2. Difficulties in speaking and ways to tackle them.

There are a lot of difficulties students come across in speaking and, correspondingly, a teacher comes across while teaching speaking. The commonest situation is when students won’t talk or say anything. One way to tackle the problem is to find the root of it and start from there.

It may occur that topic or situation is above learners’ level of language proficiency: learners simply lack the necessary language resources and need more controlled practice to be able to cope with speaking on their own as well as more support during their speech: visual (pictures, tables, maps) and verbal (key words, plan etc).

The topic or situation may be above the level of learners’ intellectual abilities: demand too complicated logical operations, too much load on their memory, too much of higher thinking skills. The topic or situation may be reworded simplifying the learners’ task or abandoned for the time being or altogether.

The topic or situation may be beyond learners’ knowledge (cross-curricular, cultural, pragmatic etc). Learners should be helped before they deal with such a topic or it may be abandoned for the time being. In any case, it is necessary to find out more about learners’ background knowledge before suggesting any new situation.

Learners have some psychological problems, they are too shy to speak, they do not want to communicate with the chosen partner, or they are not motivated to speak at all. It is important to establish favourable psychological climate at the lessons (learners should not be afraid of the teacher interrupting and reprimanding them all the time, rapport should be established, sarcastic remarks avoided etc) and have favourable seating arrangements if possible (in a circle, in islands etc).

Penny Ur (1996) gives a comprehensive list of factors that are common to successful speaking activities:

• learners talk a lot;

• participation is equally distributed;

• motivation is high;

• meaningful information is communicated.

It could be argued that the first two of these factors are in turn influenced by the extent to which learners feel comfortable about speaking and uninhibited by any feelings of anxiety. High motivation too is dependent on a number of factors.

Most learners feel less comfortable when speaking in a whole class situation then when discussing something in a pair or a small group. “Image-conscious teenagers” need to be spared humiliation of speaking in a strange tongue before a group of 15+ peers. As well as lowering the level of anxiety, speaking activities that involve pair or group work increase the amount of time each learner spends speaking the target language. Choral repetition does allow a lot of learners to speak at once but involves learners in using the target language in a very limited and imitative way.

Not all the learners will value a speaking activity for its own sake. They are to have a purpose for the activity above the fact that a teacher has asked them to complete it and said it will be good for their oral skills. Thus we may speak about information gap or opinion gap element when students try to learn what they do not know at a time.

The instruction to an activity should be set clearly (learners should know what exactly they should do) and within the limits of learners’ capabilities (they know how to do it and can do it).

Learners are to take ownership of the language they are asked to produce, to personalize it so it becomes part of them. This involves more than just talking about themselves in a foreign language, it is not very motivating when you inform of the facts your friend knows well about you.

So a good speaking activity:

• it is motivating, has a clear purpose and an end-goal or outcome;

• its completion requires language which is within learners’ capability;

• speaking opportunities are maximized, that is, the task cannot be completed by learners saying very little;

• learners have little scope to revert to their mother tongue

• the activity can be extended to allow learners to speak more independently and to personalize the language used.