CHAPTER III

JOURNAL
THE REPORT OF ARTICLES IN TEACHING AND
LEARNING SPEAKING

Developing Classroom Speaking Activities;

From Theory to Practice
Jack C Richards

The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second or foreign
language learners. Learners consequently often evaluate their success in language
learning as well as the effectiveness of their English course on the basis of how well they
feel they have improved in their spoken language proficiency. Oral skills have hardly
been neglected in EFL/ESL courses (witness the huge number of conversation and other
speaking course books in the market) though how best to approach the teaching of oral
skills has long been the focus of methodological debate. Teachers and textbooks make
use of a variety of approaches, ranging from direct approaches focusing on specific
features of oral interaction (e.g. turn-taking, topic management, questioning strategies )
to indirect approaches which create conditions for oral interaction through group work,
task work and other strategies (Richards 1990).

Advances in discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and corpus analysis in

recent years have revealed a great deal about the nature of spoken discourse and how it
differs from written discourse (McCarthy and Carter 1997). These differences reflect the
different purposes for which spoken and written language are used. Jones (1996,12)
comments:
In speaking and listening we tend to be getting something done, exploring ideas,
working out some aspect of the world, or simply being together. In writing we
may be creating a record, committing events or moments to paper.

Research has also thrown considerable light on the complexity of spoken

interaction in either a first or second language. Luoma (2004) for example, cites some of
the following features of spoken discourse:
➢ Composed of idea units (conjoined short phrases and clauses)
➢ May be planned (e.g. a lecture) or unplanned (e.g. a conversation)

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 ➢ Employs more vague or generic words than written language
➢ Employs fixed phrases, fillers and hesitation markers
➢ Contains slips and errors reflecting on-line processing
➢ Involved reciprocity (i.e. interactions are jointly constructed)
➢ Shows variation (e.g. between formal and casual speech), reflecting
speaker roles, speaking purpose, and the context

In designing speaking activities or instructional materials for second or foreign

language teaching it is also necessary to recognize the very different functions speaking
performs in daily communication and the different purposes for which our students need
speaking skills.

Functions of speaking
Numerous attempts have been made to classify the functions of speaking in
human interaction. Brown and Yule (1983) made a useful distinction between the
interactional functions of speaking (in which it serves to establish and maintain social
relations), and the transactional functions (which focus on the exchange of information).
In workshops with teachers and in designing my own materials I use an expanded three
part version of Brown and Yule’s framework (after Jones 1996 and Burns 1998): talk as
interaction: talk as transaction: talk as performance. Each of these speech activities are
quite distinct in terms of form and function and require different teaching approaches.

1. Talk as interaction
This refers to what we normally mean by “conversation” and describes interaction
which serves a primarily social function. When people meet, they exchange greetings,
engage in small talk and chit chat, recount recent experiences and so on because they
wish to be friendly and to establish a comfortable zone of interaction with others. The
focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to present themselves to each other
than on the message. Such exchanges may be either casual or more formal depending
on the circumstances and their nature has been well described by Brown and Yule
(1983). The main features of talk as interaction can be summarized as follows:
• Has a primarily social function
• Reflects role relationships
• Reflects speaker’s identity
• May be formal or casual

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 • Uses conversational conventions
• Reflect degrees of politeness
• Employs many generic words
• Uses conversational register
• Is jointly constructed

Some of the skills involved in using talk as interaction are:

• Opening and closing conversations
• Choosing topics
• Making small-talk
• Recounting personal incidents and experiences
• Turn-taking
• Using adjacency-pairs
• Interrupting
• Reacting to others
Examples of these kinds of talk are:
Chatting to an adjacent passenger during a plane flight (polite conversation that does not
seek to develop the basis for future social contact)
Chatting to a school friend over coffee (casual conversation that serves to mark an
ongoing friendship).
A student chatting to his or her professor while waiting for an elevator (polite
conversation that reflects unequal power between the two participants)
Telling a friend about an amusing weekend experience, and hearing her or him recount a
similar experience he or she once had (sharing personal recounts)

Mastering the art of talk as interaction is difficult and may not be a priority for all
learners. However students who do need such skills and find them lacking report that
they sometimes feel awkward and at a loss for words when they find themselves in
situation that requires talk for interaction. They feel difficulty in presenting a good image
of themselves and sometimes avoid situations which call for this kind of talk. This can be
a disadvantage for some learners where the ability to use talk for conversation can be
important.
2. Talk as transaction
This type of talk refers to situations where the focus is on what is said or done.
The message is the central focus here and making oneself understood clearly and

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accurately, rather than the participants and how they interact socially with each other. In
transactions,

…. talk is associated with other activities. For example, students may be engaged in
hand-on activities [e.g. in a science lesson] to explore concepts associated with
floating and sinking. In this type of spoken language students and teachers usually
focus on meaning or on talking their way to understanding. Jones 1996, 14

Burns distinguishes between two different types of talk as transaction. One is

situations where the focus is on giving and receiving information and where the
participants focus primarily on what is said or achieved (e.g. asking someone for the
time). Accuracy may not be a priority as long as information is successfully
communicated or understood.

The second type are transactions which focus on obtaining goods or services,
such as checking into a hotel.

Examples of these kinds of talk are:

Classroom group discussions and problem solving activities.

A class activity during which students design a poster.
Discussing needed repairs to a computer with a technician.
Discussing sightseeing plans with a hotel clerk or tour guide
Making a telephone call to obtain flight information .
Asking someone for directions on the street.
Buying something in a shop Ordering food from a menu in a restaurant.

The main features of talk as transaction are:

• It has a primarily information focus
• The main focus is the message and not the participants
• Participants employ communication strategies to make themselves
understood
• There may be frequent questions, repetitions, and comprehension checks
• There may be negotiation and digression
• Linguistic accuracy is not always important
Some of the skills involved in using talk for transactions are:
• Explaining a need or intention

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 • Describing something
• Asking questioning
• Confirming information
• Justifying an opinion
• Making suggestions
• Clarifying understanding
• Making comparisons
• Agreeing and disagreeing

3. Talk as performance
The third type of talk which can usefully be distinguished has been called talk as
performance. This refers to public talk, that is, talk which transmits information before
an audience such as morning talks, public announcements, and speeches.
Spoken texts of this kind according to Jones (1996,14),

…often have identifiable generic structures and the language used is more
predictable.
…Because of less contextual support, the speaker must include all necessary
information in the text – hence the importance of topic as well as textual knowledge.
And while meaning is still important, there will be more emphasis on form and
accuracy.

Talk as performance tends to be in the form of monolog rather than dialog, often
follows a recognizable format (e.g. a speech of welcome) and is closer to written
language than conversational language. Similarly it is often evaluated according to its
effectiveness or impact on the listener, something which is unlikely to happen with talk
as interaction or transaction. Examples of talk as performance are:

Giving a class report about a school trip

Conducting a class debate
Giving a speech of welcome
Making a sales presentation
Giving a lecture

The main features of talk as performance are:

• There is a focus on both message and audience

• It reflects organization and sequencing

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 • Form and accuracy is important
• Language is more like written language
• It is often monologic

Some of the skills involved in using talk as performance are:

• Using an appropriate format
• Presenting information in an appropriate sequence
• Maintaining audience engagement
• Using correct pronunciation and grammar
• Creating an effect on the audience
• Using appropriate vocabulary
• Using appropriate opening and closing
Teachers sometimes describe interesting differences between how learners manage
these three different kinds of talk, as the following anecdotes illustrate.

I sometimes find with my students at a university in Hong Kong, that they are good at
talk as transaction and performance but not with talk as interaction. For example the
other day one of my students did an excellent class presentation in a course for
computer science majors, and described very effectively a new piece of computer
software. However a few days later when I met the same student going home on the
subway and tried to engage her in social chat, she was at a complete loss for words.

Another teacher describes a second language user with just the opposite difficulties.
He is more comfortable with talk as interaction than as performance.

One of my colleagues in my university in China is quite comfortable using talk socially. If

we have lunch together with other native speakers he is quite comfortable joking and
chatting in English. However recently we did a presentation together at a conference and
his performance was very different. His pronunciation became much more “Chinese” and
he made quite a few grammatical and other errors that I hadn’t heard him make before.

Implications for teaching

Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an oral
English course. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the course will
focus on. Is it all three of the genres described above or will some receive greater
attention than others. Informal needs analysis is the starting point here. Procedures for
determining needs include observation of learners carrying out different kinds of
communicative tasks, questionnaires, interviews, and diagnostic testing (e.g. Tsang and

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Wong 2002). The second issues is identifying teaching strategies to “teach” (i.e. provide
opportunities for learners to acquire) each kind of talk.
Talk as interaction is perhaps the most difficult skill to teach since interactional
talk is a very complex as well as subtle phenomena that takes place under the control of
“unspoken” rules. In my experience these are best taught thought providing examples
embedded in naturalistic dialogs that can serve to model features such as opening and
closing conversations, making small talk, recounting personal incidents and experiences,
and reacting to what others say. For example to practice reacting to what others say,
students can be given a dialog in which listener reactions such as “really”, “is that right”,
“wow”, “that’s interesting” have been omitted. Students work in pairs to add them to the
dialog, practice the dialog with the reactions, then practice a different dialog, this time
adding their own reactions. Another technique to practice using conversation starters
and personal recounts involves giving conversation starters which students have to
respond to by asking one or two follow-up questions. For example, “I didn’t sleep very
well last night”. “Look what I bought on Sunday. How do you like it?” “Did that
thunderstorm last night wake you?”.
Talk as transaction is more easily planned since current communicative materials
are a rich resource of group activities, information-gap activities and role plays that can
provide a source for practicing how to use talk for sharing and obtaining information as
well as for carrying out real-world transactions. These activities include ranking activities,
values clarification activities, brainstorming, and simulations. Group discussion activities
can be initiated by having students work in groups to prepare a short list of controversial
statements for others to think about. Groups exchange statements and discuss them. For
example: “Schools should do away with exams”. “Vegetarianism is the only healthy life
style”. “The Olympic games are a waste of money.” Role-play activities are another
familiar technique for practicing real world transactions and typically involve the
following sequence of activities:
• Preparing: reviewing vocabulary, real world knowledge related to the content
and context of the role play (e.g. returning a faulty item to a store)
• Modeling and eliciting: demonstrating the stages that are typically involved in
the transaction, eliciting suggestions for how each stage can be carried out, and
teaching the functional language need for each stage
• Practicing and reviewing: students are assigned roles and practice a role play
using cue cards or realia to provide language and other support

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Teaching talk as performance requires a different teaching strategy. Jones (1996,
17) comments:
Initially talk as performance needs to be prepared for and scaffolded in much the
same way as written text, and many of the teaching strategies used to make
understandings of written text accessible can be applied to the formal uses of
spoken language

This involves providing examples or models of speeches, oral presentations, stories etc
through video or audio recordings or written examples. These are then analyzed or
“deconstructed” in order to understand how such texts work and what their linguistic and
other organizational features are. Questions such as the following guide this process:
• What is the speaker’s purpose?
• Who is the audience?
• What kind of information does the audience expect?
• How does the talk begin, develop, and end? What moves or stages are involved?
• Is any special language used?
Students then work jointly on planning their own texts, which are then presented to the
class.
The third issue involved in planning speaking activities is determining the
expected level of performance on a speaking task and the criteria that will be used to
assess student performance. For any activity we use in class, whether it be one that
seeks to develop proficiency in using talk as interaction, transaction, or performance, we
need to consider what successful completion of the activity involves. Is accuracy of
pronunciation and grammar important? Is each participant expected to speak for about
the same amount of time? Is it acceptable if a speaker uses many long pauses and
repetitions? If a speaker’s contribution to a discussion is off topic, does it matter?
As the above questions illustrate, the type of criteria we use to assess a speaker’s
oral performance during a classroom activity will depend on what kind of talk we are
talking about and the kind of classroom activity we are using. Green, Christopher and
Lam (2002, 228) in a report on teaching discussion skills recommend assigning one
student to serve as an observer during a discussion activity using the following
observation form:
Number of contributions
Students: A B C D E F
1. Total number of contributions made
2. Responding supportively
3. Responding aggressively

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 4. Introducing a new (relevant) point
5. Digressing from the topic
A speaking activity that requires talk as performance, e.g. a mini-lecture, would require
very different assessment criteria however. These might include:
• Clarity of presentation: i.e. the extent to which the speaker organizes
information in an easily comprehensible order
• Use of discourse markers, repetition and stress to emphasize important points
and to make the lecture structure more salient to the listeners
Different speaking activities such as conversations, group discussions, and
speeches make different types of demands on learners. They require different kinds and
levels of preparation and support and different criteria obviously have to be used in
assessing how well students carry them out.

Conclusion
I will conclude with a set of questions I use to guide myself when preparing speaking
activities for the classroom or in textbooks and which I use with teachers in workshops
which focus on developing and reviewing classroom materials.
• What will the focus of the activity be: talk as interaction, transaction or performance?
• How will the activity be modeled?
• What stages will the activity be divided into?
• What language support will be needed?
• What resources will be needed?
• What learning arrangements will be needed?
• What level of performance is expected?
• How and when will feedback be given?

Comment:
This article explains to us that according to its function, speaking is
divided into three categories, namely: talk as interaction, talk as transaction, and
talk as performance. This classification of speaking seems to be important to prepare
speaking class for the learner. As a teacher, we have to determine what kind of talk the
learners are expected to do and what criteria should be applied to assess the learners’
speaking ability. It is a good guideline for teaching and measure the speaking class.

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 HOW TO TEACH SPEAKING
www.univirtual.it/corsi/2002_2003/bertin/download/M03.pdf

Outside the context of any classroom, all children who are repeatedly
exposed to language, in normal circumstances will learn it unconsciously.
Most adults can learn a language without studying it. Though they may
have more trouble with pronunciation and grammar than younger
learners, they may still be able to communicate fluently. Children and
adults who learn language successfully outside a classroom context seem
to share certain similarities. First of all, they are usually exposed to
language which they more or less understand even if, sometimes, they
can't produce the same language spontaneously themselves. Secondly,
they are motivated to learn the language in order to be able to
communicate. And communication is mainly an oral business. And finally
they have opportunities to use the language they are learning, thus
checking their own progress and abilities.

All these features of natural language acquisition can be difficult to

replicate in the classroom, but there are elements which are no doubt
worth imitating. Obviously enough within the classroom environment
students don't get the same kind of exposure as those who are "picking
up" the language. But we should try to work on motivation, language
exposure, maximized talking time and we should offer chances to use the
language. This module will deal with communicative (or conversational)
skills, that is those skills a speaker must possess when he or she wants to
communicate something orally.

Communicative (conversational) skills

When we think about speaking, we mean when the students use any and
all the language at their command to perform some kind of oral task. The
important thing is that there should be a task to complete and that the
students should want to complete it. The reasons why it is a good idea to
give students speaking tasks which provoke them to use all and any
language at their command are mainly three:

1) Rehearsal: when students have free discussions or conversations

inside the classroom they have a chance to rehearse having

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 discussions or conversations outside the classroom. Simply enough,
when they meet a new friend from abroad the first conversation will
be about introducing oneself, one's own family etc. Having them
take part in a role-play at the lost property office allows them to
rehearse such a real-life event in the safety of the classroom. It is a
way for students to "get the feel" of what communicating in the
foreign language really feels like.
2) Feedback: engagement in a speaking task which demands for the
use of all and any language at the students' command provides
feedback for both teacher and students.
3) Engagement: completing a speaking task can be really motivating
and give real satisfaction. Many speaking tasks (role-play,
discussions, debate, problem-solving etc.) are intrinsically enjoyable
in themselves and if planned carefully (by the teacher) and
completed successfully (by the students) contribute to increasing
their self-esteem.

What is conversation?
Teachers often tend to assume that conversation in the language
classroom involves nothing more than putting into practice the grammar
and vocabulary skills taught elsewhere in the course. But if we want to
teach conversation well, we need to know something about what native
speakers do when they have conversations. We have chosen to deal with
conversation here, because conversation is what normally occurs in
everyday life, in the contacts students will have with foreign friends or
foreign people in general. With the term "conversation" we refer to a
spoken interaction between two or more people who don't follow a fixed
schedule. The purposes of conversation include the exchange of
information, the creation and maintenance of social relationships, the
negotiation of status and social roles as well as deciding on joint actions.

The basic unit of a conversation is an exchange. An exchange consists of

two moves (an initiating move and a response):
A. Would you like a cup of coffee?
B. Yes, please.

We can give a function to each move. In the case above we have offering
(A) and accepting (B). To do so we need to take account of factors such as
who the speakers are and where and when the conversation occurs.

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An exchange or a series of exchanges are not necessarily the same thing
as a conversation:
A. Excuse me?
B. Yes?
A. How do I get to the railway station from here?
B. Go straight on, then take the first turning on the right. The railway
station is at the end of the street.
.. Can you think of other examples of this kind?
The one above is not a conversation because the two speakers want to
finish their business as
quickly as possible; on the other hand, conversation is open-ended and
has the potential to develop in any way. It is possible that the example
above could contain a conversation if B enquired about A's nationality and
A told him the reason why he wanted to reach the station. The potential is
always there in real life. Unfortunately, many students never have the
confidence or opportunity to go beyond simple exchanges like the one
above, so one of the main aim when teaching speaking skills is to propose
exercises and activities which allow
students to develop the ability to initiate and sustain conversation.

Conversation is such a natural part of our lives that many people are not
conscious of what happens within it. However, conversation follows certain
rules which can be described. During a conversation:
- usually one person speaks at a time;
- the speakers change;
- the length of any contribution varies;
- there are techniques for allowing the other party or parties to speak;
- neither the content nor the amount of what we say is specified in
advance.

The two moves in an exchange are related to each other when the second
utterance can be identified as related to the first. These are called
adjacency pairs. Some examples are:
A. Hello!
B. Hi! (greeting-greeting)
A. Are you OK?
B. Yes.

In some cases we can predict the second part of a pair from the first as in
the first example. In other cases there might be a variety of options. ..

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Let's take a complaint. What are the different parts which might follow a
complaint?
.. Here are some adjacency pairs where the second part is missing. Can
you complete them?
.. What nationality are you?
.. …………………………
.. Would you like something to drink?
.. ……………………………………
.. Remember to record the film on Channel 5 for me this evening.
.. …………………………………………………………………..
.. My head aches.
.. ……………….

We need to think about ways of developing appropriate second parts to

adjacency pairs from the start. For example many drills require students
to reply to yes/no questions with "yes" or "no" plus a repetition of the
auxiliary. We therefore get exchanges like this one:
A. Has Sandra arrived?
B. No, she hasn't.
What students do not often get are opportunities to practise other options,
such as:
A. Has Sandra arrived?
B. There has been an accident on the motorway. She has just called to say
she's stuck up.
Another reason why students usually appear flat and unresponsive in
conversation is the tendency to encourage them to produce isolated
sentences containing a target structure, e.g.

If I won the lottery I'd travel around the world.

We all should keep in mind that a minimal answer does nothing to drive
the conversation
forward.

Many students have great difficulty in getting into a conversation, in

knowing when to give up
their turn to others, and in bringing a conversation to a close. In order for
conversation to work smoothly, all participants have to be alert to signals
that a speaker is about to finish his or her turn and be able to come in with
a contribution which fits the direction in which the conversation is moving.

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We need to train students to sense when someone is about to finish.
Falling intonation is often a signal for this.

Besides, students often lose their turn because they hesitate in order to
find the right word. Teaching them expressions like Wait, there's more or
That's not all as well as fillers or hesitation devices such as Erm…, Well…,
etc will help them to keep going.

As regards topics, we must keep in mind that different cultures talk about
different things in their everyday lives. Native speakers are very aware of
what they should and should not talk about with specific categories of
people in their own language. That is why both teachers and students
need to develop a sense of taboo subjects if they are to avoid offence.
.. Can you think of any taboo subject for English people?
Simplification in informal speech
.. Have you ever met a person who pronounces the individual
sounds and words of English beautifully but who still sounds very foreign?
What's the reason, in your opinion?
In English the sound quality of a word, particularly the vowels and certain
consonants, changes depending on whether the word is said in isolation or
as a part of a continuous stream of words. Some of this is a result of
simplification of informal speech owing to the fact that English is a stress-
timed language. This means that between two stressed syllables there is
the same interval of time.
Let's take two sentences:
1. I caught a bus.
2. It's a bus I caught.
.. Do they contain the same number of words or syllables?
.. What do they have in common?
The two sentences are the same length when spoken because they
contain the same number of stressed syllables (two each). This means
that the unstressed syllables have to be squeezed in. The vowels
belonging to unstressed syllables very often become the weak vowel
represented by the symbol [.]. The weak vowel or "schwa" is the most
common sound in spoken English.

Another peculiarity of spoken English is elision, that is the "missing out" of

a consonant or vowel or even both.

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If you give each part of a word the same value (as it normally happens in
Italian), this can have a wearying effect on the native speaker listener.
This was particularly true with Trinity Exams last year. Students who were
very accurate and whose vocabulary was rich but who spoke, I would say,
flatly, got lower marks than students who were far less accurate but were
able to reproduce the stress-timed pattern typical of the English language.
This shows that it is worth pointing out weak forms from the start for
recognition and production.
Planning communicative activities
Many students repeatedly say that their main purpose in learning English
is to be able to speak. Nevertheless, most of them don't talk readily in
class and the "discussion lessons" in which the teacher does most of the
talking are still too prevalent.
.. Pause and consider: when you were a student, did you take part in
any lesson which dealt
with discussing a specific issue? Did you talk a lot? Who talked the
most?
.. As a teacher, have you ever favoured discussion in class
(obviously using L2)? Were your
lessons successful or were you not satisfied with them? In either
case which were the
issues you discussed?
If you find that lessons where discussion took place were not successful as
the teacher did most of the talking, consider if the students were prepared
for the discussion or fluency activity. Preparation is a vital ingredient for
success. Students need to be orientated to the topic. You just can't enter
the classroom and say: Today we are going to talk about ethnic cleansing
through the centuries (the issue may be relevant to a fifth-year class,
though).
.. Empathise with your students: if you were one of them, how would
you feel? Why would
you rather sit quietly in the back row hoping your teacher takes no
notice of you than
engage in a passionate attack against ethnic cleansing?
Some simple techniques which can be used to prepare students for a
particular topic are the
following:
- the use of audio/visual aids to arouse interest;

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- a general orientation to the topic: a short text, questionnaire, a video
extract. (This pre-speaking task must never be too long but it is
recommended);
- exercises focusing on key words needed for a task.

Students may need to be orientated to the task. The general rule is to

formulate tasks in terms students can understand and make sure that the
instructions are clear.
.. Record yourself while you are giving instructions for a speaking
activity. Listen. Were the
instructions clear? How would you modify them?
One possible paradigm for instruction-giving is as follows:
- Think through instructions from the point of view of the student.
- Include only the essential information in simple, clear language.
- Insist on silence and make sure you can be seen. Make eye-contact.
- Use demonstration and gestures where possible to go with your
explanation.
- Make sure the students have understood what to do. Do this by asking
for a demonstration
or for an answer to a question which proves understanding. A yes/no
answer to a question
like Do you understand? Are you with me? is not particularly revealing.

Gower and Walters1 state that "the way you give instructions indicates
the way you exercise
control and your attitude to the group… Generally students (…) would not
appreciate you trying to be more polite. It would be time-wasting and slow
things down and would involve you in more complicated language than
they can readily understand".
.. What is your view?

What has been said so far as regards instructions concerns all the other
skills we are going to
deal with in the following modules.
Last but not least is the choice of the topic to discuss. Students are
sometimes not
motivated to talk because they lack involvement in the topic. However,
even where students admit interest, they may be unwilling to talk about it
in English because they lack the linguistic resources. It is a good idea to
talk about things which are within the students' experience or which they

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think they might influence their future lives or attitudes. I am thinking of
the terrorist attacks to the U.S. last year: the students were motivated and
involved to speak about what had happened because they felt it was
something that was linked to their hopes and fears for the future.

