HOW TO TEACH SPEAKING SKILL

HOW TO TEACH SPEAKING SKILL

Presented by: Hendra, S.Pd / NIM: 060954

Principally, language is as a means of delivering ideas, thought, opinion and feeling. Therefore, teaching a language must emphasize on the students’ communication ability (Chomsky: 1957).

One of the main features of communicative teaching is an active interaction among student and student, student and teacher, and teacher with the whole class. Through teaching learning, teacher influences students’ activities to achieve the goals (Alwasilah, 2003). So, teaching speaking is a process of communication and interaction among the teacher and all students in the class by using target language.

According to Angela Scarino (1994: 3-6) in Azis and Alwasilah (2000), there are eight principles of learning communicative language; namely:

1. Need analysis    
2. Giving more chances to learners to explore themselves in communication.
3. Creating conducive situation for learners that encourage them.
4. Focusing the teaching on strategy and skill that enhance learning achievement.
5. Encouraging students to speak with the native speaker or at least with people who have been abroad where English is spoken.
6. Giving consciousness of role of culture and language.
7. Giving appropriate feedback for the learners’ advance.
8. Giving the learners an authority to study by their own ways.

Bygate (1987) said that verbal interaction can be seen by routine ness, participants continuously negotiate meaning, what he/she must say, to whom he/she says and about what he/she says.

In this respect, I would like to try to give some techniques to teach speaking skill based on my empirical study and readings:

1.      Class discussion

Class discussion is the easiest communicative activities for students, and the topics must not be restricted. Teacher can only suggest them what topic should be easily discussed; by offering some provocative issues. However, all students can propose their own topic to discuss based on their interests. Thus, the discussion will run well and all students will also participate in the topic being discussed.  Their focus is no more on language but something that they want to deliver.

But before performing discussion, it would be better to:

þ  Arrange group discussion

þ  Use discussion clues

þ  Make a Proposal project

þ  Prepare a Speech presentation

2.      Drama activity

Role play is the most technique that applied in teaching language, especially in what kinds of language skill which they want to master and can be clearly restricted. Besides it is fun, it also offers mental escaping from the class atmosphere.  It can be done by:

þ  Choosing a role

þ  Guided role play

þ  Free role play

þ  Free role play from texts

3.      Information Gap

Information gap will happen if teacher give some hypothesis questions, so the students will be eager to know the answer. Meanwhile, if the teacher gives some question with exact answer, there will be no information gap here. Thus, as a creative teacher, he will use information gap to develop speaking skill.

Some activities in Information Gap:

þ  Cartoon sequence

þ  Which face?

þ  Who’s who?

þ  Describe and draw

þ  Loss of memory

þ  Jumbled picture

þ  Shared information

Bandung, September 30, 2006

References:

& Azies, Furqonul and Alwasilah, A. Chaedar. 2000, Pengajaran bahasa Komunikatif. Bandung: PT Remaja Rosda Karya.

& Alwasilah, A. Chaedar. 2003. Kompetensi komunikatif dan keterampilan mengajar bahasa asing. Bandung. Makalah pada pelatihan Guru bahasa Inggris dan instruktur lab MA se-Jawa barat.