“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
What’s New? An Effective Technique to Enhance Gastronomic Services Students’ Oral Skills
Bernardo Buduen Saborit University of Granma. (Cuba) bbuduens@udg.co.cu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9932-8246
Eduardo Escalona Pardo University of Granma. (Cuba) epardo@udg.co.cu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2832-8828
Rubén Escalona Pardo
Taller Territorial Electromedicina Manzanillo ruben.escalona@nauta.cu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0191-1984
Resumen: La sociedad cubana desarrolla una Revolución Educativa para lograr una cultura general y sana entre las personas. El Sistema de Educación lleva a cabo acciones para asegurar aprendizajes con calidad a todos los ciudadanos. Es un desafío para las Ciencias de la Educación orientar el desarrollo y las transformaciones en cada institución docente a partir de la actividad docente. Por ello, este artículo centra la atención en el desarrollo de las habilidades orales de los estudiantes en inglés. Se deriva de un trabajo de investigación para obtener el título de doctor del autor principal. El problema científico radica en las insuficiencias que tienen los docentes de inglés de la especialidad de Servicios
Abstract: The Cuban society develops an Educational Revolution to achieve a general and wholesome culture among people. The System of Education carries out actions to assure learning with quality to all citizens. It is a challenge for the Sciences of Education to guide the development and transformations in each teaching institution departing from teachers´ activity. For this reason, this article centers the attention on the development of students´ oral skills in English. It is derived from a research work to get the principal author´s doctor´s degree. The scientific problem lies on the insufficiencies English teachers of the Gastronomic Services specialty in Manzanillo have, which hinder the development of oral expression to interact with
Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
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Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo
Gastronómicos en Manzanillo, que dificultan el desarrollo de la expresión oral para interactuar con los clientes durante el servicio gastronómico en su realidad objetiva. El propósito es resaltar los elementos teóricos que justifican la utilidad del "¿Qué hay de nuevo?" técnica como un recurso eficaz para desarrollar esta habilidad. La técnica, diseñada por los autores de este artículo, se aplica en la práctica pedagógica para corroborar su eficacia. Este es el mayor aporte del trabajo de investigación. Entre los métodos
clients during the gastronomic service in their objective reality. The purpose is to highlight the theoretical elements that justify the usefulness of the "What's new?" technique as an effective resource to develop this skill. The technique, designed by the authors of this article, is applied in the pedagogical practice to corroborate its effectiveness. This is the greatest contribution of the research work. Among the scientific methods used are analysis-synthesis, observation, document analysis, pedagogical test; as well as statistical methods. As a result, new ways are open for
científicos utilizados están el the participation of students in spontaneous,
análisis-síntesis, la observación, el análisis de documentos, la prueba pedagógica; así como métodos estadísticos. Como resultado, se abren nuevos caminos para la participación de los estudiantes en interacciones comunicativas espontáneas, creativas y naturales.
creative interactions.
and
natural
communicative
Palabras Clave: expresión oral, interacción comunicativa, Servicios Gastronómicos.
Keywords: oral skill, communicative interactions, technique, Gastronomy Services.
Introduction
Learning the English language in Cuba has become a priority at every level of Education. Economic globalization and technological advances are giving the possibility to exchange with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (Escalona, 2020). This situation has a strongly effect among students from the Gastronomic Service specialty because they are committed to lively interaction with people from different parts of the world who communicate in the English language while requesting a given service. For this reason, it is a necessity for each of them to develop skills, mainly in the spoken language.
Conversation consists of spoken language. According to (Pridham, 2001) in the Language of Conversation, not only do the features of spoken language differ from the features of written language, but the methods used to analyze conversation have to consider that conversation exists within a social context which determines its purpose and shapes its structure and features. Though we are largely unaware of the rules that govern conversation, we operate daily using them.
It is obvious; therefore, that learning to speak also means learning to talk. Sometimes the students do the talking in class yet they are not involved in authentic
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
conversations, many times they are not practicing in real situations or they are just repeating some monologue or even a dialogue they learned by heart.
The article Teaching Conversational Skills Intensively states that one of the biggest challenges to current language teaching methodology is to find effective ways of preparing students for spontaneous communication. As one answer to this challenge, a new type of language lesson, the conversation class, has appeared whose main teaching objective is to improve the students’ conversational skills. (Thurrell,1994)
Here are some of the students’ problems for communicating through real-time conversations:
• In using strategies for striking up a conversation.
• In using strategies for keeping a conversation going. (Students face problems when they need to make contributions so that the conversation can take place.)
• In using strategies for closing a conversation. (Most of the times, the students close the talk abruptly, thus affecting the flow of the exchange, even causing them to be impolite.)
• In using strategies for subject changing.
• In taking turns. (Sometimes the students make undesired breaks or interruptions. They do not wait until it is their time to do the talking.)
• In perceiving back-channeling and use the meanings derived from it to keep the conversation going. (Sometimes the students cannot take advantage of the possibilities face-to-face interaction provides for the participants to have immediate access to feedback.)
• In completing adjacency pairs during the interaction. (The students have problems to complete the adjacency pairs what might cause the conversation even to stop.)
• In language use. (These problems occur when the students use language in order to do the talking. The shortcomings appear basically in sound pronunciation, intonation, pause, accent, vocabulary (choice of the right words to say).
There have been different methods and approaches in foreign language teaching for example grammar-translation, direct, audio-lingual and others. They all have tried to solve students´ proficiency problems when speaking, but the one which have been more effective is the communicative approach. With it, learners are involved in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition are used, and this allows them to learn to use the language appropriately.
However, students with problems at the time of using the English language to keep a conversation going are easily found in the English as a Foreign Language classroom in the Gastronomic Service Specialty. For this reason, the problem of this
Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
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Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo
research lies in the insufficiencies of the English teachers of the Gastronomic Services specialty in Manzanillo, which hinder the development of oral expression in English to interact with clients during the gastronomic service.
In Manzanillo, due to the growing demand for both international and national tourism, this specialty finds a top place in the socioeconomic development of the territory taking into account the different forms of employment that regulate the country's labor policy, in which the polytechnic centers, particularly those of the territory, play a fundamental role in the formation of the qualified force for the progress of the services with quality, which demonstrates the social need for a technician with a broad command of skills, both in the specialty and in the foreign language.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze theoretical elements that justify the usefulness of the "What's new?" technique as an effective resource to develop the oral skill. This technique contributes to open opportunities where the students are frequently involved in spontaneous, creative, natural and fun communicative interactions.
Methods
This article is built on interviews with teachers of English to understand the way they use to develop oral expression in class. They all have several years of experience working with Gastronomic Service Students. The authors utilized the bibliographical analysis method to study the contents related to the content under analysis. They also applied the observation to corroborate the skills students acquire by using the new technique elaborated.
For the development of the research, a random sample was selected, which consisted of 62 students of the Gastronomic Services specialty in Manzanillo and 32 of them made up the sample, which represents 51.6% of the population.
Results and discussion
Trends in foreign language teaching in Cuba
According to Montano, (2008), the real objective in the history of foreign language teaching has always been communication, but the linguistic and psychological misconceptions that have existed do not allow for the creation of methodologies that efficiently meet that objective. Structural linguistics, which, coupled with one or another psychological theory, has dominated language teaching for many decades, considers language in terms of its grammatical structure, without much attention to its meaning and use. As a consequence, learners develop the
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
ability to produce grammatically correct sentences, but are unable to express their views and opinions on a given topic.
Mistakenly, the goal in many English classes is not communication, but the knowledge of an isolated grammatical structure, of its use in communicative practice. How many of the students in the classrooms use the correct form to ask for a glass of water, ask for the time or for information about an address? How many know when to speak, what to say, and how to express it properly?
Since the late 1960s, many authors insisted on this problem. Leontiev, (1982), pointed out that there was an emphasis on the formation of linguistic habits and not on the development of skills, and that there was a formal teaching with little attention to the psychological factors of communication; a situation that still prevails in the conception of many English courses.
Wilkins, (1976) states that the inefficiency in foreign language teaching is due to the fact that the courses developed in the world maintained a structural organization, where the parts of the language were taught separately to be integrated little by little in a process of gradual accumulation. As a result, students work easily with the linguistic material, but are unable to establish communication because the capacity required is not equal to the sum of its elements.
When freed from the restrictions imposed by American linguistics in the teaching of foreign languages, the communicative approach or methodology is developed and spreads throughout Great Britain and North America on the theoretical basis of a functional or communicative approach to teaching.
The development of communicative competence is the essential objective in English classes, that is, the development of the ability to use the linguistic system effectively and appropriately; the linguistic system of the foreign language is best learned through the need to communicate; the use of the mother tongue is accepted when necessary, translation can be used whenever it is beneficial for the students; communication is stimulated from the beginning, paying special and systematic attention to both the communicative functions and the structural aspects of the language.
