Byrne 1984:9 in Leo and Cely 2010 states that the main goal of teaching speaking is oral fluency: the ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably,
accurately, and without undue hesitation. To achieve the goal, the students have to move from the imitating a model or responding to cues to the use of the language
to express their own ideas. Based on the concepts, the teacher has to provide students with the materials which are able to motivate students to develop their
speaking skills, so that they can communicate intelligibly, reasonably, and accurately in everyday life. In this case, the use of authentic materials that enables
students to learn the real use of the language will be a good alternative. Louma 2009 also lists some features of spoken discourse, those are:
a composed of idea units conjoined short phrases and clauses
b planned e.g., a lecture or unplanned e.g., conversation
c employs more vague or generic words than written language
d employs fixed phrases, filters, and hesitation makers
e contains slips and errors reflecting online processing
f involves reciprocity i.e., interactions are jointly constructed
g shows variation e.g., between formal and casual speech, reflecting
speaker roles, speaking purposes, and the context.
b. Types of Spoken Language
Brown 2001:251 classifies the types of oral language into two main categories which are monologue and dialogue. Monologue that involves only one
speaker can be subdivided into planned and unplanned monologues. Dialogues that involve two or more speakers can be subdivided into interpersonal maintain
social relations and transactional exchange of information conversations. In each case, participants deal with shared knowledge or background information.
Participants who have familiar interlocutors will be able to produce more assumptions and meanings to comprehend the conversation. On the contrary, if
participants involved in the conversation are unfamiliar each other, they have to make the meaning more explicit to avoid misunderstanding.
Monologue Dialogue
Planned Unplanned
Interpersonal Transactional
Unfamiliar Familiar Unfamiliar Familiar
Figure 1: Types of Oral Language in Brown 2001:251
c. Micro skills of Speaking
Brown 2001:271 proposes the micro skills of oral communication that becomes the basic principles in teaching speaking. Those basic principles are:
1 produce chunks of language of different lengths
2 orally produce differences among the English phonemes and
allophonic variants 3
produce English stress patterns, words in stresses and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours
4 produce reduced forms of words and phrases
5 use an adequate number of lexical units words in order to
accomplish pragmatic purposes 6
produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery 7
monitor your own oral production and use various strategic devices – pauses, fillers, self
– corrections, backtracking – to enhance the clarity of the message
8 use grammatical word classes e.g., nouns, verbs, etc., systems e.g.,
tense, agreement, pluralization, word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms
9 produce speech in natural constituents – in appropriate phrases, pause
groups, breath groups, and sentences. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms
10 use cohesive devices in spoken discourse
11 accomplish appropriately communicative functions according to
situations, participants, and goals 12
use appropriate registers, implicatures, pragmatic conventions, and other sociolinguistics features in face
– to – face conversations 13
convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given
information, generalization, and exemplification 14
use facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language to convey meanings
