Oral Communication

The Necessity for Oral Communication 

We're going to be discussing a very important topic today: oral communication. Most people know what oral communication is, but they do not understand how important it is to develop oral communication skills in students. When we talk about having good oral communication skills what do we mean? Well, it has to do with the degree of how well you can get meaning across to other people through the use of your voice. I consider myself to have good oral communication skills and I actually notice a correlation between my oral communication skills and how I write. I don't believe it affects the grammar and spelling of my writing but it definitely has an effect on how fast I can write and makes my writing more engaging. 

A test you can do is to try and write a paragraph about something opinionated, and as you write that paragraph notice how the inner voice in your head is talking. 

Does that inner voice sound like you?

Is that inner voice loud?

Does it think of content you can write faster than you can write it? 

Or is it slow? 

Is it quiet? 

Doing this test can tell you a lot about yourself. Now let's look at why oral communication is so important in the 21st century. To state the obvious oral communication gives us a massive array of tools to use when communicating with one another. It is the ULTIMATE way to communicate with other humans. You can express things like sarcasm, mood, and emotions all through the way you speak. It is at least twice as hard to do that through writing although many skilled writers can get close. A common form of communication in the 21st century is texting. Texting is a great tool to get quick information across, but many things can get misinterpreted over text. For instance, in the English language, there are various ways to agree with what someone said. Over text, this is mostly represented as "okay", "ok", "okk", "kk", "k" and the most feared "K". This does seem to be a generational thing but I know for the most part anyone in my generation and younger could be extremely offended by a text that just says "K". In our heads that is equivalent to someone orally yelling "okay" at you with a manor of passive aggressiveness and disgust. This is what makes the English language one of the hardest to learn and the most complex. The text message "K" is a generational cultural thing, my dad will text me just "K" all the time for convenience and I just have to know that he is not saying it as if he is angry. This concept applies to many people. 

So now that you've seen why oral communication can be so important in regular conversational settings, let's apply it to the work field. There are so many students who can get 90-100% on all of their tests and assignments. But they struggle when it comes to group projects or anything that has to do with speaking. This can be so detrimental when they finish school and enter, as they say, "the real world". The student finishes their university degree in something like business and then finds that they can't start their own business because they can't speak to people properly. So they try to get a job in the corporate world and find that their interviews are awful because they sound like a robot and then get a job low on the ladder, that they could have got without their degree. This happens a lot and that is why you see so many people not achieving their dreams. However, this situation can be stopped before it even begins. All it takes is teachers facilitating oral communication in their students and getting them out of their "shell". Of course, this isn't all on the teacher, it has to do with parents as well. But if there are shy quiet students in your class, the teacher should be doing as much as they can to get them out of their "shell". The best way to do this is by slowly introducing assignments, activities and group work that require the students to come out of their "shell". Doing this at a slow pace is key because abruptly making quiet students do a lot at once can make the problem worse and embarrass them. Therefore, scaring them even more and associating speaking as a bad thing. 

Now as good as it is to have oral communication skills there can be some pitfalls. Students need to learn how to use the power of free speech. Just a few examples of using oral communication in a bad way is by using it for hate speech or trying to sway other people into doing bad things. It can be a very powerful thing. An extreme example of this is how Hitler was able to sway people's opinions on many things by mostly using oral communication. A less extreme example of using oral communication in a bad way is by speaking too much and too often. There will usually always be that student in the classroom who talks and answers questions way too often. This causes the rest of the class to not be able to participate in the class and can be a serious problem. Therefore, you can see that there are two sides of the spectrum. Teachers have an important responsibility to promote oral communication in their students but must teach their students how to use their words responsibly. 