One idea to help students go is finding the topic to discuss but instead of
discussing it under a general perspective, you could try setting a specific
related problem. Let's take, for example, the new war the American
President would willingly wage against Iraq. You could divide the class into
two groups, one in favour of a military response to overthrow Iraqi
dictator, Saddam Hussein, the other more careful and prone to turn to
diplomacy and intelligence instead. Give them some articles with different
viewpoints and the results of the poll conducted among Americans and tell
them they must decide (and agree) on how to cope with this crucial issue:
going to war or relying on intelligence and diplomacy?

When dealing with speaking activities, it is important to ensure that

the students develop a sense that they are making progress. Often
students do not realise just how much more confident and fluent they are
becoming. One reason may be that they may rarely get the opportunity to
take a leading role in conversation; it is well worth trying, then, to
programme activities and pair work in which brilliant students have to
sustain a conversation with those at lower level, in order to give them the
experience of being the driving force in a conversation.
This is particularly important in view of the consolidation of self-esteem,
which we must never forget when dealing with teenagers.

Getting students to compare their current efforts with recordings

made in the earliest stages of the course is another way of boosting
confidence.

In many cases students will have external objectives such as the

oral examinations run by organisations such as Cambridge Local
Examinations Syndicate and Trinity College. It is therefore useful to show
the extent to which students are making progress towards their
examination objective by including an element of exam practice in the
programme. This is a possible approach to how this can be set up:
• make your students fully aware of what a satisfactory performance
in the examination involves. For example, show them a film of a

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 Trinity exam interview, commenting on the mastery of language but
also on fluency and on the examiner's gestures and fillers;
 an identification of areas which are critical for a good performance
in the exam might then be followed by controlled practice of exam-
type tasks;
 you should also give your students practice in exam conditions.
Feedback from these tasks is particularly valuable in that it fosters
self-evaluation and improvement.
-

Towards communicative competence

According to William Littlewood2 there is a continuum of classroom

activities to promote
communicative competence:

Step 1: Controlled activities

Although conversational competence can only come from fluency
activities or natural language
interaction outside the classroom, there is an argument for the use of
controlled activities
which help students develop confidence as well as the ability to
participate in and maintain
simple conversations.
.. Remember your first English lessons. What kind of student were
you? Were you always
ready to raise your hand to be invited to speak in the foreign
language or did you hope the
teacher didn't see you?

28
Many students have to overcome a psychological barrier before they are
prepared to speak in the foreign language. Some students feel uneasy
when they have to speak in the classroom situation because there is
always an audience, others contribute in the sheltered environment of the
classroom but are at a loss when they have to use the language outside. A
few prefer not to speak at all and are then denied opportunities for
practice.
Within the classroom a major source of threat against speaking is the
individual's perception of himself/herself and the other students. Threat
reduction is possible by building up personal security through the use of
getting-to-know-you activities which promote trust as well as articulation
activities3 which give the opportunity to use English sounds in a safe
environment.
Getting-to-know-you activities
They are meant to build a positive atmosphere of trust within a group.

28
27
GUESS WHO

LEVEL Elementary to intermediate (A2 to

B2)

TIME 15-20 minutes

AIM Students are given statements of

personal information about other
students and they have to ask
questions in order to establish the
person's identity.

PREPARATION Have available enough small pieces

of paper for the whole class.

PROCEDURE 1. Give each of your students a

piece of paper and ask them to
write four facts

about themselves. These can be

anything they choose, e.g. I was
born in February, I

own a bicycle, I like Limp Bizkit etc.

as long as the statement is true.

2. Tell the students to fold their

pieces of paper and pass them
anonymously to the

front of the class.

3. Collect them together and then

redistribute them so that each
student has personal

information about another student.

4. Once the students have had a

28
 chance to look at the personal
information, tell them

that they will have to find out whose

information they have by turning
the

statements into questions, and then

asking other students those
questions. You can

exercise control over the activity in

a variety of ways:

- by deciding on the form of the

question which is allowable, such as
Who was born

in February?;

- by deciding whether to nominate

students to speak or to allow them
free choice;

- by deciding whether or not to

allow students to move about.

5. Once you have decided on the

rules for the activity you can set it
in motion. The

activity ends when everybody has

found out whose personal
information they have.

REMARKS If the initial statements were

collected in the previous lesson, or
copied out two or three times, you
could distribute more than one set
of information to each student. This
would be needed to make a
mingling activity more successful.

29
.. Focus on the "Guess who?" activity. What kind of practical problems
may arise? How would you cope with them?

Articulation activities

When students come to speak in a foreign language they often find

themselves inhibited by
the prospects of having to make what to them are strange and even comic
sounds. One way to
tackle this problem is to give students the opportunity to experiment with
sounds.
LISTEN AND RECORD

LEVEL Elementary and above (from A2)

TIME 15-20 minutes

AIM For students: making a recording

after listening carefully to a taped
model.

PREPARATION Select a natural model for students

to imitate.

PROCEDURE Ask the students to listen to the

tape and to repeat any of the
utterances they have heard, until
they are ready to be recorded. The
activity is selfdirected, but you
should be available for consultation.
The finished product can be a

27
 subject of feedback and evaluation.

REMARKS The activity is self-regulatory. This

is important if students are not to
be threatened by having to repeat
something they feel uncertain
about. This activity also fosters the
notion of rehearsing what we are
about to say, something many
people do in their own language,
anyway.

Dialogue building

The use of cues or prompts to build up dialogues is a commonly-used

technique. The cues or
prompts determine the content of what is said, and dialogue building
activities can range from
being highly controlled to very free. Dialogue building is not a substitute
for fluency work, but
used sparingly it allows the possibility of giving weaker students a chance
to say something.
.. Go through a course-book and find an activity of this kind. Send it
to our forum saying whether it is a highly controlled one or a free
one. Use a ranking scale where 1 stands for highly controlled, 5 very
free.

Gambits
In the early stages of conversational development students can be taught
to take the part of
the person who responds to what somebody else has said, by producing
an appropriate
response or "gambit".
Here's a list of what we might teach:

27
1. Language to indicate the speaker's agreement with what has been said:
- Yes, it is.
- Yes, that's right.
- Of course, it is.
- Quite, absolutely true.
- Yes, I do / Yes, he was / Yes, they were….
2. Language which indicates polite disagreement:
- Well, not really.
- Not quite, no.
- Perhaps not quite as bad/good/difficult as that.
- Em, I don't know.
3. Language to indicate possible doubt:
- I'm not quite sure.
- Really?
- Is that right?
- Is that so?
- Are you sure?
4. Language to provide positive and negative feedback:
- Great!
- That's nice.
- Very nice indeed (good, clear, pretty)…
- Really nice.
- Sounds lovely! (informal)
- Not very nice.
- No at all nice/clear …
- Very nasty indeed (disagreeable, bad, noisy) …
- Sounds awful. (informal)
5. Language to encourage confirmation and more information:
- Is that right?
- Really?
- No kidding? (informal)
- You're not!

One way of getting students used to the function of short responses is to

build them into drills.
Although such practice is semi-mechanical students enjoy the challenge of
getting the stress
and intonation of the short response right. The important thing is not to
use drills too
extensively.

27
Step 2: Awareness activities

Students need to become aware of what native speakers do in

conversation if they are themselves to achieve communicative
competence in the target language. The focus of the awareness activities
will be then on promoting the following issues:
• the ability to "sound" English by drawing attention to critical
elements which can be usefully imitated (weak forms);
• development of the ability to interpret what is being said;
• a feeling for what is appropriate in conversation;
• awareness of strategies used to further conversation;
• awareness of the target culture.
Awareness activities can be used from the earliest stages of learning.

Observation tasks
They are used to encourage students to become sensitive to particular
features of conversation. Observation should always be directed through
the use of task sheets and these can be used to focus on:
• audio recordings of people talking;
• video recordings of people talking;
• conversations as they occur in real time.
The simplest observation tasks require the observer to mark the presence
or absence of a particular feature.

ENCOURAGING NOISES

LEVEL Elementary and above (from A2)

TIME 15-20 minutes

AIM Making students sensitive to expressions

which encourage the other speaker to
continue.

PREPARATION Select an audio or video tape that contains

examples of this type of expression. Hand out
the task sheet below to the students.

TASK SHEET

Listen to the extract of people talking. Make a tick (v) next to each of the

27
expressions in the

list whenever you hear one of the speakers using it.

.. Really? .. Uh huh.

.. Does He? .. Is it?

.. Is that right? .. Yes.

.. That's nice. .. I see.

.. How interesting. .. Mmmm.

PROCEDURE 1. Introduce the task so that the

students get some idea of what they
are looking for.
2. Give out a copy of the task sheet to
each student.
3. Play the tape two or three times
before focusing on the specific
expressions in context.

Sensitivity to the sound system

.. How often do you notice, focus on and/or correct the following in what
your students say?
- Phonetic confusion (pin vs. bin)
- Problems with consonant clusters (str or nch)
- Interference from the written form (half)
- Failure to use the weak form
- Incorrect word stress
- Incorrect intonation
If students are to make themselves easily comprehensible, there is a need
to work on their pronunciation, stress, rhythm, and intonation from the
start.
Remember that lengthy but infrequent attention to stress and intonation
is less effective than short tasks that are built into the overall teaching
programme and often as introductory "warming up" activities, end of
lesson relaxers, or simply as and when the need arises in response to
errors.

27
Cross-cultural awareness
If we accept the fact that language is embedded in culture, then some
elements of crosscultural training are inevitable and the inclusion of some
cross-cultural work in the teaching of communicative skills would seem to
offer the following advantages:
• cross-cultural issue can generate discussion in their own right;
• knowledge of why people in the English culture behave in certain
ways should make native speakers easier to interpret;
• a sensitivity to the ways social norms operate in other languages
should make the learning of certain areas of language (such as
politeness formulae) easier;
• If students become aware of issues such as social taboos, they are
less likely to cause offence by breaking them. Besides, they would
begin to fall into the category of foreigner that native speakers find
easy to talk to.

Step 3: Fluency activities

The communicative needs of the average foreign student fall within a
limited range of purposes, the most important of which are:
• the maintenance and development of social relationships;
• information exchange;
• co-operative problem-solving in English;
• expressing ideas and opinions.
If students are to achieve communicative competence the practice tasks
they are given must:
• provide the experience of using English in real time (in real life the
interlocutor does not wait for the right or appropriate answer);
• offer them the chance to express their own feelings and points of
view;
• provide the opportunity of using the language for a specific purpose.
It is also important that the tasks are culturally appropriate and perceived
as relevant by the
students.
The successful introduction of fluency activities to a class which has not
encountered them before usually requires an element of learner training.
This is because the students may perceive that the burden is placed on
them as it is the students who initiate and determine what they want to
say (even if within a set of guidelines) and feedback can be delayed as the

27
teacher keeps a low profile throughout the activity to allow the students to
express themselves freely. Then it is important, especially with adolescent
learners, that learner training covers the why and the how of what the
students are being asked to do. The teacher can simply point out the ways
in which fluency activities help to promote the objective of oral
competence by forcing the learners to use the English they have in their
heads. The how refers to the fact that students may not know what is
expected of them during the activity. It is a good idea, then, that they
perceive elements in common with what they have been used to doing,
for example the way of giving instructions for an activity.

In class students very often revert to using L1 in the execution of

fluency activities if they are
not under scrutiny by the teacher. Some of the reasons for this problem
include:
• social unease at using a foreign language with their peers;
• perceiving the task as being difficult to complete in any language;
• becoming affectively involved, that is perceiving a genuine need to
use the easiest way of communicating about the solution to the
task.
.. How would you cope with this problem?
First you must give a reason for using English in the completion of a task,
not simply telling them to do it in English, but making it purposeful. Then
at an early stage tasks must be short and relatively easy. The activity
should never appear stressful to the students. You should praise the
students who make the effort to use English and make clear that for this
particular type of exercise errors are not so important.