In this article, the authors consider that the potentialities of the communicative approach in English classes in the teaching-learning process of the Gastronomic Services specialty have not been fully exploited. As a result, when students conclude their studies in Technical Education and begin to provide service in the different gastronomic facilities in the country, where they have access to customers who use English for communication, they have limitations in understanding the message delivered in the foreign language.
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Hence the importance of the "What's new?" Technique, as it is conceived within the developmental teaching-learning process that prepares students to face the social relationships they establish among themselves both in the classroom and outside it and allows them to expand their knowledge, their culture and their linguistic training.
The language of conversation. What is it characterized by?
It is stated that a conversation is an oral or written dialogue between two or more persons that alternatively take part in the exchange expressing their ideas or feelings in an unplanned way. Communication is then established using verbal language (words or linguistic signs) and non-verbal language (gestures, postures, distance, eye contact.)
Unlike the monologue, a conversation implies a dialogued interaction through which the interlocutors contribute to its construction as a text. Those contributions are made by the participants on the basis of the cooperative principle.
The conversation may be about one or many subjects, and it is conditioned by the context that surrounds the communicative situation. This context can vary easily in an informal situation and the participants can express and discuss their viewpoints.
The conversation is a way of having a relationship with persons and of getting much information concerning the diversity of feelings, thoughts, experiences that generate reflexive processes in which the senders organize their own discourse in relation with the conversational context.
It consists of natural talk, the spontaneous information exchange that is structured departing from the intention of the speaker and the proper interpretation made by the hearer within the particular communicative situation that they are involved in.
A conversation is a text. Defining the text.
In Discourse Analysis, the text is understood as the verbal record of any communicative event. (Brown and Yule, 1983)
As a result of a communicative act, a text may be defined as a relatively independent and hierarchically structured linguistic unit (macrostructure), which reflects a complex state of affairs and has a specific communicative intention. The
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
state of affairs may refer to the real world or to the world of imagination and fiction. (Glaser, Kastovsky, Szwedek and Gruyter, 1986)
According to (Roméu, 1992), the text should be seen as a communicative coherent utterance that carries a meaning…it fulfills a certain communicative function in a given context, produced with a determined communicative intention that would allow the accomplishment of definite tasks, for which the sender uses interactional procedures and chooses the most appropriate language means.
Taking into consideration the definitions of the text cited, it can be affirmed that a conversation can be understood as a text, what makes it necessary to take a look at the seven standards of textuality proposed by (de Beaugrande and Wolfgang, 1987). These authors include within the seven standards of textuality: cohesion, coherence, informativity, acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and situationality. Below there is a short reference to each of these standards.
Cohesion concerns the way in which the components of the surface text, i.e. the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence. The surface components depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and conventions, such that cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies.
Coherence refers to a set of conceptual relations under the surface text, which is similar to cohesion in the way stretches of language link each other. Cohesion refers to the surface of the text, while coherence refers to semantics or meaning of the text.
Informativity is in relation to the way new elements appear in the text. It concerns the extent to which its events are expected vs. unexpected or known vs. unknown/certain. It refers to the author’s intention to provide information through the text.
Acceptability concerns the text receiver’s attitude to evaluate whether the text is acceptable or unacceptable based on the other six attributes of textuality.
Intertextuality concerns the factors that make the use of one text dependent upon knowledge of one or more previously encountered texts. So other texts may complete or complement the interaction. In this way, intertextuality refers to the connection between the target text and the background knowledge of the audience of anotherinserted text.
Intentionality refers to the fact that people do not have the same intentions every time they speak with others (it seems to be a goal on the author’s mind). The author hopes the target audience to be satisfied with the message carried by the
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text. Intentionality refers to what a text producer plans to do and what he/ she hopes the target text receiver will accept.
Putting into practice the cooperative principle, the students make contributions to keep their conversations going, and so they consider Grice’s four conversational maxims:
● Maxim of quantity.
a. Make your contribution as informative as required.
b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
● Maxim of quality.
a. Do not say what you believe to be false.
b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
● Maxim of relation.
a. Be relevant.
● Maxim of manner.
a. Avoid obscurity of expression.
b. Avoid ambiguity.
c. Be brief.
d. Be orderly.
Situationality concerns the factors that make a text relevant to a situation of occurrence (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981): who (we do not speak with the same people every day), what (we do not speak about the same topics all the time every day), when (we do not speak in the same hours every day), where (we do not speak in the same places every day), how ( we use different words to speak with different people and also different strategies, gestures, postures, touch, etc), why (we do not speak for the same reasons every time we do it).
