Teaching speaking skills

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow"

Lawrence Clark Powell

Communication may well be seen as an art needing as much skill as practice, emotion,
creativity, thus depicting who we truly are. Though most of us have been speaking since we were
children, carefully choosing our words, organising our ideas and making them easy to follow,
captivating the audience, or pacing our speech for emphasis are the building blocks of good
communication. Every student can learn, practice and perform them. But first, they need
conscientious teachers who will show them how. That's where we, the teachers, come in.

All students can talk (sometimes we need to ask them to stop!) and , thus, teachers often
assume they don't need to offer instruction in verbal communication. Students, on the other hand,
often believe that what we teach in school has no relevance to their lives in the 'real world', and to a
large extent, they may be right. According to Palmer (2011), broadly speaking, good
communication skills may be the efficient and appropriate delivery of speech to inform, explain,
demonstrate or persuade, the organisation of speech using an introduction, body, and conclusion
with transitions and well-integrated evidence and the effective adaptation of subject, vocabulary,
and delivery to the audience and the occasion.

When it comes to teaching speaking Brown (2000) quotes Richards' two approaches: the
direct and the indirect approach. The former allows learners to engage in interaction without much
direction from the teacher, learners acquiring conversational competence peripherally, by engaging
in meaningful tasks. The latter, however, calls students' attention to conversational rules,
conventions and strategies. Features of conversations are further given, features which can receive
specific focus in classroom instruction. Thus Richards points out that teachers should incorporate in
their teaching ways of using conversation for both transactional and interactional purposes,
producing both short and long turns in conversation, as well as ways of initiating and responding to
talk in a broad range of topics, developing and maintaining talk on these topics. Maintaining
fluency in corversation through avoiding excessive pausing, breakdowns, and errors of grammar or
pronunciation, producing talk in a conversational mode, using a conversational register and syntx as
well as conversational fillers in a casual style of speaking or a neutral or more formal style are also
features which he puts emphasis on.

Teachers should also equip learners with strategies for managing turn-taking in conversation,
including taking and holding a turn as well as relinquishing a turn, strategies for opening and
closing conversations, as well as strategies for repairing trouble spots in conversation, including
communication breakdown and comprehension problems.

Not all students come equipped with an array of good language, vocabulary, grammar,
expressions, discourse and so on. That is why we should give our learners a lot of practice to
compensate for their gaps in their linguistic repertoire. In order to be able to teach speaking skills
we should also be prepared to identify the problems most learners face which Brown (2000)
enumerates.

1. Clustering: learners should be able to organise their output both congenitively and physically
through clustering

2. Redundancy: the learners should know that they can make meaning clearer through redundancy
of language

3. Reduced forms: apparently students who are unaware of colloquial contractions can sometimes
have a stilted, bookish quality of speaking that may stigmatise them

4. Performance variables: learners can actually be taught to manifest a certain number of

performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking and corrections, all features of native speakers

5. Rate of delivery: teachers should help learners achieve an acceptable speed along with other
attributes of fluency

6. Stress, rhythm and intonation: the stress-timed rhythm of spoken English and its intonation
patters convey important messages

8. Interaction: learning to produce waves of language in a vacuum-without interlocutors-would rob

speaking skills of their richest component: the creativity of conversational negotiation.

9. Adjustment of the message: the learner decides to alter the message he intends to communicate,
omitting some information and making his/her ideas simpler.

10. Paraphrasing: the student will either use a synonym or a full explanation of the concept

11. Approximation: students will use words which express the meaning as closely as possible

Brown (2000) sums up this discussion on teaching speaking enumerating some

PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGNING SPEAKING TECHNIQUES. He emphasises the need to use
techniques that cover the spectrum of learner needs, from language-based focus on accuracy
to message-based focus on interaction, meaning, and fluency, to encourage the use of
authentic language in meaningful contexts, to provide appropriate feedback and correction, to
capitalise on the natural link between speaking and listening, giving students opportunities to
initiate oral communication, nominate topics, ask questions, control conversations, change the
subject and to, most importantly, the need to provide intrinsically motivating techniques,
appealing to the students' ultimate goals and interests, to their need for knowledge, for status, for
achieving competence and autonomy, and for 'being all they can be'.