Sharing
A great deal of motivating language practice can be generated by
asking students to talk about themselves, to share their private store of
experience with one another, providing they have a framework in which to
do so. The framework, especially in the early stages, should limit the
exchanges to quite simple factual information. Such exchanges constitute
a natural information gap activity in which all students are able to
participate. The activity that follows is a very simple one aimed at
introducing students to fluency
activities.

Role plays

28
Role plays can range from highly controlled activities - in which all the
content is supplied to student - to full-scale simulations in which
participants determine what they will say on the basis of background
information and the role they are given.
Feedback
Evaluation of the success or failure of conversational performance is
not an easy job. In conversation a variety of factors, including the
speaker's accent, control of grammar and vocabulary, as well as overall
fluency, all contribute to any impression of the performance.

The objective of feedback is to give students the information they need to

improve on their performance. Areas for feedback in activities aiming at
the development of communicative skills include:
• grammar;
• appropriacy of vocabulary and expressions;
• fluency;
• pronunciation;
• non-linguistic factors affecting communication.
Feedback needs to be staged and selective if it is to avoid demoralising
the students. To achieve this teachers need to decide on the areas of
communicative performance most relevant to their students. Once the
decision is made, it is a question of focussing on the chosen areas in turn
until the students reach the required performance level. To assist this
process, teachers need to be continually aware of student performance
and progress. One way of doing this might be to keep a record card for
each student similar to the one below:
Nature
Grammati Appropria Fluency
of task Overall
cal cy of and
(short performan
Name Date correctne vocabular pronunciati
talk ce
ss y on
etc.)

Another way might be to use a tape recorder during speaking activities.

This way it gets easier for the teacher to identify areas of weakness which
can form the basis of subsequent lessons focusing on accuracy, the

27
presentation of new language, etc. Other advantages of using tape
recordings of students at work include:

- the opportunity for students to hear again their own performance;

- the opportunity to look objectively at how students develop over a
period of time.

It is important for teachers to correct mistakes made during

speaking activities in a different way from the mistakes made during a
study exercise. When students are repeating sentences trying to get their
pronunciation right, then the teacher will often correct (appropriately)
every time there is a problem. But if students are involved in a passionate
discussion about whether smoking should be banned anywhere, the effect
of constant interruption from the teacher will destroy the conversational
flow, thus mining the purpose of the speaking activity.
It is a good idea to watch and listen while speaking activities are
taking place, noting down things that seemed to go well and times when
students couldn't make themselves understood or made important
mistakes. At the end of the speaking activity the teacher can write the
mistakes on the board or on an OHT asking students to correct them. As
with any kind of correction, it is important not to single students out for
particular criticism.

M03: HOW TO TEACH SPEAKING

TASK 1
Describe a group of students and then say what topics for speaking
activities they might be interested in. How would you try and find out
which those topics are?
TASK 2
Write the two moves of an exchange and then try to identify the potential
it contains to develop into a conversation.

Comment:

This article talking about what a dialogue consists of, namely: An exchange
consists of two moves, an initiating move and a response.
In order to promote the conversation in speaking class, a teacher should have: (a)
Preparation, Preparation is a vital ingredient for success, (b) instruction, the
instructions must be clear, and (c) topic, choice of the topic to discuss.
Three steps activities to promote communicative competence:
Step 1: Controlled activities

28
 Getting-to-know-you activities: Chain names Guess who
Articulation activities: LISTEN AND RECORD
Dialogue building
Gambits
Step 2: Awareness activities
Observation tasks ENCOURAGING NOISES
Sensitivity to the sound system
Cross-cultural awareness
Step 3: Fluency activities
Sharing, I HATED MATHS - DID YOU?
Ranking activities
Role plays
Feedback
These activities are really good to apply in speaking class, from the
beginners to advance learners. The article also completed with very clear
step by step activities to promote the learner to speak in the class and
furthermore are able to take part in English conversation outside the
classroom.

28
 To Promote Communicative Efficiency
through Speaking Activities Capital University
of Economics and Business
Hao Qinhai

Capital University of Economics and

Business

Introduction
With the social and economic development of our country,
education at college level is changing to reflect the needs of the
learner and hence society. Consequently, foreign language teaching is
responding to society's need to prepare our youth for an unpredictable
future in which language skills will be in great demand. However,
according to the survey conducted by the College English Directive
Committee, the comprehensive skills of the college graduates, their oral
and written abilities in particular, are not satisfactory. To change the
phenomenon of “dumb English” has become a challenging task for us.
Realizing the need to maximize the learner's foreign language
abilities, the national educational administration has mandated
language requirements for college English teaching that in turn require
adjustments for teaching a diverse group of students and developing
their oral communicative competence. The focus of curricula and hence
assessment have, therefore, also shifted from the knowledge of
grammar to oral proficiency and communicative competence in target
language.

II. The Purpose of Our Classroom Teaching

The aims of language teaching courses are very commonly defined
with reference to four language skills. These aims, in turn, usually
decide the content and the approach of our teaching. So let’s first focus
on what purpose we can achieve in our classroom teaching.
As is known to us, the aims of language teaching are set out on the
basis of linguistic theory concerning a native speaker’s knowledge of

27
language. The investigation into it has been proceeding for quite a
long time, and perhaps the most famous theory in this respect is put
forward by Chomsky in his paper Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in
1965. His suggestion is that a native speaker has, somewhere in his
brain, a set of grammar rules which enable him to make sentences and
with a finite number of rules, it is possible to create an infinite
number of sentences. Therefore , he made a distinction between
“competence” and “performance”. By “competence” he meant a native
speaker’s internalized linguistic knowledge, or internalized grammar,
while “performance” was the use of language in a certain environment.
Although what Chomsky suggests may account for a native
speaker’s knowledge of grammar, it is not sufficient to explain
everything a native speaker knows about his own language. Unlike
Chomsky, Hymes , in his paper On Communicative Competence in
1972, replaced “competence” with his own concept of “communicative
competence” by arguing that besides the grammar rules, there are
rules of use and competence by itself is not enough to explain a
native speaker’s knowledge. He separated the native speaker’s
knowledge into four categories: systematic potential, appropriateness,
occurrence and feasibility. Obviously, Hymes includes categories that
are very different from Chomsky’s original idea of competence and it
seems clear that the native speaker does in some way know the rules of
use and try to be appropriate with the help of the rules in their
communications.
What is discussed above demonstrates that a native speaker knows
about the grammar of the language and knows especially what is
appropriate in certain situations. This is often referred to as the ability
to communicate. Therefore, the learning of a language involves not
only acquiring the ability to compose correct sentences but also
acquiring an understanding of which sentences or parts of sentences
are appropriate in a particular context. However, the idea of
communicative competence can not be applied immediately to the
study of a foreign language since it is based on too many cultural
assumptions. It remains a question whether we can expect to teach our
students communicative competence in a classroom. Our classroom

28
is far from the target language community and it is doubtful
whether we can give this knowledge to our students. So
communicative competence may be an impossible goal in the
classroom.
What we can expect our students to do in a language class is
that they are capable of expressing what they wish to say and their
meaning is understood. So in a language class, our purpose is not to
teach our students to be model Americans or Englishmen but to teach
them how to convey their thoughts and purposes efficiently in order
that they are competent to communicate in the target language with
native speakers naturally and smoothly. So a more realistic goal might
be “communicative efficiency”, put forward by Harmer. In
terms of language skills, communicative efficiency means that
students should be able to perform efficiently in oral and written
verbal communication.
However, there are many factors now in EFL classroom that hinder
the development of communicative competence, thus resulting in the
failure in achieving communicative efficiency. The texts are too difficult
to comprehend and it takes most of the class time to explain the
difficult language points, which leaves little time for the students to
internalize the language input and communicate with it. Its lack of
practical application and the difficulty of organizing
communicative activities have made it hard to meet the demand of
communicative language teaching. Besides, improper approach and
test-oriented teaching are misleading in the process of developing
skills to use language. Traditional method, which focuses on
linguistic phenomena rather than on comprehension and
communication, are still popular on account of various reasons, little or
no attention paid to listening and speaking. And unfavorable learning
environment in China is also an obstacle to achieve this goal in the
classroom.
As a result, most students possess poor oral communicative
competence and they desire to improve their ability. We designed a
questionnaire and interviewed some students to identify students’
perception of their language needs and motivations and to
discover students’ oral

29
communicative competence.. The results of the analysis demonstrate
that learners want more opportunities to speak English and want
teachers’ help in their listening and oral practices. In the light of these
findings, it is suggested that in order to achieve this goal in the
classroom, priority should be placed on the following areas:
improving listening and oral skills, creating English-speaking
environment and shifting from test-oriented teaching to communication-
oriented teaching. It is essential to design a superior way to achieve
communicative efficiency.

III. Analysis of Communication and

Communicative Activities
We are supposed to adopt a superior approach in our teaching
practice. However, before designing a useful and efficient approach it is
necessary and beneficial to analyze the nature of communication.
Communication between humans, though rather complex and ever-
changing, shares certain characteristics which are relevant for the
learning and teaching. Therefore, we may make some generalizations. In
a talk involving two people, both speaker and listener have their
particular roles for a certain reason. The three generalizations which
apply to all speakers and listeners may be
made as the
following:

spea Listen
want to sayker
something; er something;
want to listen to

Have a communicative be interested in communicative

purpose; purpose;
select from language store; process a variety of language;

This table suggests that a speaker makes a decision to address

someone. Speaking may be forced on him in some way, but we can say
that he wants and intends to speak, otherwise he could keep silent.
Speaker says things because they want something to happen as a
result of what they say. He is interested in achieving his communicative
purpose, in other words being successful in what he wants to convey.
The speaker also will select the language that he thinks is appropriate to
achieve his purpose. So is the listener other way round.

27
 Having discussed the nature of communication, we can now suggest
characteristics necessary for communicative activities. There is a
considerable debate on appropriate ways of defining communicative
language teaching and no single model is universally accepted as
authoritative (Mcgroarty, 1984; Markee, 1997). However, according to
Richards and Rodgers(1986), communicative language teaching
starts with a theory of language as communication, and its goal is to
develop learners’ communicative competence.

The most obvious characteristic, according to Larsen-Freeman

(1986), is that “almost everything that is done is done with
communicative intent”.In our classroom teaching, whatever activities
the students are involved in, if it is genuinely communicative and
really promoting language use, the students should have a desire to
communicate and they should use language in some way to achieve an
objective. Their attention should be centred on content of what is being
said not the form that is being used. And the students will have to deal
with a variety of language rather than just one language item.
Another characteristic is that “activities in the Communicative
Approach are often carried out by students in small groups”(Larshen-
Freeman, 1986, p.132) and is “its learner-centered and
experience-based view of second language teaching”(Richards and
Rodger, 1986, p.69).

Comments:

This paper deals with the possibility of training students’

communicative competence by promoting their speaking skill with two
major purposes;
1. To provide a theoretical background to a methodology for
teaching speaking and
2. To present a relatively reasonable suggestion of stages in
teaching speaking on the basis of the discussion of the purpose
of our teaching and the unique nature or characteristics of the

28
speaking skill.

28
 THE TEACHING OF EFL SPEAKING IN
THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT: THE
STATE OF THE ART

Utami Widiati
Bambang Yudi Cahyono

Nowadays, along with the strengthening position of English as a

language for international communication, the teaching of speaking skill
has become increasingly important in the English as a second or
foreign language (ESL/EFL) context. The teaching of speaking skill is
also important due to the large number of students who want to study
English in order to be able to use English for communicative purposes.
This is apparent in Richards and Renandya s (2002) publication where
they stated, A large percentage of the world s language learners study
English in order to develop proficiency in speaking (p. 201). Moreover,
students of second/foreign language educa- tion programs are
considered successful if they can communicate effectively in the
language (Riggenback & Lazaraton, 1991). The new parameter used to
determine success in second/foreign language education programs
appears to revise the previously-held conviction that students success
or lack of suc- cess in ESL/EFL was judged by the accuracy of the
language they produced. Thus, the great number of learners wanting to
develop English speaking pro- ficiency and the shift of criteria of learning
success from accuracy to fluency and communicative effectiveness
signify the teaching of ESL/EFL speaking.

