that a turn-taking is a complex activity. The turn-taking avoids the speakers from overlapping other utterances and provides gaps between the speakers
’ utterances. Richards 2008: 23 sets some skills that are used in conversations. Those skills
include opening and closing conversations, choosing topics, making small-talk, joking, recounting personal incidents and experiences, turn-taking, using
adjacency pairs, interrupting, reacting to others, using appropriate style of speaking.
From the theories above, it can be concluded that speakers need the skills in conversation such as opening and closing the conversation, turn-taking,
interrupting, and using adjacency pairs.
d. Social and Cultural Contexts
Social and cultural contexts focus on how someone’s status and
personality affect the way conversation will go on. D ṏrnyei and Thurrell 1992:
112 say that every conversation has a time, a place, a social context within a culture. Here are some factors that determine how the conversation will go on.
1 Time and location
2 The social situation
3 Workplace and status
4 The social norms of appropriate language use – style and politeness
5 Cross-cultural differences
Cook 1989: 34 explains that social and cultural issues are important parts in the learning and teaching English. Brown and Levinson cited in Cook 1989:
34 state as follows: “All human being, in order to enter into social relationships with
each other, must acknowledge the face of the other people. By this they mean that the people both avoid intruding upon each
other’s territory physical territory, a particular field of knowledge, a friendship and also seek to enlarge the territory of
others – in Lakorff’s terms, make the other person feel good –
presumably on the assumpstion that the same will be done to them.”
In conclusion, it is important to make the students aware of social and cultural issues to avoid the conflict and maintain the social relation.
e. Microskills and Macroskills of Speaking
Teaching and learning speaking cannot be separated from its micro- and macro-skills. Micro skills involve smaller range of language where macro-skills
involve bigger range of language. Brown 2004: 142-143 proposes the micro- and macro-skills of speaking that have to be comprehend by students in order to
be able to carry out the conversation successfully. There are 11 micro-skills in speaking comprehension. They are able to: 1 produce the smallest unit of sound
in English which distinguish two words, such in pit and bit; and produce those
sounds in different variants, 2 deliver parts of language in different length, 3
produce words in different stress patterns, 4 produce shorten forms of words and phrases, 5 use enough dictions to reach the pragmatic aims, 6 deliver speech in
fluent and variant speed, 7 watch and check the production of various strategies
such as pauses, fillers, self-corrections, and backtracking in the oral production,
8 deliver the grammatical words such as nouns, verbs, etc., system such as tense, agreement, pluralization, etc., word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms
leaving out the unnecessary words, 9 deliver speech in natural grouping such as suitable phrases, pauses groups, breath groups, and sentences, 10 show a
certain meaning in a different way, 11 use cohesive devices in spoken texts.
In the same reference, the macro-skills of speaking are: 1 appropriately achieve the communicative functions based on the situation, participants, and
goals, 2 appropriately use style, registers, implicature, pragmatic conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and yielding, interrupting, and other
sociolinguistics features in face-to-face conversations, 3 express links and connections between occasions and convey that kind of relation as important and
unimportant ideas, occasions and opinion, new information and given information, generalization, and exemplification, 4 use facial expressions,
movement, body language, and other nonverbal language alongside the verbal language, 5 improve and use the strategies of speaking such as stating the key
words, repeating words in different way, determining the context to find word meaning, requesting helps, and knowing whether the other speaker has reached
the same understanding. Comprehending the micro- and macro skills of speaking helps teachers and
students know what kind of activities and techniques should they teach and learn to accomplish teaching and learning objectives of speaking successfully.
