teaching speaking

There was a little problem with group A, so that the post of ‘Teaching Speaking’ was late.

The speaking topics ranged from “Asking and giving suggestion” (group D), “Expressing like and dislike” (group B), and “Describing people” (group A). There was a little problem with group D’s presentation. The laptop they brought wasn’t compatible with the LCD projector. However, the teacher could handle the problem and the lesson ran well. He could manage the time well and gave reinforcement well too. Group B succeeded in triggering the students to response, because they used colorful picture as the teaching aids. Group B also used wonderful picture shown in slides. Yet, I saw that in group B the STT (Students Talking Time) was higher than TTT (Teacher Talking Time). This is not good for teaching language, especially teaching Speaking. Group A also used picture, but they used it for exercise. The weakness of group A was the teacher translated the vocabulary into Bahasa, which was not necessary.

I hope the students can learn from their friends’ presentation. I hope they can take the good points and leave the bad ones. Making mistakes is a part of learning, so that I expect that by reflecting the experience, they can teach Speaking in a meaningful and better way in the future.

Harmer said a good way to teach Speaking is by using the language (in this case, English) in the classroom as the medium of instruction and as the language used to teach the lesson (classroom language).

There are some values of using English in class as follows:

• It will give the students practice in listening and responding to spoken English
• The situations that occur in the classroom give an opportunity for real, natural English to be used
• It will give the students the feeling that English is a real language which is used for communication

There are some classroom speaking activities the teacher can use. Some of them are:

• Information gaps (exchanging information
• Guessing games (by using pictures, sentences, mime, etc)
• Surveys (by asking question and giving answer)
• Role play (by pretending to be someone else)
• Presentation and discussion

The following are Speaking test techniques that can be used by the teacher to assessed students’ speaking ability:

• Discussion/conversation
• Decision making
• Interview
• Form-filling
• Responding
• Question and answer
• Reading blank dialogue
• Picture story
• Explaining/describing
• Oral report
• Role-play
• Retelling story
• Reading aloud
• Interpreting
• Sentence completion
• Sentence correction
• Sentence transformation
• Sentence repetition

The teacher can use some of them at the same time to focus on a particular Speaking component to be measured. For example, if the teacher wants to focus on pronunciation, stress, and intonation, he/she can use reading aloud as the technique. If the teacher wants to focus on grammar and vocabulary, he/she can use sentence completion or sentence transformation.

There some components that the teacher should take into consideration when he/she assesses students’ Speaking ability. They are:

• Pronunciation
• Stress and intonation
• Fluency
• Comprehension
• Content
• Vocabulary
• Grammar

From all those components, pronunciation should be put as the first thing to be considered because mispronunciation will lead to misunderstanding. Yet, some of us have some pronunciation problems such as:

• Difficulty in pronouncing sounds which do not exist in the student’s own language; for example the sound /ð/ as in the word ‘the’
• Confusion of similar sounds; for example ‘hear’ and ‘here’
• Use of simple vowels instead of diphthongs; for example the word ‘continuous’
• Difficulty in pronouncing consonant clusters; for example the words ‘tasks’ and ‘disks’
• Tendency to give all syllables equal stress and flat intonation

Since the teacher has to correct his/her students’ pronunciation, he/she should spend some times to teach pronunciation. Some notes in teaching of pronunciation are:

• The basic steps are for the teacher to say the sound clearly in isolation (so that students can focus on it)
• If students confuse two similar sounds, it is useful to contrast them
• If students have difficulty in producing a particular sound, it is useful to describe how it is pronounced
• Writing words on the board is not necessary, and would confuse the students

The teacher can ask the students to practice certain sounds by using, for example:

• Minimal pairs:

will well

soap soup

goat got

• Completing sentence:

- A boy and a …..

- First, second, and ….

- A pigeon is a kind of ….

This week you are WONDERFUL!