language knowledge has to be integrated into learners’ own purposes to meet their needs.
B. Teaching Speaking
1. Speaking Ability
Harmer 2004 divides the English skills into two groups; those are receptive skills and productive skills. Dealing with those two language skills,
speaking is categorized as productive skills in which it deals with the knowledge of language features and the ability to process the idea and language on the spot
through mental or social processing. Furthermore, Harmer explains that the language features related to speaking consist of four elements: those are connected
speech, expressive devices, lexis and grammar, and negotiation language. In terms of mental processing, Harmer suggests three stages in what extent a speaker
produce a language: those are language processing, interacting with others, and on the spot information processing.
In language processing, a speaker should be able to process the language in their head and arrange into a coherent order so that it can convey a
comprehensible and intended meaning. After language processing, communication will be real by interacting with others, at least it consists of two
people sharing their idea into a language. When interacting with others occurs, sometimes people should process the information right away to make the
communication effective. This stage is called information processing. However, Harmer suggests that this stage is very culture specific.
In carried out fluent speaking, the speaker should deal with the language features and mental processing. It is not an easy thing, however, so that it needs
practices The importance of speaking is briefly explained by Freeborn 1986: 76
that people learn to talk before they learn to read and write. It is not merely something that people know about the language but how people made it concrete,
and transmitted and received by one or more of the human senses. Similar with Freeborn statement, Alexander 1975: vii-x suggests that language learners are
successful when they can carry out meaning from what they have learnt. The success is not measured by how much the language learners have learnt the
language features but how well the language learners do performance in the reality. Mostly, the performance is shown in speaking since it is the most
noticeable language skills. In addition, Richards 2008: 23 also states that The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second-language or
foreign-language learners.
2. The Nature of Speaking
Speaking is the active use of language to express meanings so that other people can understand them Cameron, 2001: 4. Related definition stated by
Fulcher 2003: 23, he defines that speaking is the verbal use of language to communicate with others. Speaking is the process of building and sharing
meaning through the use of verbal and non verbal symbols in a variety of contexts Chaney, 1998: 13. From those explanations, it means that to share ideas,
opinions, and other information in variety of contexts, people can use a verbal language such as utterances and non verbal language such as gestures.
Dealing with speaking, Brown 2001: 267 argues that when someone can speak a language it means that he can carry on a conversation reasonably
competently. He also states that the benchmark of successful language acquisition is almost always the demonstration of ability to accomplish pragmatic goals
through an interactive discourse with other speakers. When someone wants to have oral communication, there are some criteria
that need to be noticed. Nunan 1989: 32 states that successful oral communication involves developing the following aspects
a. The ability to articulate phonological features of the language
comprehensibly. b.
Mastery of stress, rhythm, and intonation pattern. c.
An acceptable degree of fluency. d.
Transactional and interpersonal skills. e.
Skills in taking short and long speaking turn taking. f.
Skills in the management of interactions. g.
Skills in negotiating meaning. h.
Conversational listening skills successful conversations require good listeners and good speakers
i. Skills in knowing about and negotiating purposes for
conversations. j.
Using appropriate conversational formulae and filler.
3. Criteria of Good Speaking
In a real life situation, when a person speaks language fluently, it means that he she has good speaking ability. However, it is not only fluency that can be
used to assess someone’s speaking ability. There are four criteria according to Brown 2001: 268 to assess speaking ability. Those four criteria are:
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