13 correct use of language but is also keen to encourage the students’ attempts to
use the language they have in order to communicate. Fluency, on the o
ther side, can be thought of as “the ability to keep going when speaking spontaneously.” Not only fluent, the learners should also be able
to get the message across with whatever resources and abilities they have got, regardless of grammatical and other mistakes. The teacher better not to give
comment during fluency activity, however in feedback afterwards the teacher can comment favourably on any strategies the students used to increase their
fluency. In addition, Richards defines fluency as natural language use occurring
when a speaker engages in meaningful interaction and maintains comprehensible and ongoing communication despite limitations in his or her communicative
competence. Fluency is developed by creating classroom activities in which the students must negotiate meaning, use communication strategies, correct
misunderstandings, and work to avoid communication breakdowns. Contrasted with fluency practice, the focus of accuracy practice is on creating correct
examples of language use Richards, 2006: 14. While Bailey, cited in Nunan 2003: 55, defines accuracy as the extent to which students’ speech matches
what people actually say when they use the target language. Besides, fluency is the extent to which speakers use the language quickly and confidently, with few
hesitations or unnatural pauses, false starts, word searches, and so on.
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d. Micro- and Macro-skills of Speaking
According to Brown 2004: 142-143, the micro skills refer to producing the smaller chunks of language such as phonemes, morphemes, words,
collocations, and phrasal units. Meanwhile, the macro skills imply the speaker’s
focus on the larger elements; fluency, discourse, function, style, cohesion, nonverbal communication, and strategic options. There are sixteen micro- and
macro skills in total, they are:
Micro skills 1.
Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants. 2.
Produce chunks of language of different lengths. 3.
Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonation contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units words to accomplish
pragmatic purposes. 6.
Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery. 7.
Monitor one’s own oral production and use various strategic devices – pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking- to enhance the clarity of
the message. 8.
Use grammatical word classes nouns, verbs, etc., systems e.g., tense, agreement, pluralisation, word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical
forms. 9.
Produce speech in natural constituents: in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breathe groups, and sentence constituents.
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
11. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
Macro skills 12.
Appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
13. Use appropriate styles, registers, implicature, redundancies, pragmatic
conventions, conversation rules, floor-keeping and –yielding,
interrupting, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations.
14. Convey links and connections between events and communication such
relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events and feelings, new information and given information, generalization and exemplification.
15. Convey facial features, kinesics, body language, and other nonverbal
cues along with verbal language. 16.
Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning
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of words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding you.
e. Types of Classroom Speaking Performance
Speaking performances have different function in daily communication, as Brown 2001: 271-274 states that there are six categories are applied to the
oral production that students are expected to carry out in the classroom. They are:
1. Imitative.
A very limited portion of classroom speaking time may legitimately be spent generating “human tape recorder” speech, where, for
example, learners practice an intonation contour or try to pinpoint a certain vowel sound. Imitation of this kind is carried out not for the purpose of
meaningful interaction, but for focusing on some particular element of language form.
2. Intensive.
Intensive speaking is one step beyond imitative since it includes any speaking performance that is designed to practice some phonological or
grammatical aspect of language. Intensive speaking can be self-initiated or it can even form part of some pair work activity, where learners are “going-
over” certain forms of language.
3. Responsive.
A good deal of student speech in the classroom is responsive. It is short replies to teacher or student initiated questions or comments. These
replies are usually sufficient and do not extend into dialogues. Such speech can be meaningful and authentic.