He also stresses the importance of developing speaking strategies, such as asking for
clarification, asking someone to repeat something, using fillers in order to gain time to process,
using conversation maintenance cues, getting someone's attention, using paraphrases for structures
one can't produce, appealing for assistance from the interlocutor, using formulaic expressions, using
mime and nonverbal expressions to convey meaning (275-276)

Knowing that interaction is what communication is about , that is sending messages,

receiving them, interpreting them depending on the context, negotiating meaning, then teachers
have to design interesting and meaningful activities to motivate the students so that they would
participate voluntarily in the activities. It is a fact that our students are not as competent in speaking
as they are expected to. But we cannot expect the students to leap suddenly to original and creative
communication. We have to lead them step by step. Motivation is of paramount importance because
if the students are not interested in learning, they will fail in their attempt to bridge the gap between
the manipulative and the communicative phase of language learning. However, according to
edudemic.com, learning a specific skill set doesnt have the value in todays world that it once did,
learning how to be more creative (and thus adaptable) is what prepares students for life beyond the
classroom. Teachers would perhaps say that managing to make both learning language skills and
learning to be more creative a perfect harmony is the desirable outcome. Speaking, being part of the
productive skills alongside writing, makes good use of creativity.

Cehan et al (2003) propose a number of communicative activities which enhance good,

authentic and meaningful communication. They suggest that information gap activities bring the
classroom environment closer to real life situations, stimulating the practice of specific language
items, being both involving and motivating. In these kind of activities one student possesses
information which the other student gets only in response to appropriate prompts, or they can
increase interaction as students must not only share the information but also evaluate it in order to
solve a problem. Role plays, discussions and debates are also important means through which we
can bring our classroom activities closer to real life communicative situations, adding a social
dimension to our endeavors, language being not only a functional instrument but also a form of
social behaviour.

Through activities such as communicative games, debates, prepared speeches, round

table discussions, project work, discussions on topics of interest for them, such as motion
pictures, poetry, drama students are expected to interact with each other, share ideas, support and
encourage academic achievement, and hold each others responsibility for learning. Within
cooperative learning situations, the students maximize their own and one anothers learning.
Students gather in groups to talk over the subject, to exchange facts and opinions bearing on the
matter. Each member of the group contributes facts and opinions that may help the group as a whole
to arrive at a sensible conclusion. The ability to communicate your ideas clearly and respectfully is
something that will benefit students in all areas of their life and something a lot of people grow up
never learning how to do well.

Creativity is not something one can have if they play with plasticine or legos; you can be
creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering. Because
creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value. A big part of being creative is
looking for new ways of doing things within whatever activity you're involved in. Sir Ken
Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and
human resources , believes that most original thinking comes through collaboration and through the
stimulation of other people's ideas. Even people who live on their ownlike the solitary poets or
solo inventors in their garagesdraw from the cultures they're a part of, from the influence of other
people's minds and achievements. He continues by saying that most processes benefit enormously
from collaboration. The great scientific breakthroughs have almost always come through some form
of fierce collaboration among people with common interests but with very different ways of
thinking. This, he says, should be one of the great skills we have to promote and teach
collaboration, communication, benefiting from diversity rather than promoting homegeneity.

Mastering the art of speaking is one of the most, if not, the most, important aspects of
learning a second or a foreign language and success can be seen in terms of the ability to carry out a
conversation in that language. Learners need, beside the before mentioned features of good
communication, to be equipped with the ability to articulate the sounds comprehensibly, mastery of
stress, rhythm, intonation patterns, an acceptable degree of fluency, transactional and interpersonal
skills, skills in the management of interaction, skills in negotiating meaning, conversational
listening skills, using appropriate conversational fillers, and the list can go on. Learners who are
actively engaged in attempting to communicate have solid chances of learning the new language.
Since we learn to do things by doing them, learners also learn to speak by speaking, thus our role, as
teachers, is to give our students opportunities to speak English more spontaneously and creatively.
The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply
of repeating what other generations have donemen who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.

Jean Piaget

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. Albert
Einstein

There is a difference between teaching through creativity and teaching for creativity. Good
teachers know that their role is to engage and inspire their students. This is a creative process
in itself.

Sir Ken Robinson

References

Brown, H. Douglas. 2000. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Second Edition. Pearson

Cehan, Anca et al. 2003. In-Service Distance Training Course for Teachers of English. Polirom

Harmer, Jeremy. 1991. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman

Palmer, Eric. 2011. Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students. Stenhouse Publishers

Web

Hicks, Kristen. 2015. Why Creativity in the Classroom matters more than ever. www.edudemic.com
Azzam, A. Amy. 2009. Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson. www.ascd.org