In addition, situationality is connected with coherence and acceptability. Some elements in the text refer to the context of situation and cannot be decoded unless reliance on situationality is made. Generally, people in different situations can get different meanings of the same text because of their different experiences. This standard of textuality can help the target audience understand the message of the text easily (Pragmatics studies the relationship between language and its users, not the meaning of the words but what the speaker means with a certain utterance). Therefore, the producer must create a text according to the circumstance or condition in a particular place and at a particular time.
In this respect, it is important to consider the context provided by the situation in which the students are interacting, in accordance with the topic of conversation. The situation is ever changing since every day the students come across different people and speak about different topics. In discourse, what people say is often in relation to what they said earlier and/or to what they are going to say later. So it can be stated that context borders not only intentionality but situationality as well.
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
While the standards coherence and cohesion are text-centered, informativity, acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and situationality are user-centered. The seven standards of textuality overlap with each other, and if a text (as a conversation) does not meet any of the ones mentioned earlier, it may be considered unacceptable.
Didactic considerations about language teaching
The teaching learning process of any subject comprises laws and principles established by didactics, a scientific discipline that groups and regulates the functioning of the mechanisms, methods and techniques that operate within this process. While laws direct the process as such, the principles control its methodological organization, thus making of it a systemic and dynamic process.
In addition, didactics takes into account psychological, pedagogical, cognitive, affective, instructive and educative aspects to better deal with the teaching learning process, which takes in a system of didactic components having each specific roles or functions within the process itself, namely, the teacher, the students, the contents, and others.
In the teaching learning process of English, these components, which are logically ruled by laws and principles, work together, establish internal relationships, and rely on each other. This makes possible to organize and structure the English lesson in a more efficient and effective way since the methodological point of view, a criterion widely analyzed and accepted by authors such as Antich, (1986), Gonzalez, (2009), Enriquez, (2004) and others.
In relation to the development of students´ speaking skill, the researchers consider important to assume the didactic principles proposed by Cuban famous expert Antich, (1986) and the ones suggested by González, (2009), which thoroughly fulfill the requirements of the teaching learning process of English. Some of those principles are the following:
The conception of teaching language as a means of communication, also known as communicability.
● The primacy of the oral language.
● The consideration of students’ mother tongue.
● The concentric distribution of the linguistic material.
● The leading character of practice.
● The consideration of the social and cultural aspects of the language.
Among these principles, this author considers communicability as the leading principle in the teaching learning process of English. It conceives the didactic organization of this process taking into account the teaching of the language based on real communicative situations closely related to students´ daily life.
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This principle mostly determines the development of students´ communicative competence, which is regarded as “the individual´s real capacity to organize the verbal activity properly according to the different communicative situations (…)”, as Zimniaya, (1989) points out. The holistic character of this competence makes it cover some other competences that really contribute to develop students´ speaking skill, namely, the linguistic, the discursive, the strategic, the sociolinguistic, and the sociocultural competences.
The development of the speaking skill in students from the Gastronomic Services Specialty represents also the development of their communicative competence, a competence that can be successfully attained through social interaction in the process of communication, in which the students can use the language system appropriately in any circumstances.
Students develop a certain skill when they can take advantage of the knowledge and operate with it to solve successfully theoretical or practical tasks. That is why the student develop skills in the course of the systematization of activities that require communication. This is achieved, for example, by transferring the linguistic content of a situation learned in class to a slightly different situation.
What does the “What’s new?” technique consist of?
“What’s new?” is a communicative activity based on face-to-face interactions and includes at least a one-to-one (student-student and/or student-teacher talk) and a small group situation (student-small group talk).
This technique could be encouraged first thing in several lessons, and could be practiced using two variants that can be used in different occasions.
Variant 1
The teacher asks student 1 (and/or other students) “What’s new?” The inquired student(s) starts to speak what new events have happened in their lives since the last time they met together in class. The teacher or student 2 will ask student 1 question derived from their talk, and other students may get involved in the interaction. Other students might be suggested to ask another classmate the question, or even the teacher, who takes part in the activity and, at the same time, is its facilitator).
Variant 2
Student 1 asks student 2 the question “What’s new?” Student 2 answers speaking about something new that happened to them since the last time they met together in class. Student 3 asks student 2 a question and the latter answers, and later asks student 4 the same question. Other students from the class may continue
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
to ask the same question to others. The students will be answering the questions derived from their talk, so that several students may get involved in the interaction.
