4 Interactive
The differences between responsive and interactive speaking are in the length and complexity of the interaction, which sometimes include multiple
exchanges and participants. Interaction can take the two forms of transactional languages, which has the purpose of exchanging specific information, or
interpersonal matters, and which have the purpose of maintaining social relationships. In the three dialogues cited above, A and B were transactional, and
C was interpersonal. In interpersonal exchanges, oral production can become pragmatically complex with the need to peak in a casual register and use colloquial
language, ellipsis, slang, humor, and other sociolinguistic conversations. 5
Extensive monologue Extensive oral production tasks include speeches, oral presentations, and
storytelling, during which the opportunity for oral interaction from listeners is either highly limited perhaps to nonverbal responses or ruled out together. Language
style is frequently more deliberative planning is involved and formal for extensive tasks, but we cannot rule out certain informal monologues such as casually
delivered speech for example, my vacation in the mountains, a recipe for outstanding pasta primavera, recounting the plot of a novel or movie
d. Micro- and Macro-skills of Speaking
Speaking consists of micro- and macro-skills. Brown 2004 proposes micro- and macro-skills of speaking. Micro-skills of speaking are about producing
morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Macro-skills of speaking are about fluency, discourse, function, style, nonverbal communication, and the like.
According to Brown 2004: 142, there are 16 different skills in English as mentioned below.
1 Micro-skills
a Produce differences among English Phonemes and allophonic variants.
b Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
c Produce English stress patterns, word in stressed and unstressed positions,
rhymic structure, and intonation contours. d
Produce reduced forms of words and phrases. e
Use an adequate number of lexical units words to accomplish pragmatic purposes.
f Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
g Monitor one’s own oral production and use various strategic devices – pauses,
fillers, self-corrections, backtracking – to enchance the clarity of the message. h
Use grammatical word classes noun, verb, etc., systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralisation, word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
i Produce speech in natural constituents: in appropriate phrases, pause groups,
breath groups, and sentence constituents. j
Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms. k
Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
2 Macro-skills
a Appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations,
participants, and goals. b
Use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and –yielding, interrupting, and
other sociolinguistics features in face-to-face conversations. c
Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events and feelings, new information and given
information, generalization and exemplification. d
Convey facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
e Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing keywords,
rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding
you. Those micro- and macro-skills can help teachers to design appropriate
speaking tasks to students. Brown 2004 also proposes some issues that should be considered as the teachers set out to design speaking task:
a No speaking task is capable of isolating the single skill of oral production.
b Eliciting can be tricky because beyond the word level, spoken language offers a
number of productive options to test takers. c
It is important to carefully specify scoring procedures. According to these issues, teachers should be careful in designing speaking
tasks. Speaking tasks cannot be isolated from listening activities as the input.
e. Components Underlying Speaking Effectiveness
