speaking

THE CONCEPT OF SPEAKING

A.    Speaking As Productive Skill.

Speaking is one of the four language skills. If students want to speak English fluently, as Harmer says  [2oo7 ]    they have to be able to pronounce correctly. In addition, they need to master intonation, conversation, either  transactional or interpersonal  conversation. Transactional function has its main purpose  conveying information and facilitating the exchange of goods and service, whereas the interpersonal function is all about maintaining and sustaining  good relations between people. Speaking is called productive skill because  when we speak we produce the language.

B.      Speaking As Oral Communication skill.

When  communicating  his or her idea  some one utters  English sounds  and he or she expects  the response from the listener. Talking about communication, Harmer [1993] puts forward the nature of communication as  follow: Communication happens when the  listener can give the response to the speaker after the listener understands  the  message given. The message can not be understood when pronunciation is not clear This is the evidence that mispronunciation can cause the  students to have misunderstanding. In the following section the writers of the module provide  a review  of twenty vowel phonemes.

1.      Twenty Vowel  Phonemes

Studying a target language means studying its elements, which  consist of phonemes, morphemes, syntax and lexicon. Phonemes refer to words, syntax refers to grammar and structure and lexicon refers to meaning.

In this section, we will study the 20 vowel phonemes, those are :

5 Long vowel phonemes :

[  i : ]                - bee, see, knee, etc.

[ a : ]                - barn, far, car, etc.

[]              - born, corn, thorn, etc.

[ u : ]                - boon, soon, moon, etc.

[ 3 : ][  ]      - burn, earn, learn, etc.

7 Short vowel phonemes :

[  i   ]                - it, bit, hit, etc.

[   ]               - up, shut, cut, hut, etc.

[]              - pot, hot, top, fox, etc.

[ e   ]                - pet, pen red, wet, etc.

[ ae ]                - cat, hat, black, bat, etc.

[ ə ]                  - a long, ago, away, etc.

8 Diphthongs :

[]              - boy, toy, coin, etc.

[  ai ]                - buy, guy, shy, why, etc.

[  ei ]                - bay, say, way, gay, ray, etc.

[]              - poor, tour, sure etc.

[ i ]               - ear, hear, tear, etc.

[ Eə]                - share, care, where, air, etc.

[ ou ]                - no, show, so, though, etc.

[ au ]                - now, about, aloud etc.

Long vowels :

[ i :  ]                - bean

[ : ]              - boon

[ a : ]                - barn

[]             - born

[ 3 : ]                - burn

Long vowels have their length considerably reduced when they occur in a syllable closed by /p, t, k, t, , s, /, e.g. in soup, seat, leak, porch, half, earth, loose, leash. This shortening of the vowel is highly significant in distinguishing a word such as seat from seed.

2.      About  Intonation.

Hello dear participants .Can you do the exercises? Have you discussed how would you present it to our colleagues later? Practice again and again would be better and try to learn the 2o vowel phonemes by heart. Now you are expected to review  intonation because we frequently find out that most learners need to practice intonation.

C.     Models of Learning And Teaching Speaking.

The goal of learning and teaching English in junior and senior high school even in primary school is C.C [communicative competence].It is C.C which is designed based on Celce and Murcia[Department Of Education,2004],and it covers discourse competence, actional competence, linguistics competence, socio cultural competence, and strategic competence. Based on the 2004TEFL high school syllabus,2006 TEFL high school syllabus and KTSP teacher of English should teach English communicatively. It means that teacher should encourage the learners to have C.C by creating the atmosphere of the class which is rich in communication In  other  words, the characteristics of the class should be students centered, cooperative, the students  should work in the small groups, they should be very active in discussing the tasks and exercises’ Dealing with the above characteristics of the class we put forward the following models of learning and teaching, CLT, CTL, Educational Drama and TPR Plus Speaking .the reason why we focus on those four models of teaching  because they are not against School based Curriculum or they are relevant to S B C or KTSP.

CLT [Communicative Language Teaching].

We describe CLT based on two terms of CLT those are CLT in The Western Context and CLT in THE Indonesian context {Mulyana,Kim,1997]..Richards [2001] writes that the term CLT is used for substituting the term Communicative Approach, which  has become an umbrella term.[Savignon1994, Turner 1994 in Mulyana Kim 1997.] It means that CLT is not  an approach or a method but it is a set of approaches which have similar belief that the goal of language teaching is Communicative  Competence.

CLT in the western context  is different from CLT in the Indonesian Context, in terMs of  each goal and the term of English used .In the Western context CLT is used for teaching English as a second  language and the goal is C.C but it is designed based on Hymes [in Mulyana Kim 1997] which covers four components those are: grammatical competence , discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence.