2.5.3.1. Speaking
According to Ur (2002), speaking seems intuitively the most
important of all the four language skills. That is, people who know a language
are referred to as «speakers» of that language and many of most
foreign language learners are primarily interested in learning to speak.
Ur provides characteristics of a successful speaking activity
as follows:
1. Learners talk a lot. As much as possible
of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact
occupied by learner talk. This may seem obvious, but often most time is taken
up with teacher talk or pauses.
2. Participation is even: Classroom
discussion is not dominated by a minority of talkative participants: all get
chance to speak, and contributions are fairly evenly distributed
3. Motivation is high: Learners are eager to
speak: because they are interested in the topic and have something new to speak
about it, or because they want to contribute to achieving a task objective.
4. Language is of an acceptable level:
Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily
comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of language accuracy.
(op cit., p.120)
In addition to these characteristics of successful speaking,
he provides also a list of four problems related to speaking activities:
1. Inhibition
Unlike reading, writing and listening activities, speaking
requires some degree of real-time exposure to an audience. Learners are often
inhibited about trying to say things in a foreign language in the classroom:
worried about making mistakes, fearful of criticism or losing face, or simply
shy of the attention that their speech attract.
2. Nothing to say
Even if they are not inhibited, you often hear learners
complain that they cannot think of anything to say: they have no motive to
express themselves beyond the guilty feeling that they should be speaking.
3. Low or uneven participation
Only one participant can talk at a time if he or she is to be
heard, and in large group this means each one will have only very little talk
time. This problem is compounded with the tendency of dome learners to
dominate, while others speak very little or not at all.
4. Mother tongue use
In classes where all or a number of the learners share the
same mother tongue, they may tend to use it : because it is easier, because it
feels unnatural to speak to another in a foreign language, and because they
feel less «exposed» if they are speaking their mother tongue. If they
are talking in small groups it can be quite difficult to get some classes
-particularly the less disciplined or motivated ones- to keep to the target
language. (op cit., p.121)
Kennedy and Rod (1984) state some skills resulted from
speaking, namely: group discussion skills, social skills, and occupational
skills. For the discussion skills Johns and Johns (1977) cited by Kennedy and
Rod (op cit., p.114) say that non-native English learners have the following
difficulties:
a) comprehension of spoken English (`they speak too fast;
they mumble; vocabulary is idiomatic');
b) the pressing need to formulate a contribution quickly (`I
can't think what to say');
c) shyness about the value of a contribution (`I might say
something wrong');
d) inability to formulate an idea in English (`I don't know
how to say it in English')
e) awareness that a given function may be realised in various
ways (`I don't know the best way to say it'); and
f) frustration about being unable the discussion (`some
students speak too much').
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