Different questions are asked derived from the contributions of the student(s) that answer the “What’s new?” question for the first time, and those questions and their answers may be about the people the students found on their way to school or on their way back home the day before, the topics they talked about, the things that happened to them, where and when those things happened, why the events happened the way they did, how people involved in one story reacted in the different situations.
The exchange of information flows among the students, and in doing so they should take turns as a way of organizing their contributions in the talk.
The teacher guides the activity in such a way that several students are involved in the activity as much as they can every time they practice it, and that the students progressively come to interact more on their own each day.
The teacher makes sure that the contributions are as spontaneous and natural as possible, and that there is the occurrence of some informative (new) elements and adjustment to the situation in their interaction while they do the talking, using accepted utterances (due to the choice of the right words said with coherence and cohesion) to fulfill the purpose of their talk (according to their communicative intention).
In assessing the progress of the activity, the teacher will consider the quality of the interactions more important than their length.
Why “What’s new?” can become a highly effective tool to enhance the students’ oral skills. The interactive activity that is called “What’s new?” meets several theoretical specifications linguistically and pragmatically speaking, which are in accordance with its potentialities to help the students have real conversations with others.
First, conversation is characterized by features typical of the oral form of communication (sound pronunciation, intonation, pause, accent, the vocabulary used (choice of the right words to say), stylistic elements (stay in register, street talk, slang), violation of grammar rules (contractions, ellipsis). So “What’s new?” will contribute to a sufficient use of the language based on the participants’ choice of words. That choice will be madefrom the knowledge the participants have of the surrounding world and the command they have of the English languageto be involved in different situations.
There are two outstanding features that “What’s new?” presupposes for the in-person conversation. On one hand, the presence of the human voice, which is a
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determinantfactor since conversation is typically an oral act that guarantees the verbal side of communication. So voice allows capturing in real time the intonation changes, how long the pauses exactly are, the tone of the exchange (whether happy or sad, tough or nice, ironic or sarcastic), how loud the volume is, as well as attitudes like assertion or hesitation on the part of the participants.
On the other hand, the paralinguistic elements that accompany the act of communication and complement it ensure the non-verbal side of the talk through a variety of meanings interpreted from the gestures, postures, eye contact, proximity, and touch produced by the sender of a message at a certain point.
Second, “What’s new?” involves the students in talks where the standards of textuality are to be considered since they will introduce new elements in their interaction. Besides, the students use expressions that should be acceptable due to the elements of cohesion (the links that bind together the sentences) and coherence (the semantics or meaning of the text), in accordance with what the participants are talking about every time.
Teacher-student interaction and also student-student interaction can be practiced since everyone comes across different people in different places every single day, so the students are going to talk about different people and topics with different intentions in different contexts of situations, most of the times interrelating the conversation that has been started with other textual resources (may be another previous talk, or something that is being played on the radio or TV, or remarks about the weather, or facts related to a picture one is holding in his hand, or a book that one is reading and holding in his hand at the time the talk takes place). Those resources would allow the students to make more contributions to conform the whole conversation.
In short, the seven standards of textuality proposed by (Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981) are appropriate for analyzing any text types, including a conversation, that may arise from the practice of the English language teaching activity “What’s new?”, emphasizing its cohesion, coherence, informativity, acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and situationality as properties that would guarantee the effectiveness of that conversation as a text in a variety of communicative situations.
With the application of this novel technique and after the analysis of the results of all the methods applied in this research, it was corroborated that the “What’s new?” technique encouraged the use of words not as having a meaning by themselves but in relation to the context in which they are used. In other words, the emphasis was made on the relationship between the language signs used in the utterances and the meanings they have for the participants in the interaction,
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
specifically attention was given to what was said, what it is meant to say, and what the interlocutor understands from what is said.
The “What’s new?” technique also guaranteed, with the teacher’s help as a facilitator and actor, the talks to be spontaneous and natural, gradually reducing its degree of preparedness, so that the students worked more on their own each time.
“What’s new?” was a successful tool when used in the teaching of oral English to the Gastronomy Service students, either intermediate and advanced students alike, encouraging the necessary adaptations considering the use of the vocabulary with its particular meaningful units and grammatical constructions according to each level and also leading the students to interact with others depending on the conversation skills achieved by them.
To obtain the results, an initial diagnostic was applied for the English subject in the first semester of the 2021 school year. It consisted of a practical oral exercise in which students assumed roles of waiters and clients. In this diagnostic, the current state of development of the oral skills of these students for interaction with the client in English in the service was verified, and it was aimed at measuring the following indicators:
- Use of conversation starters and greetings to welcome the clients.
