Personal Writing Project (PWP)

First draft.

Johanna Angulo Hurtado.

TOWARD THE INTEGRATION OF ART

IN THE LEARNING PROCESS OF

A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Topic: the encouragement of oral expression in the learning process of a foreign language through art.

Audience: teachers and foreign languages students in the learning process to become teachers.

Justification: because writing and reading have become the focus of the learning process of a foreign language, so students tend not to care about orality as an important means of expression for human beings interaction.

Objectives:

General: To implement a pedagogical proposal to the encouragement of oral expression in the learning process of a second language through art.

Specific:

To evaluate what the influence of art in the learning process of a foreign language is.

To promote artistic activities that help students to improve their oral expression in a second language.

To encourage spontaneous oral expression that motivates students to act according to any situation.

To evaluate what the role of authentic material in the improvement of oral expression is

To propose a dynamic for evaluating oral expression in a foreign language.

Research questions:

What is the influence of art in the learning process of a foreign language?

How to promote oral expression through art?

How to recreate situational contexts that help students to develop spontaneous oral expression?

What is the role of authentic material in the encouragement of oral expression?

How to evaluate oral expression?

Nowadays it seems that the learning process of a foreign language has been reduced to the idea of writing and reading –producing and comprehending different types of texts, paying less attention to the role of orality in the process of interaction of the human beings. I would lie if I told you that I do not think about literacy as an important component for developing the ability of expressing and understanding. Indeed, some times I like reading and writing, but I can not deny that learning a language is more than that, it is also about the art of expression through orality.

I consider it is necessary to have some considerations about writing and orality. On one hand, it is important to consider writing as an ability that we acquire through the practice of expressing ideas into words that we write on a paper. On the other hand, orality is a capacity that we develop through the interaction with other people. Orality tends to be a complex process which includes lots of components (gestures, deictic expressions, intonation –prosody, the position and the movement of the body, etc.) that complement the communicative situation which participants are part of. My point is that we can not pass up what happens with people and their social relationships in the ordinary life. When I go to a market for example, I do not write a list specifying to the vendedor, what I am looking for or what I want to know about the product I want to buy; when I meet my classmates or friends, we do not communicate with each other through writing on pieces of paper. What I mean is that oral expression gives us the possibility of expressing our feelings and our human nature throughout one of the most common means of communication: conversation¹, which does not happen when we write.

Now for example, I am writing this presentation for my final paper, and maybe you already inferred what my purpose is, but it will be difficult for me to make you know about the feelings and emotions that I express each time I pronounce a single word or a whole phrase; so it will be more difficult for you to guess what I really want to express. That is the singularity of orality. It is true that writing does not depend on an immediate context as orality does, and this gives us the chance of manipulating the discourse in a different way although with the same purpose, communicating. While we are writing it is very common to use punctuation marks attempting to evoke sensations and feelings that just can make sense in the immediate context. For that reason I consider orality as an art of the expression.

Then, what is expression?

That is a difficult question to answer, yet let’s see a pertinent definition from the “Collins Cobuild, English Language Dictionary” for my proposal.

“Express: ¹ if you express an idea or feeling; ² when you express yourself; ²ּ¹ you put ideas into words, especially openly or clearly, by speaking or writing them; ²ּ² you show your thoughts or feelings by your actions or by artistic activities”. This definition definitely summarizes what I have been trying to express since I started to write this presentation. Although I am considering oral expression as an optimum means of communication, it does not mean writing is not. I do not attempt to promote a conflict between these communicative processes; I am just looking for emphasizing on what I am considering for the development of my research project.

So, what to do for developing or encouraging oral expression in the whole sense, for interacting with other people in a foreign language? This question has been around my mind for a long time, but finding an answer has been difficult for me until now. That is why I propose the integration of art towards the reinforcement of oral expression in the learning process of a second language.

As I told you before, most of the students of a foreign language tend to pay more attention to writing and reading during their learning process, acquiring a great ability for putting and organizing thoughts into written words; but when they are exposed to any kind of oral situations they feel shy, they feel it is so difficult to express themselves talking, that is why it is very common to hear some students saying “I prefer writing”. In our context we do not have the chance of being in contact with the second language, thus we depend a lot on what we do in the classroom, so teachers and students have the responsibility of creating occasions that help students to encourage the capacity of oral expression in a second language.

Searching information for building the framework of my proposal about the encouragement of oral expression in the learning process of a second language through art, finding relevant information to construct good arguments to support my idea has been difficult. Nevertheless, I believe art develops human being sensibility and a creative capacity that give him confidence for interacting with other people through orality.

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