Teaching Speaking Skills in the classroom
Teaching speaking is also the most essential for teaching language classroom. Speaking can be defined as the production of utterances. We speak our desires, feelings, ideas, opinions, like, dislike and to make good relationship with the friends, relatives and people around. Teaching speaking consists of pronunciation, stress, intonation, juncture and rhythm.
The language learners have to learn speaking skills to provide feedback, get knowledge, motivate themselves, provide coherence opportunities and to make students able to produce the language automatically.
Components of Speaking
1) Pronunciation
- Pronunciation is the way of producing particular sound or word in a particular way.
- It deals with the phonological process that refers to the components of grammar made up of the elements and principles that determines how sounds vary and pattern in a language.
- There are two features of pronunciation, they are phonemes and supra segmental features.
2) Stress
- Stress is relative emphasis and prominence.
- The stress placed on the syllable within word is called word stress and lexical stress.
3) Intonation
- The entire variation of pitch while speaking is called intonation.
- It deals with the stress of words.
STAGES OF TEACHING SPEAKING
a) Early Stage
- This is presentation stage
- Students learn general language functions as requesting, greeting, taking leave etc.
- Students understand the meaning, forms, functions and the degree of formality of the language.
- To provide focus on the accuracy of the new language item.
- Pay attention to pronunciation, stress, intonation, fluency etc.
- Help teacher to creating a relevant context.
- Elicitation of the new language items.
- Presentation of the model/sentences.
- Helps teacher to check the student's understanding.
b) Controlled Conversation stage
- This stage is called practice stage because the students practice speaking or remain busy in constant speech activity.
- Students lean the structure and vocabulary.
- Teacher can use different kind of drills as below:-
|
1)
Mechanical Drills |
|
|
Repetition Drills As, Teacher : Gita is reading English. Student : Gita
is reading English.
In the above two sentences student repeat the sentences
stated by the teacher. |
Substitution Drills As, Teacher : Sangam is playing with me. Student : Sangam
is playing with me. Teacher :
writing Student :
Sangam is writing with me. In the above sentences student make the sentence
according the teacher's structure. |
|
2)
Meaningful Drills |
|
v
It removes the weakness of mechanical drills. v
The students control the conversation themselves
and talk to each other. v
The students understand the situation and use relevant
structure to complete the activity. For example;
Teacher : I am not feeling well
today. Gita : You should go to the
hospital. Sita : If I were you, I would
take rest. Hari : You'd better go to the
home. Here, different students give their own opinion. In this stage teacher should give the situation and students make their own ideas or opinions. |
|
3)
Discourse Chain |
|
|
v Teacher
should give the students enough opportunities to express their ideas, opinions, views etc v Teacher gives
the students a situation and student makes their own ideas or opinions about
that. |
|
c) Free Conversation Stage
- This is a stage of production
- The learners should perform independently.
- The teacher plays the supervisor role and closely observe learners activities.
- Teacher can provide real life situations to make the conversation.
- The main aims of this stage is to make the learners fluent speakers in relevant to the context.
- The teacher creates the situations in the classroom and ask students to express their view freely.
- The students involve in pair work or group work.
- Finally teacher provide the feedback.
-Communicative Activities for Teaching Speaking
- Drills
- Role play / Simulation / play drama
- Discourse chain
- Debate
- Story telling
- Information gap activities
- Pair / group discussion
- Prepare speech
- Describing pictures/charts/poster
- Recitation
- Teacher told the students to recite a series of things loudly.