MATERIALS TO DEVELOP THE SPEAKING SKILL

Prof. Licda. Cindy Gutiérrez Navarro

cgutierrez_m@costarricense.cr

                According to author Rebecca Hughes,  it is necessary to make students  understand that speaking is the basis of all human relationships and the first means to form their own identity which differentiate it from written communication in the sense that it has to be spontaneous and not edited and reread. Moreover, the understanding of cultural and pragmatic use of the language requires special attention to avoid misuses of expressions as well as misunderstandings of them. Finally, to carry out real-time conversations it is a must to possess a rich competence about the language in order to produce a rich performance when speaking. That is why some recommendable activities to develop such skill are affecting students’ interests and emotions, providing informal day to day encounters, putting into practice public formal uses of the language like interviews and speeches, and expose them to local and international varieties of English.

                          In addition, the previously stated differences between spoken and written discourse, collaboration among learners and cultural differences in the use of the language are also of prior importance when teaching and learning English.

Theory states that the most important aspects to focus on when preparing material to develop the speaking skill take root on the study of spoken corpora, insights from conversation analysis, work on affect and creativity, interactional linguistics and speech processing and psycholinguistics.

                          Considering the information above, there is a big controversy about the aims of our development of the speaking skill in the classroom: do our materials elicit only chunks of speaking or they make our students produce accurately, fluently and in context? It is something which needs to be clear and of course; if the second option is chosen, the process will be widely successful.
An example of materials and information to encourage the use of speaking skills in context can be accessed to the following link...

http://www.englishclub.com/english-for-work/hotel-reservation.htm