Teaching Speaking in English Class

Most Indonesian students think that English is difficult to study, especially speaking. Facing this problem, English teachers must make the way of teaching speaking easy for the students. They should avoid becoming over-critical of the students’ performance. As stated by Cameron (2001: 53), speaking is the active use of language so that other people can make sense of them. William T. Littlewood (1984: 97) states that the English teachers should try to create space for each student to express himself in the speaking class and work to produce a relaxed classroom atmosphere with cooperative relationship. 

The purpose and function of English teaching are to gain the communicative competence. The stress is on the meaningful and functional communication, so that the teaching process has to be related to the context and the situation of the language activities. The process of teaching should be directed to make students able to communicate in English instead of memorizing the grammatical forms. 

As one of the language activities, speaking or conversation is also aimed to enable the students to apply their English in real life for communication. Paulston and Bruder (1975: 55) state that the purpose of teaching speaking is to use language in communication as social interaction.

Classroom is one of the communication settings. There are teachers, students, and educational media used for the classroom activities. English teachers should provide proper activities which can promote communications among students in the classroom. A language classroom in which communication is the objective should include student-centered activities. It means that the students should be active participants.

As stated by Jeremy Harmer (2002: 271): 

We can ask our students to act out scenes from plays and their course books, sometimes filming the results. Students will often act out dialogues they have written themselves. This frequently involves them in their speaking ability. We need to work to create the right kind of supportive atmosphere in the class. We need to give students time to rehearse their dialogues before they are asked to perform them. 

We can go through the student’s presentation as if we were directors, drawing attention to appropriate stress, intonation, and speed. By giving students motivation before they give their final performances, we ensure that presentation in front of the class is both learning and a language producing activity.

Besides providing proper materials, the teacher also creates positive condition for having a good communication in the classroom. The situation should encourage interaction and communication between the teacher and the students especially among the students themselves.

Spontaneous communication and free interaction are possible in any language only when teachers and their students have built up a warm, uninhibited, confident, sympathetic relationship and when such a relationship exists among the students themselves. (Rivers, 1983: ix)

Paulstan and Bruder (1975: 55) state that the purpose of teaching speaking is to use language in communication as social interaction. Speaking is one of the components of language, besides phonology / orthography, structure and rate and general fluency. Students who want to learn a target language in this case English, of course, have to learn those elements. In teaching speaking, we may be able to get a better understanding of how our learners learn to speak a foreign language through this new method.

There are many ways in teaching speaking. One of this is using little bazaar activity. According to Chang Feng Hsin and Chen Shih Jin, techniques that can be used in teaching English speaking are:

1. Retelling activities.  In this practical teaching technique, the students will have opportunities to active participation in speaking English. 
2. Using dialogues. “Fill in” dialogue is particularly appealing to students. The technique deals with the interaction aspects of speaking. On the dialogue, it plays a rule to practice functions of language like greeting, agreeing, disagreeing, and asking from information and suggestion. 
3. Role play. As we all know, “role play” is frequently employed to practice speaking. 
4. Drama. Drama can be used to encourage general oral fluency, or to train students for specific situations especially where they are studying English.
5. Description. Names of persons and things that are known are written on pieces of paper, which are distributed among the students.
6. Discussion. Discussion is essential device for our oral communication. In this case, the writer used discussion as a teaching technique.

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