This article presents a review of the teaching of EFL speaking in

the Indonesian context within the broader perspective of ESL/EFL
language teach- ing methodology. It aims to examine whether or not
the teaching of EFL speaking in Indonesia has been informed by the
theoretical framework of the ESL/EFL speaking pedagogy. It also provides
an account on which areas of teaching EFL speaking have not been much
investigated or explored in the literature. In order to achieve these
purposes, the following section will firstly discuss ESL/EFL speaking
within the historical perspective of the methodology of language
teaching.

ESL/EFL SPEAKING AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

The modern history of language teaching started with the adoption
of the approach used for teaching Latin in European countries. Under
the ap- proach, known as the Grammar Translation Method, the purpose

27
to learn a language is primarily to read the literature published in the
language (Rich- ards & Rodgers, 1986:3). As reading and writing
considered to be the focus of language teaching, the ability to speak a
foreign language was regarded as irrelevant (Prator, 1991:11). Speaking
was then made the primary aim of language when the Direct Method
came. In the era of this method oral com- munication became the basis
of grading the language teaching programs (Richards & Rodgers,
1986:10). However, the Reading Approach that fol- lowed believed that
reading was the only language skill which could really be taught within
the available time. Thus, the essence of the teaching of speaking or
oral communication in the earlier days of language teaching his- tory
depended on the approach which was in fashion during those days.

The primacy of speech was once again insisted on in the era of the
Audiolingual Method (ALM). Based on the structural analysis of spoken
language, this new, scientific Audio-lingual Method (Savignon, 1983)
came to be known, won the day, and was popular for many years. It
believed that mimicry and memorization are the most efficient route to
second language use and it relied on active drill of the structural
patterns of the language. This view on language learning is reflected in
its conviction stating that language behavior is not a matter of solving
problems but of perform- ing habits so well learned that they are
automatic (Brooks, 1961:3, cited in Savignon, 1983:19). In short, the
primacy of the oral language in the ALM was unquestioned regardless of
the goals of the learner. In other words, the mastery of the fundamentals
of the language must be through speech.

The ALM was later criticized for not providing language learners with
the spontaneous use of the target language. The mimicry, memorization,
and pattern manipulation were said to have questionable values if the
goal of language teaching and learning was the communication of ideas,
the sharing of information. This has led to the idea of communicative
competence in language teaching which was emphasized by another
approach to language teaching coming later, that is, the
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Before elaborating the notion
of communicative competence, the na- ture of communication is
discussed in the following section.

THE NATURE OF COMMUNICATION

Communication is an important part of human civilization and it is a
means of cultural transformation. Communication using languages can be
conducted in two ways: orally and in a written form. In the context of
lan- guage learning, it is commonly believed that to communicate in a

28
written form (writing) is more difficult than orally (speaking), suggesting
that writ- ing is a more complex language skill than speaking. However,
in reality, as Artini (1998) suggests, although the complexity of spoken
and written lan- guages differs, the differences do not reveal that one is
easier than the other. Unlike written language, spoken language
involves paralinguistic features such as Tamber (breathy, creaky), voice
qualities, tempo, loudness, facial and bodily gestures, as well as prosodic
features such as intonation, pitch, stress, rhythm, and pausing. Thus,
spoken language which employs variability and flexibility is in fact as
complex as written language, meaning that each is complex in its own
way. Additionally, the two means of language communication are equally
important. It is speech, not writing, which serves as the natural means
of communication between members of community (Byrne,1980), both
for the expression of thought and as a form of social behavior. Writing
is a means of recording speech, in spite of its function as a medium of
communication in its own right.

According to Harmer (1991:46-47), there are three reasons why

people communicate. First, people communicate because they want to
say some- thing (p. 46). As Harmer explained, the word want refers
to intentional desire the speaker has in order to convey messages to
other people. Simply stated, people speak because they just do not
want to keep silent. Second, people communicate because they have
some communicative purpose (p.

46). By having some communicative purpose it means that the speakers

want something to happen as a result of what they say. For example,
they may ex- press a request if they need a help from other people or
they command if they want other people to do something. Thus, two
things are important in communicating: the message they wish to
convey and the effect they want it to have (Harmer, 2001:46). Finally,
when people communicate, they select from their language store (p.
47). The third reason is the consequence of the desire to say something
(first reason) and the purpose in conducting communicative activities
(second reason). As they have language storage, they will select
language expressions appropriate to get messages across to other
people. Harmer used the three reasons to explain the nature of
communication which can be presented graphically in Figure 1 as follows.

29
Figure 1. The nature of communication with a focus on the speaker
(Adapted from Harmer, 2001:48)

Harmer (1991) added that when two people communicate, each of

them normally has something that they need to know from the other.
The inter- locutor supplies information or knowledge that the speaker
does not have. Thus, in natural communication, people communicate
because there is an in- formation gap between them, and they
genuinely need information from other people. In the context of
EFL/ESL learning, the ability to convey mes- sages in natural
communication is of paramount importance. In order to communicate
naturally, EFL/ESL learners need to acquire communicative competence,
an issue which is discussed in the following section.

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

The concept of communicative competence developed under the

views of language as context, language as interaction, and language as
negotiation. Learning to speak English requires more than knowing its
grammatical and semantic rules. Students need to know how native
speakers use the language in the context of structured interpersonal
exchange. In other words, effective oral communication requires the
ability to use the language appropriately in social interactions
(Shumin, 2002:204). Due to the importance of the notion of
communicative competence, a number of language and language
learning experts (e.g. Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1971) elaborated
the nature of this concept. Hymes s (1971) theory of communicative
competence consists of the interaction of grammatical, psycholinguistic,
sociolinguistic, and probabilistic language components. For Canale and
Swain (1980), communicative competence includes four components
of competence: grammatical competence, discourse competence,
sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. In the context of

27
second/foreign language learning, Canale and Swain s interpretation of
communicative competence has been frequently referred to. How these
four components of competence underlie speaking proficiency is
graphically shown by Shumin (2002:207) as in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Speaking proficiency and the components of communicative

competence (Shumin, 2002:207)

As can be seen from the figure, speaking proficiency is influenced

by all four components of competence. Grammatical competence,
the first component, is linguistic competence (Savignon, 1983:36), that
is, the ability to perform the grammatical well-formedness. It is mastery
of the linguistic code, the ability to recognize the lexical, morphological,
syntactic, and phonological features of a language and to manipulate
these features to form words and sentences. In the case of speaking
activities, grammatical competence enables speakers to use and
understand English-language structures accurately, which in turn
contributes to their fluency.
Another component is sociolinguistic competence, which requires
an understanding of the social context in which language is used: the
roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of
interaction (Savignon, 1983:37). This competence helps prepare
speakers for effective and appropriate use of the target language. They
should employ the rules and norms governing the appropriate timing
and realization of speech acts (Shumin, 2002:207). Understanding the
sociolinguistic side of language enables speakers to know what
comments are appropriate, how to ask questions during interaction
and how to respond nonverbally according to the purpose of the
speaking.

28
 In addition, students need to develop discourse competence. This
is concerned with the connection of a series of sentences or utterances,
or inter-sentential relationships, to form a meaningful whole (Savignon,
1983:38). To become effective speakers, students should acquire a
large repertoire of structures and discourse markers to express ideas.
Using this, students can manage turn taking in communication (Shumin,
2002:207). In their review of a discourse-based approach in the teaching
of EFL speaking, Luciana and Aruan (2005:15) stated that the discourse-
based approach enables students to develop and utilize the basic
elements of spoken discourse in English in- volving not only a full
linguistic properties but also the knowledge of proposition, context and
socio-cultural norms underlying the speech .
The fourth component of communicative competence is strategic
competence, that is, the ability to employ strategies to compensate for
imperfect knowledge of rules (Savignon, 1983:39), be it linguistic,
sociolinguistic, or discourse rules. It is analogous to the need for coping
or survival strategies. With reference to speaking activities, strategic
competence refers to the abil- ity to keep a conversation going. For
example, when second/ foreign lan- guage learners encounter a
communication breakdown as they forget what a particular word in the
target language is to refer to a particular thing, they try to explain it by
mentioning the characteristics of the thing, thus employing a type of
communication strategies (Cahyono, 1989).
The concept of communicative competence as explained above implies

also the essential purposes of spoken language. Spoken language

functions interactionally and transactionally. Interactionally, spoken
language is in- tended to maintain social relationships, while
transactionally, it is meant to convey information and ideas (Yule,
2001:6). Speaking activities involve two or more people using the
language for either interactional or transactional purposes. Because
much of our daily communication remains interactional (Shumin,
2002:208), interaction is the key to teaching language for
communication. In addition, as believed by the interaction hypothesis
in second language acquisition, learners learn faster through interacting,
or active use of language (Miller, 1998). It is also important to note that
interaction requires understanding of the social background of those
involved in communication. In her article addressing oral proficiency
from the intercultural perspective, Luciana (2005) suggested that when
two parties are inter- acting, they need to consider some socio-cultural
aspects that they bring with them, thus necessitating the importance of
intercultural understanding.

To summarize, it becomes clear to us that speaking or oral

28
communication has been considered an important language skill for
second/foreign language learners even though, depending on the
approaches and methods of language teaching, this skill was not treated
as equally important to the other language skills. It is also apparent that,
naturally, to speak is not only to con- vey a message that someone else
needs or to get information which has not been known, but, more
importantly, to interact with other people. The remainder of this
article focuses on the discussion of the teaching of EFL speaking in
the Indonesian context by using these two aspects (i.e., information gap
and interaction) as the pedagogical basis in the analysis of EFL
speaking instruction. The following section will first provide the
background to speaking English in Indonesia before other aspects of
the practice of teaching of EFL speaking such as activities, materials,
and students oral proficiency, are discussed.

SPEAKING ENGLISH IN THE INDONESIAN CONTEXT

Considering the current status of English as a foreign language in
Indonesia, not so many people use it in their day-to-day
communication. How- ever, in certain communities in this country
English has been used for various reasons (Musyahda, 2002), leading to
the fact that some people use it as the second language. For example, in
the academic level, some of the scholars are quite familiar with English
and occasionally use it as a means for communicating. Those involved
in the main level of management such as bankers and government
officials also use code-mixing and code-switching in Indonesian and
English. The use of English among teenagers such as in seminars for
youth or among middle-level workers in the workplaces and the use of
English by radio announcers or television presenters can be easily
found (Azis, 2003). Moreover, the development of tourism lead to the
growing number of people from this sector, such as tour guides and
hotel receptionists, who use English.
In spite of the fact that more Indonesians use English in their daily
life, many (e.g., Nur, 2004; Renandya, 2004) consider that English
instruction is a failure in this country. One of the reasons for the failure
is that there has been no unified national system of English education
(Huda, 1997) and, therefore, improvements of English communicative
ability are painstakingly made. In reality, as the world is changing very
rapidly towards a global village, human resource development becomes
a central issue and an ability to communicate internationally is an
important quality of the manpower. Global market places often
require the ability to use English.

The main challenge for this country thus is to develop an

educational system resulting in human quality competitive at
international level. This is relevant to the significant change that took

29
place in the real needs for English in Indonesia (Huda, 1997). The need
for English ability in the fifties and sixties was limited to academic
purposes at the university level. Today, individuals need English in order
to communicate with others at international forums. Accordingly, efforts
need to be continuously made concerning quality improvements of
English instruction in Indonesia. More particularly, curriculum of English
education that can be effective to produce graduates who are able to
communicate at international level is needed.
The challenge to compete at international level seems to have
been thought of by some English language teaching researchers or
specialists. Al- though an ideal curriculum may not be attempted in the
near future, the challenge results in the application of some classroom
activities in the teaching of EFL speaking. The following section
examines the practice of teaching EFL speaking in the Indonesian
context as the efforts of developing students oral English proficiency.

THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING EFL SPEAKING IN THE

INDONESIAN CONTEXT
In the last quarter of the century, the teaching of EFL speaking in
Indonesia has been closely connected to the concept of communicative
competence which is emphasized within the Communicative Language
Teaching (CLT) approach. As this approach values interaction among
students in the process of language learning, classroom activities have a
central role in enabling the students interact and thus improve their
speaking proficiency. This section presents reports, either based on
research or classroom practice, on how speaking teaching has been
carried out in Indonesia. The reports, mostly dealing with tertiary-
level students, can be categorized into those dealing with teaching
problems, classroom activities, teaching materials, and assessment.
Such reports will provide a glimpse view of teaching EFL speaking
in Indonesian classrooms.

