Promoting Speaking Skills

Communicative language teaching concerns with all the skills and their integrated usage. In promoting speaking skills particular attention is paid on ways of developing speaking skills.

Teaching speaking not only linguistic competence, but also sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic, socio-cultural and social competence should be developed as the components of communicative ability. Speaking activities aim to develop the confidence, desire and ability to use the target language not only accurately but also appropriately and effectively for the purpose of communication.

The use of communication strategies (Strategic competence)is effective ways to compensate for gaps in communicative ability.

Language is a tool of communication, yet none of us has such a perfect command of it, not even in our native language, that we do not encounter communication problems. Communicating through a language we may get stuck in a sentence constitution, use words that mean sth. else to our partner or we may simply not know what to call sth. or formulate sth. We often say “I don’t know how to put it into words” and not only in a foreign language, but also in our native tongue.

To overcome these difficulties there are a number of communication strategies:

• Retracing (when getting stuck in a sentence structure: “Sorry, I’ll start again”)

• Rephrasing (“Let me put it in a different way”)

• Substitution:

• by a general word (thing, person)

• by a pronoun (this it, they, sth)

• by a subordinate (“free” for an “oak-tree”, “meat” for “mutton”)

• by a synonym (“discuss” for “debate”)

• description by means of:

• general physical properties (colour, size)

• specific features (it has 4 legs)

• interaction (functional characteristics)

• demonstration (here, look at this…)

• gesture, mime, sounds

• appeal for assistance (Pardon? Will you say that again? What do you mean by that? etc)

These strategies may lead to some errors. The learners should be made aware of the strategies used in their native language, and how they might employ them in the target language. Activities designed to practice strategies, in particular, paraphrasing, describing, rephrasing and substitution, help to foster confidence in learners ability to communicate even with limited resources.

Organizing Communicative Activities

One virtual component of communicative ability is strategic competence, which requires suitable classroom activities. The activities should be developed in situation where the learner must whish and be able to engage in communication.

Real satisfaction and confidence are achieved through successful communication. So the learners must be involved in tasks suited to their interest and linguistic development. and facilitated by the proper game activities.

A variety of activities to promote the development of speaking skills: dialogues, role play, simulation, the learner can speak personally in the classroom situation, to know each other better. They exchange information, express feelings and values through interviews, surveys, games etc and this way they become involved in discussions, story telling and different projects.

Here are examples of some popular general types of communicative activities. In every case, we are primarily concerned with enabling and encouraging communication.