preparation time for the learners; repeating the given task -- can enhance their confidence.