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Lesson 4 Teaching Speaking

The document discusses teaching speaking skills to language learners. It notes that speaking involves integrating many subsystems and is an interactive process of constructing meaning. The goal of teaching speaking is communicative efficiency. Teachers can help students develop speaking skills through a balanced approach combining language input, structured output, and communicative output. Speaking involves both productive and receptive skills. Factors that influence learners' speaking abilities include their native language, age, exposure to the target language, innate phonetic ability, language ego, and motivation. The document also identifies problems learners may face, such as clustering words incorrectly, lack of redundancy, improper use of reduced forms, performance issues, and improper stress/rhythm/intonation.

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Myra Etos
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138 views5 pages

Lesson 4 Teaching Speaking

The document discusses teaching speaking skills to language learners. It notes that speaking involves integrating many subsystems and is an interactive process of constructing meaning. The goal of teaching speaking is communicative efficiency. Teachers can help students develop speaking skills through a balanced approach combining language input, structured output, and communicative output. Speaking involves both productive and receptive skills. Factors that influence learners' speaking abilities include their native language, age, exposure to the target language, innate phonetic ability, language ego, and motivation. The document also identifies problems learners may face, such as clustering words incorrectly, lack of redundancy, improper use of reduced forms, performance issues, and improper stress/rhythm/intonation.

Uploaded by

Myra Etos
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lesson 4 - Teaching Speaking

Introduction

Speech is the most basic means of communication. “Speaking in a second language


or foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding and challenging of
the four skills.” (Bailey and Savage, 1994) What specifically makes speaking in a
second language or foreign language difficult? According to Brown (1994) a number
of features of spoken language includes reduced forms such as contractors, vowel
reduction and elision; slang and idioms; stress, rhythm, and intonation. Students
who are not exposed to reduced speech will always retain their full forms and it will
become a disadvantage as a speaker of a second language.

Speaking is an activity requiring the integration of many subsystems.


According to Chaney, Speaking is “the process of building and sharing meaning
through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts.”

Speaking is an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves


producing and receiving and processing information (Brown, 1994; Burns and
Joyce:1997).

The Goal of Teaching Speaking

The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency. Learners


should be able to make themselves understood, using their current proficiency to the
fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to faulty
pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the social and cultural rules
that apply in each communication situation.

To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors


can use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured
output, and communicative output.

The Nature of Speaking

Oral communication is a two-way process between speaker and listener (or


listeners) and involves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of
understanding (or listening with understanding). Both speaker and listener have a
positive function to perform. In simple terms, the speaker has to encode the message
he wishes to convey in appropriate language, while the listener (no less actively) has
to decide (or interpret) the message.
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Different Views on Speaking in Language Teaching

A review of some views of the current issues in teaching oral communication can
help promote some perspective to the more practical considerations of designing
speaking lessons.

1. Conversational Discourse
The benchmark of successful language acquisition is almost the
demonstration of an ability to accomplish pragmatic goals through interactive
discourse with other speakers of the language.

2. Teaching Pronunciation
There has been some accuracy over the role of pronunciation work in a
communicative, interactive course of study. Because the overwhelming
majority of adult learners will never acquire an accent-free command of a
foreign language, should a language program that emphasizes whole language,
meaningful contexts, and automaticity of production focus on these tiny
phonological details of language? The answer is “yes”, but in a different way
from what was perceived to be essential; a couple of decades ago.

3. Accuracy and Fluency


An issue that pervades all of language performance centers on the
distinction between accuracy and fluency. It is clear that fluency and accuracy
are both important goals to pursue in Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT). While fluency may in many communicative language courses be an
initial goal in language teaching, accuracy is achieved to some extent by
allowing students to focus on the elements of phonology, grammar, and
discourse in their spoken output.

The fluency/accuracy issue often boils down to the extent to which our
techniques should be message oriented (or teaching language use) as opposed
to language oriented (also known as teaching language usage). Current
approaches to language teaching lean strongly toward message orientation
with language usage offering a supporting role.

