Teaching speaking
Speaking has always been a major focus of language teaching,
however both the nature of speaking skills as well as
approaches to teaching them have undergone a major shift in
thinking in recent years. Speaking in the early 70s usually
meant 'repeating after the teacher, reciting a memorized
dialogue, or responding to a mechanical drill' (Shrum and
Glisan 2000: 26), reflecting the sentence-based view of
proficiency prevailing in the methodologies of
Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching.
The emergence of the constructs of communicative competence
and proficiencyin the 1980s lead to major shifts in conceptions
of syllabuses and methodology, the effects of which continue
to be seen today. The theory of communicative competence
prompted attempts at developing communicative syllabuses in
the 1980s, initially resulting in proposals for notional syllabuses,
functional syllabuses, as well as the Threshold Level and more
recently proposals for task-based and text-based approaches toteaching. Fluency became a goal for speaking courses and this
could be developed through the use of information gap and
other tasks that required learners to attempt real
communication despite limited proficiency in English. In so
doing they would develop communication strategiesand engage
in negotiation of meaning, both of which were considered
essential to the development of oral skills. Activities borrowed
from the repertoire of techniques associated with Cooperative
Learning became a good source of teaching ideas.
In foreign language teaching a parallel interest lead to
the proficiency movement in the 1990s, which attempted to
develop descriptions of bands of proficiency across
the different skills areas and to use these bands as guidelines
in programme planning. The proficiency concept was said to
offer an organizing principle that could help teachers
establish course objectives, organize course content, and
determine what students should be able to do upon
completion of a course or programme of study