Chapter 7 – Speaking or Signing Skills
Speaking and Signing Principles to Live By
Logan Fisher; Bibi Halima; and Keli Yerian
This chapter is about speaking and signing, so we will be discussing the presentational mode (productive skills) instead of the interpretive mode (receptive skills), but we will continue to talk about the interpersonal mode (interactive use of both productive and receptive skills). The principles in this chapter will help you do things like give speeches or tell stories in the case of presentational skills, and also how to maintain the flow of interaction in real-life conversations in the case of interpersonal skills.
Jump into it!
The first suggestion we have for you is to jump into using your language and embrace your mistakes. By pushing yourself to converse, even when you might not feel ready, your language skills will improve dramatically. As we talked about in Chapter 1, having perfect grammar or always remembering the right word for something is actually not required for communication. In fact, it’s the opposite! Communication itself is required to develop your grammar and build your vocabulary (not to mention culture and pragmatics). How do you do this? Well, if you’re trying to talk about something that happened yesterday but don’t remember the past tense, use the basic form of the verb that you do know and throw in ‘yesterday’ to compensate. If you’re learning a Sign language and don’t know a sign for a specific word, don’t be afraid to finger-spell it out! You will improve by pushing through the discomfort, and you will eventually get to the point where you can remember the past tense of the verb or the specific sign. Remember, practice is the key to proficiency.
Research Note
In a study by Suryani and Argawati (2018), students in a language learning classroom completed questionnaires about their levels of risk-taking in language learning and also took a holistic speaking test about a general topic. The results showed that there was a strong 0.685 correlation between their risk-taking tendencies and their speaking abilities, revealing that the students who took more risks also had stronger speaking skills.
Seek out opportunities to practice
One of the benefits of living in the age of technology is that you don’t even have to leave your house to practice. There are many ways to practice with technology nowadays such as having short conversations about the weather with smart devices like Siri or Alexa. Or you can have longer interactions with generative AI technology. Beyond the comfort zone of smart technology you can branch out to chat with real people by using online apps, joining a local language circle, or finding friends that speak your target language. If you can find people, push yourself to have conversations with them in your target language! It might feel really awkward sometimes, but again, no matter if you’re talking to fellow learners or native speakers, embrace your mistakes! If that tip sounds famil