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c. The Micro- and Macro-Skills of Speaking
Speaking is a language skill which requires the speaker to be able to deliver the meaning in his or her mind in the form of oral expression. In order
for the subject to do so, he or she, according to Brown 2004: 142, should master what is so called micro skills and macro skills of speaking. The micro
skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words, collocations and phrasal units. Meanwhile, the macro skills
refer to the speakers’ focus on the larger elements i.e. fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options. One
of Brown’s reason of elaborating the micro and macro skills of speaking is to ease teachers in assessing the speaking ability performed by their students.
In detail, the micro skills are 1 producing differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants, 2 producing chunks of language of
different lengths, 3 producing English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure and intonation contours, 4 producing
reduced forms of words and phrases, 5 using an adequate number of lexical units words to accomplish pragmatic purposes, 6 producing fluent speech
at different rates of delivery, 7 monitoring one’s own oral production and using various devices ―pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking―to
enhance the clarity of the message, 8 using grammatical word classes nouns, verbs etc., systems e.g. tense, agreement, plural forms, word order, patterns,
rules, and elliptical forms, 9 producing speech in natural constituents: in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath groups and sentence constituents,
16 10 expressing a particular meaning in different grammatical forms, and
finally 11 using cohesive devices in spoken discourse. On the other hand, the macro skills of speaking are 1 appropriately
accomplishing communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals, 2 using appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies,
pragmatic conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and yielding, interrupting, and other sociolinguistic features in face- to- face conversation,
3 conveying links and corrections between events and communicating such relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events, and feelings, new information
and given information, generalization and exemplification, 4 conveying facial features, kinesics, body language, and other non verbal cues along with
verbal language, and 5 developing and using a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing
how well the interlocutor is understanding the speaker. Teachers of English need to consider the macro-and micro-skills of
speaking above in teaching their students to perform to speak in English. Each of the points in the macro- and micro-skills above are worth paying attention
since they together create an ideal speaking performance.
d. The Difficulties of Speaking
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