- Use of questions of different types to start the conversation with courtesy phrases to take and offer an order.
- Use of questions of different types to keep the conversation going and explain a menu.
- Skills to change the topic and give suggestions in the service
- Skills for verification as a reaffirmation of the service.
- Skills to use the statements that allow them to communicate with the client when presenting the bill.
- Skill to actively listen to the client during the conversation.
- Skill to end the conversation with courtesy.
Learning the skills for customer conversation during service is very difficult for students as it is very dynamic, changing and unpredictable. Conversation, that cooperative and negotiating interaction of meanings between two or more people, requires students' attention, rapid input and information processing, social interpretation of inputs which tend to confuse, understanding of the vocabulary of the language and the understanding of a language that is abstract.
In relation to the complexity of establishing a conversation with the client, those who learn the English (or other) languages commit violations of its rules on one occasion or another, such as:
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- talking too much,
- not letting the client finish what they were trying to say,
- break the order in taking turns, - speak when no one is listening, - talk about inappropriate topics,
- respond when the client tries to communicate.
On the other hand, in relation to the complexity involved in conversing with a client in English, it is necessary to consider that:
- sometimes things are said that clients do not understand,
- talk about things that customers do not know,
- students don't know what to talk about,
- the rules of the conversation change from person to person,
- the conversation sometimes includes topics that customers are not interested in,
- it is difficult for students to use sentences that allow them to stay adjusted to the register of the language they are using to communicate with the client, be it more formal or more informal and many other aspects that change or are unpredictable or difficult to interpret.
The results of the initial diagnostic test behaved as shown in the table below
Table 1
Results of the initial pedagogical test
Category Amount of students % of students
Students with 5 - -
Students with 4 4 12,5
Students with 3 9 28,1
Students with 2 19 59,4
Total of students 32 100
The evaluative categories in the diagnosis were low, as is shown in the previous table.
The efficiency of the subject was 3.7. It is significant that 87.5% of the students achieved grades between 2 and 3 points.
Considering the results of the initial diagnosis, the use of some of the most necessary activities was projected to develop oral skills for conversation with the client in the service.
ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991 Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04
“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
Among them:
- To use the initiators or greetings to welcome the client.
- To use routines that serve to start the conversation. (It includes knowing how to ask courteously to take the order).
- To get closer to the customer and interact.
- To interact with the client to give suggestions on the service
- To interact with the client in the verification and reaffirmation of the service. - To join a conversation in progress during the service.
- To maintain an active listening during the conversation with the client.
- To interact with the client by giving him the account.
- To end the conversation with the client at the end of the service.
The subject was taught for a semester with an emphasis on the systematization of the “What’s new?” technique, and it was achieved that the students were involved in its use in the practical lessons of the subject. The results after the application of the technique based on the development of oral expression in English to interact with the client in the Gastronomic service behaved as is shown in the table below.
Table 2
Results of the final pedagogical test
Category Amount of students % of students
Students with 5 4 12,5
Students with 4 20 62,5
Students with 3 8 25
Students with 2 - -
Total of students 32 100
Conclusions
The theoretical information discussed in this article leads to state several reasons that justify the usefulness of the “What’s new?” technique as an effective tool in enhancing the students’ oral skills to establish conversations with their teachers, classmates and clients in real time. This technique potentially opens paths that propitiate the students’ involvement in spontaneous, creative, natural and fun interaction on a regular basis.
Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991 https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04
Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo
The seven standards of textuality serve the analysis of the conversations that may derive from putting into practice the “What’s new?” technique that guaranteed the effectiveness bydoing the talking in a variety of situations.
The compliance with Grice’s maxims of the cooperative principle at the time of practicing the conversations during the development of the “What’s new?” technique is a great contribution in using the English language since they allow the participants in the interactions to make the most of their linguistic resources, which help them say the right words at the right moment.
The statistical results shown in the analysis of the initial and final diagnosis corroborated that the “What’s new?” technique is an effective tool to enhance the gastronomic services students’ oral skills.
The "What's new?" technique provided allowed guiding the preparation process of the teacher in the Gastronomic Services specialty, based on the intentionality of the actions, in which contents are enhanced for the development of oral skills, which are made explicit in a series of interactions between students-students and students-teachers in the classroom, strengthening the skills that allow the linguistic performance in English during the provision of services.
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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos
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Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991 https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04
ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991 Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82
https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04