xxviii English Communication. TOEIC is a
standard evaluation to assess students‘ English proficiency.
Speaking is a very important part of second language learning. The ability to communicate in a second language clearly and efficiently contributes to the
success of the learner in school and their success later in every phase of life. Therefore, speaking class should have more portions. It means that the teacher
have to give time as much as possible for the students to speak. English speaking class should be developed through various controlled conversation. Besides,
English is also used for a language of instruction in the classroom. The curriculum says 2004: 18.
“Unsur komunikasi hendaknya lebih ditekankan pada berbagai latihan untuk siswa. Artinya guru harus memberikan waktu sebanyak-banyaknya
bagi siswa untuk berbicara, sedangkan guru berbicara dikurangi. Selain itu, bahasa Inggris harus digunakan sebagai bahasa instruksional di
dalam kelas”. However, the teachers do not focus their teaching on speaking competence
but more on written. They focused on preparing the students for the final exam or UNAS. They felt guilty if their scores are low.
2. Teaching Speaking a. Micro and Macro-skills of Speaking
Brown 2003: 142-143 explains that a list of speaking skill can be drawn up for the purpose to serve as a taxonomy of skills from which we will
select one or several that will become the objectives of an assessment task. He suggests micro skills and macro skills to cope in speaking class.
The micro-skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes morphemes, words, collations, and phrasal units. The macro-skills
xxix imply the speaker‘s focus on the larger elements: fluency, discourse, function,
style, cohesion, nonverbal communication and strategic option. The micro and macro-skills total roughly 16 objectives to assess in
speaking are described as follows: 1 Micro-skills
a. Produce chunks of language of different length.
b. Orally produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic
variants. c.
Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic 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 your own oral production and use various strategic devices-- pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking
– to enhance the clarity of the message.
h. Use grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc, systems e.g., tense,
agreement, pluralization, word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms. i.
Produce speech in natural constituents: in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breathe groups, and sentence constituents.
j. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical form.
k. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
2 Macro-skills a.
Accomplish appropriately communicative function according to situations, participants, and goals.
b. Use appropriate styles, registers, implicative, redundancies, pragmatic
conventions, conversation rules, floor keeping and yielding, interrupting, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to face conversations.
xxx 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.
Use facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language to convey meanings.
e. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key
words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well your
interlocutor is understanding you. It can be concluded that in designing tasks for assessing spoken
language, these skills can act as a checklist of objectives. While the macro- skills have the appearance of being more complex than the micro skills, both
contain ingredients of difficulty, depending on the stage and context of the test-taker.
b. Indicators of Speaking Ability
