2. 1. 3 Teaching Speaking
The main purpose of learning English as a foreign language is to master the language and to be able to apply it in the real world. However, this idea has been
so long gone in the ideal world of grammar, structure, reading, and writing. Especially, when the students meet the final test in the end of the semester, the
test that they have to go through is reading and writing. As a result, many English teachers at school give more focus on the learning of grammar and reading rather
than give more focus on students’ speaking and listening ability. Another result is the students are created to be the passive ones rather than the active ones. This
condition can be seen from the eighth grade students of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika Junior High School. If they have learnt English for one year in the previous level,
seventh grade, then why they cannot even speak the simplest words of English such as introduction? Giving more focus on grammar and reading are not the
wrong things to do. However, as a teacher, we need to teach the English skills in balance, means how much you teach written skill in the classroom will be as
much as you teach oral skills to the students. One point that the teacher must remember, when the students graduate from the school and start to face the real
world by looking for some jobs to survive their futures and lives, the person who can speak English fluently will have more chance to survive especially in the 21st
of century when the government has opened the free trade with many countries. Many foreign investors will come to Indonesia and how can we work together
with them if we cannot even understand their language? The poor assumption of teaching English in Indonesia is that many teachers
think that their students will not understand the words that they are spoken if they PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
speak fully English in the classroom. This assumption has led the teachers to teach English with the first language such as Indonesian, and sometimes even with
Javanese. This poor condition of course does not give any benefit at all to the students. How can the students be able to speak English if they never heard the
teacher communicate in English? How can they be brave to speak English if the teacher never gives encouragement to the students to practice the language?
Surely hiring a native speaker to teach English is a good way to do, but of course it is not an easy way to do if the school financial cannot support it. Therefore, a
local teacher can be a replacement model of the native speaker. Teaching speaking can be a hard way to do if the students are not quite
familiar with the vocabulary. Therefore, as a teacher, we need to supply the vocabulary to the students, teach them how to say it, and how to apply it in the
real conversation. Since the language of speaking can be a bit different than the language of writing, the teacher should give the clear explanation about it. If the
students only imitate the words from the text book, the result is their language will sound very bookish. This is where the teacher’s part is highly needed to give more
examples about how to give more communicative language to the students. The teacher can start it by giving simple instructions in the classroom. Between the
instructions, ‘listen to the conversation and fill in the missing words’ and ‘I want you to listen to the conversation and after that I want you to fill in the missing
words. Do you understand?’, the second instruction sounds more communicative and spontaneous. Willis in Pawlak Klimzcak 2015 states that the features of
spontaneous interaction include repetition and checking moves are much more the kind of thing that would be produced in the real time and they are considered
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