Increasing Authentic Speech in Classroom Discussions
Georgia Smyrniou

The purpose of this article is to explain the reasons why Puerto Rican college students may not be willing to participate in authentic (not rehearsed) classroom discussions in English and to suggest some discussion techniques that the author used in order to develop their English language production skills.
Introduction
Puerto Rico due to its unique association with the USA (Commonwealth) is the so called "Associate Free State” where  English is an official language along with Spanish but only 10% of the population is bilingual.  English is not necessary to survive in Puerto Rico, but Spanish is.  Students spend many years studying English and continue trying to learn English even after attending college. There may be many reasons why students do not master English. One of the main reasons is that students avoid speaking the language even though they understand it.  It is this unwillingness to speak that can create a challenge for the ESL teacher who teaches students communicatively.
Reasons Why Students Do Not Use English    
Reason One
The students will not talk because they are afraid that other students or the instructor may judge their English.  Losing face publicly seems to be one of the most difficult situations they can find themselves in during class. Students prefer silence even if the teacher makes it clear that oral participation is graded.
Reason Two
The English classes, though obligatory, are not part of the students’ main concentration. This happens to 90% of the student population.  Thus, there is not much motivation for performing well in English, let alone for discussion participation where critical thinking in English is involved.
Reason Three
Students are not motivated to participate because they are not interested in the same the subjects that North American undergraduates are interested in. Because of this, they do not look for information to prepare themselves to participate in discussions.
Techniques Working as Solutions
1. Checking the Culture
I will start with the third reason because it seemed to be easier than the other two to overcome.  In order to understand what students like to talk about I started observing the culture, particularly watching the types of materials the media were employing to promote their publications or broadcasts. I detected five main social categories, which Puerto Rican people liked to discuss, and tried them in class.  The categories were:
Religion
Politics (particularly the issue of Puerto Rican statehood)
The war of the sexes
Family
Traditional Latin American art expressions (music, dance and singing)
In addition, from the students’ culture I found that they like:
Special types of cartoons and
Science fiction.
The topics were announced a week ahead so that the students would have the opportunity to prepare. Students started relating to the topics and thus participated without having to be prodded. Although it was true that the participation was getting better and the students started talking to each other (student centered discussion), many students were not gathering information to prepare them to contribute to the discussion. Though they wanted to participate, their personal opinions were not well thought out and not based on facts.
2. Using Search Engines
Knowing that the students like to use computers to play games, I showed them how to use search engines to find information on the Web and copy it to a floppy disk and at the same time keep a window open with a game they wanted to play. If they got tired of reading the information, they could go back to the game and later continue to read the information again. The rule was that they would have to find at least two web sites with information before the class time finished and email me the URLs. A particular day of the week was dedicated to using the computer lab and doing their searches. Eventually, the searches took more time and the game pages remained idle for most of the class time. There were some students who preferred to check email and play without searching. Through the lab’s network I could locate these students and send a notice to their screens. If this behavior were repeated during the class time, I would blank out their screens.  Blanking out of the screens a second time meant the student would be counted absent that day.
3. Reviewing the Information
The next step was to have students read the information they found.  I would explain that a maximum of a two-page review had to be submitted regarding the information they found on the Internet, written in their own words.  The pages had to be submitted before the day on which the discussion would be held. The URLs were included on the pages so that I could check them and compare them with the reviews that they had submitted.
4. Finding Arguments Based On the Reviews
On the day of the discussion, I would return the information, I would split them into groups and I would give the students up to15 minutes to find arguments in favor and against the particular topic based on the reviews they had prepared.  After the students had created the arguments, I would once more gather the review papers so that they would not be read during the discussion. If anybody exceeded 15 minutes for arguments, a strike would go against his