Teaching speaking in english lessons

More specifically, problems faced by the teachers include the following:

™ Giving each student sufficient time to speak within the constraints of the lesson is not easy especially that many teachers have large classes of students who they must keep control of.

™ Teaching speaking requires the focus on each individual student who might have his own phonological and linguistic weaknesses and problems. This makes speaking instruction a time-consuming process.
™ As opposed to other skills, speaking does not lend itself to tangible evidence so crucial for feedback. Therefore, assessing speaking is time consuming and not practical (Miller, 2001: 25).
™ Unlike written language, spoken language consists of short, often fragmentary utterances. It is characterized by the use of non-specific words and phrases, fillers, repetition, loosely organized syntax and an overlap between one speaker and the other. This makes instruction sounds less systematic. As for problems faced by learners, psychological, social and linguistic obstacles can be scrutinized.
According to Scarcella & Oxford, 1994: 165 and Florez, 1998, these are as follows:
™ The conflict between fluency and accuracy: Though a student may gain confidence in using the new language by being let uncorrected, his language will continue to be inaccurate/ incorrect.
™ Lack of confidence: Apparently, some students feel uncomfortable in their first hesitant attempts at speech in the second language.
™ Pronunciation: The most prominent problems are: phonetic confusion, interference from the written form, interference from the mother language and failure to use the weak forms. Thus, in the light of the previous constraints speaking is always scarified. Yet, helping learners develop their oral communication skills is important and, even with large classes or difficult teaching situations; it is not something that can be ignored just because it is difficult (Miller, 2001: 25). Hence, some research was conducted to investigate the most suitable methods for teaching speaking in EFL contexts.