A. Maghsoudi - Speaking

Introduction

The speaking in second language learning is so crucial and is the most challenging skill among four important skills. However good a student may be at listening and understanding, it need not follow that he will speak well. Speaking plays a vital role in learning to use language as a communication means and is the performance of the speaker’s competence. Speaking a language is an encoding activity that involves more than knowing the linguistic components of the message. Developing language skills requires more than grammatical comprehension and vocabulary memorization. The speaking skill includes a dynamic interrelation between speakers and hearers and it is a complex skill. The speakers must produce the sentences which are linguistically correct and pragmatically suitable utterances. This essay introduces the approaches in the last few decades about speaking it considers how this knowledge becomes the basis for teaching speaking from communicative perspective.

Approaches to learning and teaching speaking

There are three important approaches that changed over the decades and are described below:

1. Speaking within an environmentalist approach

The researchers in this approach focused on the external environment of a person than the internal mental process. The learning of speaking was followed by stimulus-response-reinforcement pattern. In this pattern the learners were exposed to linguistic input and it was a stimulus and the response was repeating and

imitating. So the learning of speaking was according to imitating and repeating and memorizing. The ALM was focused on the oral skills than the written ones. In this approach the focus was also on the good pronunciation. In this approach the role of brain was ignored.

2. Speaking within an innatist approach

In this approach Chomsky said that the children are born with an innate potential for language. According to this approach the speakers have an innate intelligence for language learning and have internal faculty that can produce unlimited number of words and sentences. The learners in this approach were active thinkers to produce language. In this approach language was a contextualized process included the mental transformation and an internalized system of rules. In this method the learner had an important role that had the opportunities of using language more creatively. The speaking was an abstract process and the innatist couldn’t make a relationship between the language and the meaning and it should be exposed to a social environment.

3. Speaking within an interactionist approach

In this approach the researchers focused on the role of language environment in interaction with the innate capacity for language development. One of the great thinkers of this approach was Levelt. He said that there is a model for speaking regularly that has for levels: 1) conceptualization, which includes the selection of the message according to situational context and special purpose; 2) formulation, which focuses on the selection of the correct words; 3) articulation, which focuses on the motor control and articulatory organs; 4) monitoring, which allows speakers to identify the errors and correct the mistakes. The Levelt’s model involved both functional and pragmatic point of view. The view of function said that people use language for different functions. So the speaking skill was viewed as both context of culture and the context of situation. In this approach genre was a purposeful

event which was made according to culture and communicative events. And the pragmatics involved how speakers were able to perform actions by producing speech acts such as requesting, apologizing, complaining and refusing. In this approach the researchers focused on the pragmatics concerned speakers` appropriate use of utterance in different situational contexts. The politeness theory was developed and in had three socio-pragmatic factors: 1) social distance which was the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the hearer; 2)power which is the relative status of a speaker with the hearer; 3) degree of imposition which was the type of imposition the speaker forcing on hearer. This approach had a theoretical foundation for teaching the speaking skill within a communicative competence framework.

Types of speaking

1. Talking to

Describes real language situations in which the speaker is addressing but not interacting with the listeners. There is no two-way information exchange, and the speaker does not expect an answer from the audience. Consequently, he has more time to plan his speech. “Talking to” is more complete than conversational speech. In “talking to”, the speaker may make adjustments to his language according to the reaction he may get from his audience through eye contact. It includes unsustained and sustained speech. Such as greeting and answering the questions for unsustained speech and describing something, giving directions, giving speech in class and lecturing for sustained speech.

2. Talking with

“Talking with” refers to social interaction activities where a two-way information exchange takes place. “Talking with” includes both decoding and encoding that is the speaker is expected to negotiate meaning with the interlocutors and has to adjust the message to the demands of the communicative context.

Communication strategies

Speakers tend to change their way of speaking to make it sound more like the speech of the person they are addressing. This is done to assure that the speaker understands them. Caretaker speech, foreigner talk and teacher talk are examples of this linguistic phenomenon. The strategies are different according to situation, context, and the listener`s proficiency level. Sometimes speakers try to avoid difficult words and structures and use simpler structures and words instead. This is called avoidance strategy and is often used by language learners. Other communication strategies used by language learners are paraphrasing, borrowing, appeals to assistance and mime.

Conclusion

The speaking skill has been important for researchers and teachers over the past decades. The active production of language in a classroom has not always been the goal of language teaching. Speaking became a major concern of language teaching after the emergence of direct method. A shift in pedagogy towards a more functional perspective took place after Hymes`s definition of communicative competence. This signaled an important step toward the development of communicative language teaching. Stress is now placed on active meaningful production by the learner and on engagement on message-focused activity, which simulates the contexts and conditions of genuine communication.