Reports on Teaching Problems

An issue which has been extensively discussed in the literature
concerns the level of Indonesian learners EFL speaking proficiency. A
number of re- ports show that Indonesian learners commonly have not
attained a good level of oral English proficiency. For example,
Mukminatien (1999) found that students of English departments have a
great number of errors when speaking. The errors include pronunciation
(e.g., word stress and intonation), grammatical accuracy (e.g., tenses,
preposition, and sentence construction), vocabulary (e.g., incorrect word
choice), fluency (e.g., frequent repair), and interactive communication
(i.e., difficulties in getting the meaning across or keeping the
conversation going). Similarly, Ihsan (1999) found that students are likely
to make errors which include the misuse of parts of speech, syntac- tical

30
construction, lexical choice, and voice. Both Ihsan and Mukminatien
s research studies supported earlier results of research conducted by
Eviyuliwati (1997) who reported that students had difficulties in
using grammar and in applying new vocabulary items in speaking class.
With regards to the students frequent errors in speaking, Mukminatien
(1999) sug- gested teachers provide their learners with more sufficient
input for acquisition in the classroom and encourage them to use English
either in or outside the classroom.
As the ability to speak English is a very complex task considering
the nature of what is involved in speaking, not all of the students in
an EFL speaking class have the courage to speak. Many of the students
feel anxious in a speaking class (Padmadewi, 1998), and some are
likely to keep silent (Tutyandari, 2005). Based on her research,
Padmadewi (1998) found out that students attending a speaking class
often felt anxious due to pressure from the speaking tasks which
require them to present individually and spontaneously within limited
time. Tutyandari (2005) mentioned that students keep silent because
they lack self confidence, lack prior knowledge about topics, and
because of poor teacher-learner relationship. In order to cope with stu-
dents limited knowledge, she advised speaking teachers activate the
stu- dents prior knowledge by asking questions related to topics under
discus- sion. She also mentioned that students self-confidence can be
enhanced and their anxiety reduced by giving them tasks in small
groups. Both Padmadewi and Tutyandari emphasized the importance of
tolerance on the part of the teacher. More particularly, Tutyandari
recommended that the teacher act as a teacher-counselor who provides
supports and supply students needs for learning, rather than as one
who imposes a predetermined program, while Padmadewi suggested that
there should be a close relationship between the teacher and the
students.
Citraningtyas (2005) stated that a silent speaking class can be
made more alive by assigning tasks which promote students critical and
creative thinking skills. For example, when students discuss providing a
shelter for homeless children of Aceh due to Tsunami, they may be
asked whether adopting the children could be an option. Based on his
classroom action re- search, Wasimin (2005) suggested that students
interaction in English can be improved by providing them with jazz
chants exercises. Jazz chants exercises refer to recorded expressions
based on English used in speech situations in the American context.
Although expressions in jazz chants are not spoken naturally as
everyday English, they are clearly pronounced, rhythmic and mostly
repetitive (see Graham, 1978). Wasimin added that jazz chantz
exercises improved students accuracy in pronunciation and intonation,
as well as their fluency in responding to questions addressed to them.
In short, the problems that Indonesian EFL learners face in

31
developing their speaking performance relate not only to their linguistic
and personality factors, but also the types of classroom tasks provided
by the teachers. Thus, this section suggests that teachers have an
important role in fostering learn- ers ability to speak English well. For
this, teachers need to help maintain good relation with EFL learners, to
encourage them to use English more of- ten, and to create classroom
activities in order to enhance students interac- tion. The next section
specifically presents reports on types of activities in EFL speaking
classroom.

Report on Classroom Activities

The teaching of EFL speaking can be focused on either training the
stu- dents to speak accurately (in terms of, for example,
pronunciation and grammatical structures) or encouraging them to
speak fluently. The former is considered to be form-based intruction
while the latter is considered to be meaning-based instruction
(Murdibjono, 1998). Each of these focuses of in- struction has its own
characteristics. Form-focused instruction aims to pro- vide learners with
language forms (e.g., phrases, sentences, or dialogues) which can be
practiced and memorized so that these forms can be used whenever
the learners need them. The activities, usually teacher-centered,
include repetition and substitution drills which are essentially used to
activate phrases or sentences that learners have understood. In
contrast, meaning-focused instruction, usually student-centered, aims to
make learners able to communicate and the teacher, therefore, plays a
role more as a facilitator than a teacher.

Our review of the literature on the teaching of EFL speaking in

Indonesia shows that meaning-based instruction has been given more
emphasis and it is conducted through various classroom activities. While
many activities in the classrooms have been oriented to speaking for real
communication (e.g., Rachmajanti, 1995), some activities are
conducted merely for giving students opportunities to practice
speaking, such as to speak through games (e.g., Murdibjono, 1998) or
through repeating patterns (Hariyanto, 1997). In- terestingly, activities
described in those reports are usually based on the teaching
experience of the authors. Although these types of activities are not
necessarily based on keen research analysis, to a certain extent they
seem to have a degree of reliability as they are based on observation
following learners practice.
In terms of the number of students involved, EFL speaking activities
can be classified into individual and group activities. Individual
activities such as story-telling, describing things, and public speech are
usually transactional, while group activities such as role-plays, paper
presentation, de- bates, small group/panel discussions are interactional.

32
Unlike group activities which have been given much attention in the
literature, individual activities are usually listed as activities which can
be taught in EFL speaking, yet rarely explored in-depth. Therefore, in
the following discussion, group activities are highlighted.
The use of role-plays in EFL speaking classroom is recommended
by some authors (e.g., Danasaputra, 2003; Diani, 2005; Murdibjono,
1998). Ac- cording to Murdibjono (1998), in a role play students are
asked to pretend to be someone who is involved in a speech situation in
the real-life, such as a shopkeeper and a buyer, people who are involved
in shopping. Danusaputra (2003) compared the effectiveness of role-play
and dialogue techniques to encourage students to speak in EFL
classroom. The students were divided into two classes, each was
taught using the two different techniques, but given the same topics.
These topics were ones which had situation (e.g., at the grocery and at
the restaurant) and language functions (e.g., complaining, showing
regret, and expressing uncertainty). She found that both techniques can
be effectively used in EFL classrooms. However, dialogues were found to
be more helpful than the role-plays to make students speak as
naturally and communicatively as possible.
Diani (2005) combined role-play and dialogue techniques in the form
of interviews. Four students in her class were assigned roles as
interviewers who will recruit new staffs and the rest of the students were
the interviewees having roles as job applicants. Prior to the interview,
the interviewees were asked to prepare a job application letter and
their curriculum vitae. They were also asked to ensure the interviewers
that they have the skills for posi- tions offered. Diani reported that this
technique encouraged her students to do their best in the competition
to get a job. She stated that assigning stu- dents to have an interview
in a speaking class reduces their feeling of shy- ness and, in turn,
encourages them to speak more. Thus, the combined dia- logue and and
role-play techniques in the forms of interview are effective in making
students speak more actively in their speaking class.

Another activity that can be assigned to EFL students is paper

presentation (e.g., Purjayanti, 2003; Tomasowa, 2000). Tomasowa
(2000) assigned her students to have group works in order to conduct a
paper presentation, which she called seminar (p. 5), of topics that
have been provided in the available handbook. She stated that through
presentation students had oppor- tunities to talk about a particular
topic and discuss mispronunciation or wrong word choice following the
presentation. She added that presentation is effective to manage
students in a large class. In a similar vein, Purjayanti (2003) found
presentation to be helpful to encourage students to communi- cate
ideas in their fields of study. As she stated, presentation is a useful, in-
teresting and favorable way of learning speaking (p. 9). She added

33
that through presentation and its preparation students were able not
only to prac- tice speaking, but also to search for materials and deliver
them in an organ- ized way.
Small group discussion is another activity that can be conducted in
EFL speaking classroom. The aim of small group discussion is to enable
learners to be actively involved in a discussion involving a limited
number of stu- dents. Murdibjono (2001:141-142) argues that small
group discussion is ef- fective because students have more time to
practice speaking and, as stu- dents practice speaking with classmates
they have already known, they are not hindered by psychological
barriers. In her classroom action research, Wijayanti (2005) divided her
students into a number of small groups and gave them a task called
Talking about Something in English (TASE). Wijayanti found that small
grouping with TASE task provided the students with oppor- tunities to
perform their speaking abilities and that they felt motivated to speak
more. Similarly, Karana (2005) found out that her small groups of stu-
dents were enthusiastic to perform a talk show on various topics of
their choices as they have been familiar with a talk show program such as
the one managed by a well-known American talk-show presenter, Oprah
Winfrey.

Rachmajanti (1995) advised the use of combining arrangement

to teach EFL speaking. Combining arrangement refers to meaning-based
activities where learners are asked to perform tasks using information
that can be gained from other learners. These activities aim to provide
opportunities for learners to communicate in a natural situation. Some
of the recommended activities include completing incomplete pictures
and the variation which is called same or different , and partly
completed crossword puzzle . These speaking activities are claimed
to provide learners with a natural situation as learners ask real
questions to their partners or other learners, not display questions
(Lightbown & Spada, 1993:78) whose aswers have already been known.
The EFL speaking activities outlined above suggest that group
activities are strikingly more dominant than individual activities,
implying that Indo- nesian classrooms are rich with interaction of
various patterns. As Kasim s (2004) research showed, EFL speaking
classroom was of five interaction patterns: teacher-class, teacher-
group, teacher-student, student-student, and student-teacher. Moreover,
the frequency of group over individual activities increases the teacher s
role as a facilitator in the students negotiation of meaning. Kasim
pointed out that the increasing motivation of the students to talk to
each other in the target language as the semester progressed was
partly due to the facilitation of the speaking class, which was done by
focus- ing more on meaning rather than on form. While many of the
group activi- ties seem to increase interaction among EFL learners, only

34
some (e.g., small group discussion and combining arrangement) uphold
the information-gap feature of natural conversation. As a result, not all of
the classroom activities have been conditioned for triggering students
more spontaneous expressions.

Reports on Teaching Materials

An important aspect of speaking activities is how students are
made ready to speak. This deals with the importance of materials for
communica- tive activities in the classroom. A traditional approach is to
assign the stu- dents to search for materials of their own from any
sources (e.g., magazines, books, and the Internet) and use them to
complete tasks in the EFL class- room. The speaking tasks can be in the
forms of individual and transactional message delivery such as
describing objects, reporting, and telling stories (Rachmajanti, 2005),
the presentation of which may be accompanied by the use of common
media such as realia, pictures and, as Risnadedi (2005) re- ported,
puppets.
A variation of the conventional approach is to assign the students
to construct materials of their own based on their own prior knowledge
and searched materials and then share these materials to other students
in a small group before members of this group disperse to share the
materials to class- mates in other groups (Purjayanti, 2005). Because the
students get the mate- rials before they attend their speaking class,
there is a possibility that they practice before performing in the class,
thus the type of speech can be pre- fabricated utterances or it may lack
spontaneity.
Another approach is to provide the students with input for speaking
ac- tivities right in the classroom. Unlike the traditional approach which is
based on the independent effort of the students in searching
materials, this ap- proach mainly depends on the teacher s decision
making. The teacher de- signs tasks for the speaking activities, chooses
types of materials, and deter- mines the media for presenting the
materials. As the students get the materi- als for speaking when they
are in the classroom, they are likely to be more spontaneous, which is
more natural, when expressing messages. Due to the importance of this
classroom input provision approach, the remainder of this section focuses
on various input providing activities to supply materials for students
speaking activities.
One of the ways to provide input for the learners is through
watching video (e.g., Cahyono, 1997; Rachmajanti, 1994). In her article
on video in- put in teaching speaking, Rachmajanti (1994) stated that
video is beneficial to present both linguistic and non-linguistic aspects.
The materials presented in the video include short films of the
documentary and narrative types. She also prepared a number of lesson
plans in order to help teachers use video in their EFL speaking