Writing in the 21st Century

Writing in the 21st Century

Alright, folks! This is the blog you've all been waiting for. We're going to be talking about the latest and greatest research on writing in the 21st century. Many argue, now that writing is done online and in print, we need to develop "new models of writing" and a "new curriculum" to support those models (Blake, 2019). Personally, I don't believe we need a whole new curriculum. But I do believe in the notion that we have to adapt our outdated 2006 language curriculum to meet the standards we have today... 2006 was fourteen years ago. When we look back briefly on the history of writing we see that in the 20th-century reading was the main focus for children, society was less focused on writing (Blake, 2019). This is because writing was seen as a way to give control to its users while reading was a way for children to read what adults had to say and obey them (Blake, 2019). If you look at it this way society has come a long way. You can even begin to wonder if this is why we have had such exponential growth in technology and evolution in the last couple of decades. Instead of focusing on purely writing and reading specific things adults tell you, we now focus on kids' creative writing... Or so we should. It makes sense why reading was such a heavy focus back in the day it was so adults could instill their values and obedience at a young age (Blake, 2019). In that type of society, there is no growth. This is something that goes beyond writing, you can see that the brightest ideas are coming from companies like Google. Google's main hiring process is to see how creative each candidate is. They put creativity as one of their most important qualities. Speaking of Google, in my opinion, there is something lacking from the curriculum that I believe should be an essential skill in both writing and math.

Proposition

Listen, I've done extensive theoretical and hands-on research into implementing technology into the classroom. All teachers have been focusing on so far is using technology as a teaching tool. Whereas we should be implementing technology into the curriculum by teaching how to use and do certain things. Computer programming/coding sounds very abstract to most people! That is because you never learn about it unless you make a very great effort to learn it yourself or take courses at university. Coding uses many skills from math and writing and can be implemented to solve problems in science, geography, and just about every other subject. However, if we focus on writing we can see that coding and writing are more similar than one would expect. In coding, you're writing paragraphs of carefully formatted words and numbers that all have meaning so that a computer can understand them (Atwood, Coding). While in everyday writing you're writing paragraphs of carefully chosen words so that a human can understand them. Coding involves proper grammar called syntax, spelling, structure, and so on and so forth. There are multiple languages you can code in, just like we have multiple languages as humans.

This correlation is best explained with an example:

names = ['raymond', 'rachel', 'matthew']
colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow']

n = min(len(names), len(colors))
print(n)

For a writing assignment, imagine having a student read this python code and convert/explain it in words. This is somewhat of a higher level code but any snippet of code can be explained.

Explanation:

In the first sentence, the word "names" is storing a list of names - raymond, rachel and matthew.

In the second sentence, the word "colors" is storing a list of colours - red, green, blue and yellow.

In the thirds sentence, the letter "n" is storing the result of the line of code it equals. To solve that we use the BEDMAS we learned in elementary school to determine the order of operations. We also must know that "min" means the minimum value of a set of numbers and "len" is the total amount of things in a list. So starting with the inner brackets (len(names), len(colors) we can determine that the length of "names" is 3 and the length of colors is "4".  Then that sentence would look like
n = min(3, 4). To solve that we just take the "minimum/smallest" value of those two numbers, so "n" would equal "3".

In the fourth sentence, the computer is simply going to "print" out for us the answer we found already "3". When I say print I mean it's just going to show us that the answer is 3.

Continued

Now that code was written in a language called Python. Despite how intimidating it looked at first glance, that is something a student should be able to complete by the latest Grade 7. As all they need is prior knowledge of the order of operations and some problem-solving skills. However, that type is coding is pretty ugly to kids and they're more interested in the beautiful coding games and activities many educators have created over the years. A great example is the website Tynker.

On Tynker coding is fun and you get realtime results. A big aspect of it is how visually stimulating it is. 

Writing and Social Media

I can't talk about everything on writing in this blog so I've decided I would focus on the technology side of things. Social media is an enormous aspect of students' and adults day to day lives. It incorporates everything from real-time news, politics, updates from friends, and many more aspects. The thing about social media is that it has doubled the amount that people write in a day! Through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are keeping society updated on their lives through... Writing! From what I've seen is that it cultivates precise writing through the word limit on the platform Twitter. This article I found on Yahoo also states its many other benefits!

Check them out:

- Grammar and spelling errors

- Writing too fast

- Using text language

- Lessons about sharing

- Encouraging creativity

- Expressing thoughts

(Social Media Effects, Yahoo!)

Citations

Atwood, Jeff. “Coding Horror.” Coding, https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-its-just-writing/.

“Social Media Effects on Student Writing Can Be Positive.” Yahoo!, Yahoo!, https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/social-media-effects-student-writing-positive-003059758.html.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing in the 21st Century.” National Council of Teachers of English, NCTE, 2009, http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf.