Teaching Speaking : What Makes Speaking Difficult?

1. Clustering

Fluent speech is phrasal not word by word. Learners can organize their output both cognitively and physically trough such clustering.

2. Redundancy

The speaker has opportunity to make meaning clearer through redundancy of language. Learners can capitalize on this feature of spoken language.

3. Reduced forms

Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels etc all form special problems in teaching spoken English. Students who don't learn colloquial contractions can sometimes develop a stilted, bookish quality that in turn stigmatizes them.

4. Performance variables.

One of the advantages of spoken language is that the process of thinking as you speak allows you to manifest a certain number of performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking and corrections. Learners can be taught how to pause and hesitate.

5. Colloquial language.

Make sure the students are reasonably well acquainted with the words, idioms and phrases of colloquial language and that they get practise in producing these forms.

6. Rate of delivery

Another salient characteristic of fluency is a rate of delivery. One of the task in teaching spoken English is to help learners achieve an acceptable speed along with other attributes of fluency.

7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation.

The stress timed rhythm of spoken English and its intonation patterns convey important message.

8. Interaction

The creativity of conversational negotiation.

Source :Teaching by Principles by H. Douglas Brown.

future educator.

shikin hasnan.