35
classrooms. Similarly, Cahyono (1997:134) stated that video, if used
competently, can be a motivating means to learn English. He also
outlined what teachers can do before students watch the video, when
they are watching and after watching. Thus, both Rachmajanti and
Cahyono agree that video is a resourceful tool for teaching EFL speaking.
Related to the use of visual materials, Rarastesa (2004:323) pointed
out that students can be equipped with materials from movies. In her
opinion, movies may have various topics that can be selected for
classroom use. For example, the students in her classroom watched My
Best Friend s Wedding, a movie combining topics of love, friendship,
betrayal and sacrifice. Materi- als from the movie are considered
advantageous as students learn not only about the topics that they
could share in the classroom, but they can also ex- press their own
opinions and values with regard to cultural aspects of the movies.
Ruslan (1997) highlighted the values of reading literary works
(e.g., novels or drama) in developing students communicative
competence. He stated that literary works are authentic materials as
they contain native speakers cultural samples and disclose social
backgrounds of the characters which may resemble the real life. Thus,
students can discover the life sides of the characters such as values,
beliefs, attitudes, customs, and their secrets. Dukut (2004:312-313)
supported Ruslan by explaining that literary works may be used to
introduce cultural aspects of the native speakers. For exam- ple, she
asked her students to read John Steinback s The Grapes of Wrath in
order to know more about American cultural identity, especially in the
era of the Great Depression.
The importance of teaching cultural aspects of the language is also
emphasized by Gunawan (2005). However, according to him, cultural
materials need to be taught more directly in the speaking classroom,
not incidentally through movies or literary works. Such cultural materials
may include issues such as punctuality, cross-cultural differences in
terms of table manners, clothes, and social relationship. To teach these
materials, for instance, teach- ers need to prepare worksheets or
handouts (e.g., multiple choice question- naire, anecdote texts, and a
list of contradictory situations) containing cross- culturally different
issues that can be used as materials for discussion. Gun- awan pointed
out that such cultural materials will be able to increase the stu- dent s
awareness when using English to interact with native speakers, thus
avoiding cross-cultural misunderstanding.
To sum up, materials for speaking can be prepared either by the
stu- dents based on specific tasks assigned by the teacher or provided
by the teacher alone. In practice the use of these two types of materials
may involve students working individually or in groups. However,
materials prepared by the students may result in memorized or
prefabricated utterances, while those prepared by the teacher are

36
likely to enhance spontaneity in students speaking performance.

Reports on Speaking Assessment

In addition to the pedagogical issues, it is important to be aware of
as- pects related to the teaching of EFL speaking such as the
availability of standards of EFL speaking proficiency that can be used as a
guideline for in- structional activities and the results of tests used to
measure learners speak- ing proficiency.
Rusdi (2003) emphasized the importance of having standards for
stu- dents speaking proficiency as standards will ensure their good
command of English. The standards include what functions of language
should be mas- tered by students and what type of evaluation should
be used to assess stu- dents speaking proficiency. With regard to the
latter in particular, Rusdi ar- gues that students who are considered to
pass a speaking proficiency test are those who acquire more than
seventy percent of the language functions set out in a period of
instruction. Mukminatien (2005) argues that the standards applied for
learners who are still in elementary level of oral proficiency should be
different from those who are already in the higher levels. She sug-
gested that assessment for the former group of students may be
focused on aspects of uterance such as pronunciation, intonation, and
stress, whereas for the latter group of students, assessment should be
focused on language func- tion such as abilities to tell stories, to report
an event, and many other com- municative purposes.
Once the standards for students speaking proficiency have been
deter- mined and the language functions included in the instructional
materials, the next thing to do is to test the students speaking
profiency. Speaking tests may be classified into two: direct approach,
which aims at measuring stu- dents speaking proficiency by asking
them to speak, and indirect approach, which requires them to give or
choose best responses for a speech situation (Mukminatien, 1995). Our
literature review shows that discussion and research results addressing
students speaking proficiency (e.g., Mukminatien,1998) have been
commonly based on the direct approach of testing (e.g., Sulistyo, 1998).
The results of such testing are usually presented in the form of
description of the level of students speaking proficiency, problems the
stu- dents face, and suggested methods to improve students
speaking profi- ciency.

An issue which may appear when applying the direct approach of

test- ing concerns the objectivity of those in charge of testing. According
to Yuli- asri (2005:3-5), to increase objectivity, or reduce subjectivity,
teachers are recommended to use alternative assessment , which is
the antithesis of the standardized assessment or traditional
assessment. In speaking, alterna- tive assessment refers to

37
continuous assessment , a form of evaluation of students speaking
proficiency based on day-to-day record of evaluation. An important part
of this type of assessment is the criteria to judge students performance
(e.g., students speech comprehensibility, organization of the spoken
materials, and the way the messages are delivered) and the quality
categories of the students performance (e.g., superior, advanced,
intermedi- ate, and novice). Yuliasri suggested that the clarity of these
two components of alternative assessment will reduce subjectivity in
assessing students speaking proficiency.
The review of reports on the practice of EFL speaking as presented
above shows that developing oral English proficiency has been the
concern of researchers and educators in Indonesia. The discussion of
various aspects of the practice also suggests the complex nature of
what is involved in de- veloping oral proficiency in a foreign language
context. The review of re- ports on the problems in the teaching of EFL
speaking indicates that teachers are challenged to cope with various
factors in language learning either lin- guistic or non-linguistic ones. A
variety of classroom activities and teaching materials appear to have
been used to deal with these problems and these ef- forts have
contributed to the increase in the learners enthusiasm and interac- tion
their speaking classes. However, as the results are not yet satisfactory,
attention should be given to other factors that might inhibit or facilitate
the production of spoken language. For example, learners need to be
given more sufficient input for acquisition in the classroom through
tasks reflecting the application of information gap feature of natural
communication. Further- more, due to the status of English as a foreign
language, learners need to be encouraged to use English both in and
outside the classroom (see Mukminatien, 1999).
Richards & Renandya (2002) pointed out that the nature of speaking
as well as the factors involved in producing fluent and appropriate
speech, be it linguistic or non-linguistic, needs to be understood in
developing oral profi- ciency. Accordingly, classroom activities should be
selected on the basis of problems learners experience with different
aspects of speaking and the kinds of interaction the activities provide.
For example, form-based instruc- tion (which emphasize language forms,
pronunciation and memorization) is more suitable for elementary level of
EFL learners, while meaning-based in- struction (which focuses on
speaking for communicative purposes) is given to more advanced level
of learners (see Mukminatien, 2005; Murdibjono,
1998). Briefly stated, promoting competent speakers of English,
especially as a foreign language and in the Indonesian context, is not a
simple task; it requires careful analyses of components underlying
effective communica- tion, linguistic as well as non-linguistic factors, and
various aspects contrib- uting to successful instruction.

38
CONCLUSION
As one of the central elements of communication, speaking needs
spe- cial attention and instruction in an EFL context like the one in
Indonesia. Helping learners speak English fluently and appropriately
needs carefully- prepared instruction (e.g., determining learning tasks,
activities and materials) and a lot of practice (i.e., either facilitated by
the teachers in the class- room or independently performed by the
learners outside the classroom) due to minimal exposure to the target
language and contact with native speakers in the context.
We have attempted to review the teaching practice and the research
of EFL speaking in the Indonesian context. The review indicates that
various classroom activities and teaching materials have been created,
selected, and implemented to promote Indonesian learners EFL
speaking proficiency. However, a number of linguistic and non-linguistic
factors need to be considered in conducting speaking classes.
Since there has been no unified national system concerning the
devel- opment of oral proficiency in the English instruction, future
programs and research should be directed toward providing rigorous
guidance in developing competent speakers of English, involving
considerations of components

Comment:

This article reviews the teaching of EFL speaking in the Indonesian

context by outlining the recent development and highlighting the future
trends. It discusses problems in the teaching of EFL speaking, activities
commonly performed, materials usually used in EFL speaking classes,
and assessment of oral English proficiency. Based on the review, the
article also provides some recommendations on what teachers or
researchers of EFL speaking can do in order to achieve a higher quality
of the teaching of EFL speaking and to improve the speaking skill of
Indonesian EFL learners.

27
 CHAPTER IV
THE REPORT OF THESIS IN TEACHING AND
LEARNING SPEAKING

THESIS 1

Title : Teaching Speaking by Using Communicative Approach

Author : Fahmi Nurhakim
Publisher : STKIP Subang
Year of Publication : 2009

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 The Communicative Approach proposed by the writer is
Communicative Language Teaching. This method is identified by five
basic characteristics:
1. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the
target language.
2. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
3. The provision of opportunities for the learners to focus, not only on
language but also on the learning process itself.
4. An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as
important contributing elements to classroom learning.
5. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language
activities outside the classroom.

The aims of the study is to know whether listening to the English

movie can improve students’ speaking skill. The study is oriented towards:
1. To identify the students’ problem in speaking English, and;
2. To discover whether teaching speaking by using communicative
approach is effective to overcome the students’ problems in
speaking.

In order to achieve the aim of the research, the writer used

correlation method. Correlation design is not really considered model
experiments because they do not account for extraneous variable which
may have influenced the results. In this study, the writer took the students
of SD Negeri 2 Pamayonan as the population. The samples were the fifth
grade students. There were no classes and the writer took twenty
students randomly from them as the sample by lottere.

The data needed was taken from a test. The test was used to
identify the students’ achievement. The test was the objective test. In the

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term of multiple-choice items consists of ten items. The writer calculating
the mark of t-value an at least gives the interpretation of the calculation.
Data : The scores of pre-test and post-test
Analysis Data : The writer counted the value of t, the
formula used was

The writer used two groups as the samples, each group consists of
20 and 17 students, and the degree of freedom (df) is 19 and 16 for each
group. Since the two groups were choosen as the representative subjects.
The total df {(Ne-1)+Nc-1)} was 35. The t-observation was 1.966. This t-
observation was greater than t-critical (1.966>1.684). Consequently, it
was quite safe to reject the null hypothesis. It means that the two groups
have different scores on the post-test, and the difference was statistically
significant. So, this fact support the claim that students who were taught
speaking by using Communicative approach get better scores than those
taught conventionally. The experimental teaching program can improve
the students’ speaking skill effectively (24,37%) from that what they got
in the pre-test, while control group can improve the students’ speaking
skill more than the experimental group (154.56%).

The conclusion of this research was that teaching by communicative

approach contributes the improvements of students’ speaking skill, makes
English lesson live, make change from the teacher and text book, helps
the students feedback has been very positive and they were enjoying the
benefit of the communicative approach, so speaking practice becomes
more effective.

THESIS 2

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Title : IMPROVING THE STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL BY USING
ENGLISH QUARTET CARDS FOR THE FOURTH YEAR
STUDENTS OF SDN TLOGOMAS II MALANG
Author : Widya Maretta Lestiani
Publisher : Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang
Year of Publication : 2009

It is not easy to teach speaking to young learners because it needs

good technique and media to motivate them. Media is used by the
teachers in teaching and learning process. One of the appropriate media
that can be functioned to improve the students’ speaking skill is English
Quartet cards. This study aims at improving the students’ speaking skill by
using English Quartet Cards games. In this study, classroom action
research design was used to obtain the information related to the
research problems. The sample of this study was fourth grade students of
SDN Tlogomas II Malang.

The result of this study showed that teaching speaking by using

English Quartet Cards games can improve the students’ speaking skill.
Based on the result of pre-test and post-test, it can be concluded that the
fourth grade students of SDN Tlogomas II Malang achieve better
achievement in speaking after the treatment. It can be seen from the
mean of pre-test and post-test. The mean score of the pre-test was 67.93.
Meanwhile, the mean score of post-test was 87. It means that there was
an improvement on the students’ speaking skill.