4. Affective Factors
One of the major obstacles learners have to overcome in learning to
speak is the anxiety generated over the risks of blurting things out that are
wrong, stupid, or incomprehensible. Our job as teachers is to provide the kind
of warm, embracing climate that encourages students to speak, however
halting or broken their attempts may be.

5. The Interaction Effect


The greatest difficulty that learners encounter in attempts to speak is
not the multiplicity of sounds, words, phrases, and discourse forms that
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characterize any language, but rather interactive nature of most


communication. Conversations are collaborative as participants engage in a
process of negotiation of meaning. So, for the learner, the matter of what you
say things, when to speak and other discourse constraints.

David Nunan (1991) notes a further complication in interactive


discourse: what he calls the interlocutor effect, or the difficulty of speaking
task as gauged by the skills of one’s interlocutor. In other words, one learner’s
performance is always colored by that of the person (interlocutor) he or she is
talking with.

Factors that Influence Learners’ Speaking

The six factors below suggest that any learner who really wants to can learn to
pronounce English clearly and comprehensively. As the teacher, you can assist in the
process by gearing your planned and unplanned instruction toward these six factors.

1. Native Language
If the teacher is familiar with the sound system of a learner’s native
language, (s)he will be better able to diagnose student difficulties. Many L1 to
L2 carryovers can be overcome through a focused awareness and effort on the
learner’s part.

2. Age
Children under the age of puberty generally stand an excellent chance
of “sounding like a native” if they have continued exposure in authentic
contexts. Beyond the age of puberty, while adults will almost surely maintain a
“foreign accent,” there is no particular advantage attributed to age.

3. Exposure
It is difficult to define exposure. One can live in a foreign country form
some time but not take advantage of being “with the people”. Research seems
to support the notion that the quality and intensity of exposure are more
important than mere length of time.

4. Innate phonetic ability


Often referred to as having an “ear” for foreign language, some people
manifests a phonetic coding ability that others do not. In many cases, if a
person has had exposure to foreign language as a child, this “knack” is present
whether the early language is remembered or not. Others are simply more
attuned to phonetic discriminations. Strategies-based instruction, however,
has proven that some elements of learning are a matter of an awareness of
your own limitations combined with conscious focus on doing something to
compensate for those limitations.
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5. Identify language ego


Another influence is one’s attitude toward speakers of the target
language and the extent to which the language ego identifies with these
speakers. Learners need to be reminded of the importance.

6. Motivation and concern for good pronunciation


Some learners are not particularly concerned about their
pronunciation, while others are. The extent to which learners’ intrinsic
motivation propels them toward improvement will be perhaps the strongest
influence of all the six of the factors in this list. If that motivation and concern
are high, then the necessary effort will be expended in pursuit of goals.

Problems that language learners face during speaking

Douglas Brown (2000) identified factors that can make speaking difficult.

1. Clustering
Fluent speech is phrasal, not word by word. Learners can organize their
output both cognitively and physically (in breath groups) through such
clustering.

2. Redundancy
The speaker has an opportunity to make meaning clearer through the
redundancy of language. Learners can capitalize on this feature of spoken
language.

3. Reduced forms
Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc., all form of special problem in
teaching spoken English. Students who don’t learn colloquial contractions
can sometimes develop a stilled, bookish quality of speaking that in turn
stigmatize them.

4. Performance variables
One of the advantages of spoken language is that the process of thinking as
you speak allows you to manifest a certain number of performance
hesitations, pauses, backtracking, and corrections. Learners can actually
be taught how to pause and hesitate.

5. Colloquial language
Make sure your students are reasonably well acquainted with the words,
idioms, and phrases of colloquial language and those they get practice in
producing these forms.
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6. Rate of delivery
Another salient characteristic of fluency is rate of delivery. One of the
language teacher’s tasks in teaching language and those they get practice in
producing those forms.

7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation


This is the most important characteristic of English pronunciation. The
stress-timed rhythm of spoken English is to help learners achieve an
acceptable speed along with other attributes of fluency.

8. Interaction
Learning to produce waves of language in a vacuum – without
interlocutors – would rob speaking skill of its richest component: the
creativity of conversational negotiati0n.

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