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THESIS 3

Title : THE IMPROVEMENT OF STUDENT’S SPEAKING SKILL

THROUGH GUESSING GAMES TECHNIQUE (A Classroom
Action Research at 4th Grade Elementary School)
Author : Widya Maretta Lestiani
Publisher : STKIP Kusuma Bangsa Jakarta
Year of Publication : 2009

The concepts of guessing games which applied in teaching speaking

of this research were as follows

1. Guess what is it? Is it…?

2. Guess Who I am? What is my name?

3. Guess what is there in my bag today?

4. Guess where is it?

The purpose of research is to get the new theory, especially to know

teaching speaking by using games effective at fourth grade of elementary
school. Teacher hopes them to active in practicing English speaking in
class. It is expected that the students can enjoy expressing their ideas,
opinion, and feeling and can match dialogue with the real situation and
condition. Besides that, they can also get fun in learning English in school
especially for learning English speaking.

The design of the study was as follows:

1. Socializing Guessing Games

a. Teacher introduces guessing games

27
 b. Teacher states the aims of guessing games

c. Teacher explains the definition of guessing games

d. Teacher explains the concept of guessing games

e. Teacher has the rules of guessing games

f. Teacher checks students’ understanding

2. Individually or Grouping

a. Teacher asks students to apply this games individually or

b. Teacher asks students to apply this games in a group

3. Distributing Cards

a. Teacher distributes cards as teaching material

b. Teacher explains the use of cards

4. Asking Questions and Giving Answer

a. Teacher asks to practice the games by asking question and

giving answer to each group

b. Teacher asks each group to perform once.

Based on the research, the researcher proposed some advantages of

using teaching speaking through guessing games, as stated below:

1. Using guessing games make students more pleasure from regular

activities in class. It creates a relaxed atmosphere in the

classroom.

2. Using guessing games can encourage the students to

communicate in English because the games are combinations

between language practice with fun and excitement.

27
 3. Guessing games can practice the students’ ability in forming

many kind of dialogues.

While the weaknesses are:

1. In applying guessing games, the teacher needs the students who

are skillful formulating question from dialogue.

2. In applying guessing games, the teacher needs the students

more carefully to make communication.

3. In applying guessing games, the teacher needs the students’

more controlling how to make right pronunciation.

The conclusions of the research were as follows:

1. From the cycle 1, the researcher which got, almost all student

unable to answer and say truly. Even arise is each other

laughing. This thing result student is less enthusiastically even

class atmosphere become clamor. And their equip the answer

showed that they had a few self confidence.

2. From the cycle 2, the researcher must make savety felling for

the students. And make the atmosphere of the class being fun.

There was little increasing in their pronounciation from the

dialogue. As far the tasks were given individually. In the cycle

two the researcher find there was a will to the students to

overcome their problems in pronunciation and speaking skill.

27
 Few students showed increasing their speaking and they could

make simple dialogue with their partner.

3. There was increasing in their speaking ability and the responses

showed that they had motivation in learning speaking. Their

anthussiasme were high when that reseacher choosed simple

conversation from the dialogue that they make.

In cylcle 3 the competition was held among the groups, then the

students were more interested when did the conversation with their

group. They were still to improve their speaking ability to be more

succesful and more confident. Make some group on the class can improve

the ability to speak.

The conclusion from three cycles that the process of the

improvement student’s speaking skill through guessing games, first that

the researcher must make situation of the classroom more conducive so

that the students can fell more safely. The researcher has to choose

effective guessing to make involve and participant from students.

The students more encourages and more active when the researcher

gives the materials by group, they more confidence to improve their

ability speaking skill and to make conversation by their group.

Nevertheless, many factors hamper students to speak English,

sometimes it comes from lack of teacher’s technique teaching. The

students need to learn more speaking of the target language. Guessing

28
games is one of the techniques that have a positive effect on students

speaking knowledge to make confidence and encourage.

THESIS 4

Title : Using Strip-story to Improve Eight Graders' Speaking

Ability
Author : Fanny Septya Christy
Publisher : Universitas Negeri Malang
Year of Publication : 2008

In this globalization era in which communication takes an important

role in world information, speaking is one of the important English skills is
considered important to be taught. In fact, speaking is not an easy skill to
be mastered. Most of the Junior High School students are unable to speak
English well although they have learned the language for at least three
years. This may be caused by many psychological factors, such as
inhibition, anxiety, low self-esteem, fear of making mistakes, and shyness.
It is also possible that it is caused by external factors such as the lack of
speaking opportunity to practice English both inside and outside the
classroom. One alternative to help teachers to create natural
communication is using strip-story. Strip-story is a variation of jigsaw
technique in which each student is given one sentence of a story at
random, and then the sentences must be re-arranged to form a story
through verbal interaction.

Teaching speaking using strip-story will help teacher to develop

students' speaking ability through real communication activity and it will
also help students to improve their speaking ability through a comfortable

28
way of mastering English. The procedure that is used in strip-story activity
is as follows: first, the teacher decides the groups. The teacher divides the
class into several groups. Each group consist of eight students. While
waiting for the students to sit with their group, the teacher sticks the
strips to the wall. Each member of the group decides which strip that
he/she likes. And then the teacher gives students time to come to the
strips and memorize the sentence. The students have to memorize it, no
hand-writing is allowed here. Then they discuss the sentences with their
group and rearrange the sentence to form a story through oral
communication. Finally, they have to present their discussion. And after
each group present their work, the teacher together with the students
discuss the right answer.

Based on the result on the study, it is found out that after being
treated with the strip-story strategy the teaching and learning process
becomes much better. It also brings good impact on increasing the
learning process and they can work as a group. The result on language
function shows that in the strip-story activity they speak with occasional
hesitation, use adequate vocabulary, use comprehensible pronunciation,
and use complex sentence in asking and responding. Most of the students
started to speak more bravely and without feeling shy anymore. To
conclude, the strategy of strip-story applied in this study has succeeded in
solving the students' problem in improving students' speaking ability.

THESIS 5

Title : TEACHING SPEAKING THROUGH DIALOGUE TO THE

ELEVENTH YEAR STUDENT: A CASE STUDY AT SMK
MUHAMMADIYAH 1 JATINOM
Author : RINI WIDIASTUTI
Publisher : UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH SURAKARTA
Year of Publication : 2007

28
 The writer conducts descriptive qualitative research which describes
the process of teaching speaking through dialogue at the eleventh year
students of SMK Muhammadiyah 1 Jatinom. So, in this case the writer does
not need statistic data. Here are the procedures of analyzing the data:

1. Describing the teaching speaking components that covers:

a. The curriculum involves the goal, syllabus, and teaching material

b. Method and technique of teaching speaking

c. Media of teaching speaking

d. System of evaluation used by the teacher

2. Discussing findings of the research. Describes the process of

teaching speaking through dialogue based on teaching speaking
components.
3. Drawing conclusion briefly and then giving some suggestion.

This research paper is aimed at describing the process of teaching

speaking through dialogue focused on the curriculum, method and
technique of teaching speaking, teaching media, and system of
evaluation. The source of data is teaching learning process of dialogue
technique at SMK Muhammadiyah 1 Jatinom, and documents. In this
research, the writer does the classroom observation and interview to the
English teacher.

In collecting the data, the writer focuses on dialogue, the teaching

learning-process, the students activities, the teacher’s and student’s roles,
the teacher and student’s problem in teaching-learning speaking, and
problem-solving by the teacher in teaching speaking.

27
 Based on the data analysis, the writer finds that the result of
teaching speaking by using dialogue at the eleventh year students of SMK
Muhammadiyah 1 Jatinom as follows:

1. The curriculum of SMK Muhammadiyah 1 Jatinom especially at

the eleventh level uses KBK. In KBK, the goal of teaching
speaking is to gain the students to be able to communicate in
English on elementary level. Consequently, they can express
various feelings or senses;
2. Method and technique of teaching speaking. In teaching
speaking the English teacher uses Communicative approach
and dialogue technique;
3. Media of teaching speaking. Media an very needed to
successful teaching learning process, so the English teacher of
SMK Muhammadiyah 1 Jatinom uses a blackboard and
cassette (CD); and
4. System evaluation of speaking activities. To evaluate the
students performance the teacher gives comments and mark,
this way is very needed for a teacher to know the student’s
capability and to make the lesson better. Therefore, the result
of teaching speaking through dialogue is satisfying.

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THESIS 6

Title : USING ROLE PLAY IN TEACHING SPEAKING

Author : Ayu Diyah Harni Susanti
Publisher : UNIVERSITAS ISLAM NEGERI SYARIF HIDAYATULLAH
JAKARTA
Year of Publication : 2007

The objective of the study is to find out that using role play in teaching speaking is
quite effective. Therefore, the writer would like to prove whether the scores of speaking
taught by using role play better or not. The writer also wants to know the process of role play
activities.
The method that is used in this study is a quantitative method. The study is based on
both library and a field research. In the field research, the data collected by teaching and
observing the subjects.
This thesis is systematically divided into five chapters. The following is short
description about what each chapter contains. Chapter One: Introduction. It includes
background of study, identification, limitation and formulation of study, objective of study,
method of study, and organization of writing.

Chapter Two: Theoretical Framework. It discusses about speaking; definition of

speaking, teaching speaking, activities to promote speaking, and guidance for teachers in
teaching speaking. It also discusses about role play; definition of role play, types and
procedures in using role play, and significance of role play in teaching speaking.

Chapter Three: Research Methodology. It includes objective of study, place and time
of study, research method, population and sampling, instrumentation, procedures of data
collecting and technique of data analysis.

Chapter Four: Research Findings. It includes description of data and interpretation.

Chapter Five: Conclusion and Suggestion. It contains conclusion and suggestion from the
writer based on the previous discussion.

27
 This research was taken in Islamic Junior High School Soebono Mantofani at Jl.
Sumatera No. 75 Jombang . Ciputat, Tangerang, on September 20th to December 14th 2006.

Having analyzed the data of pre-test and post-test by using t-test formula, the result shows
that the coefficient is 13,420. It means that there is a significance increase in teaching
speaking by using role play.

From the result of calculation, it is obtained the value of the t observation (to) is 13,420
the degree of freedom (df) is 29 (obtained from N-1) = (30 . 1 = 29). The writer used the
degree of significance of 5% and 1%. In the table of significance, it can be seen that on the df
29 and on the degree of significance of5% and 1%, the value of degree of significance are
2,045 and 2,756. If the to compared with each value of the degrees of significance, the result
is 2,045 <13,420 > 2,756. Since to score obtained from the result of calculating, the
alternative hypothesis (Ha) is accepted and the null hypothesis (Ho) is rejected.

1. If the result of t observation is higher than t table (to > tt), the null hypothesis (Ho) is
rejected and alternative hypothesis (Ha) is accepted. It means that there is a
significance difference between variable X and variable Y.
2. If the result of t observation is lower than t table (to < tt), the null hypothesis (Ho) is
accepted and alternative hypothesis (Ha) is rejected. It means that there is no
significance difference between variable X and variable Y.

Based on the result of the data analysis, it is proven that the students. Score of speaking
taught by using role play is better. It means that the use of role play in teaching speaking is
quite effective. Another reason based on the students. responses is because most students find
that role play is enjoyable. This reason leads to better attention in learning and stimulate them
to participate in role play activities.

But the problem that they faced mostly is lack of confidence and lack of vocabulary. In
the early stages of the role play the students were uncomfortable and uncertain. This led to

29
initial lapses of silence. But soon they began helping one another to decide who should speak.
Towards the end, their shyness left them and they began prompting each other with ideas.

Conclusion of the research:

1. From the result of the analysis of the research, it is proven that the students. score of
speaking taught by using role play is better. This result has answered the research
question that the use of role play in teaching speaking is quite effective.
2. The use of role play makes the speaking and learning activity more enjoyable and
interesting. It is because role play helps the shy students by providing a mask, where
students with difficulty in conversation are liberated. In addition, it is fun and most
students will agree that enjoyment leads to better learning.
3. In role play, the world of the classroom is broadened to include the outside world.
This offers a much wider range of language opportunities. So, the students can be
anyone and in any situation they wish.
4. The use of role play makes the class more active and alive. Students are willing to
participate without any forces from the teacher.
5. The use of role play makes the students more motivated in learning and easier to grasp
the lesson.
6. Problems that the students faced mostly in role play are lack of confidence and lack of
vocabulary.

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