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Approaches to learning and teaching speaking
Speaking in the English language has been considered the most challenging of the four skills given the fact that it involves a complex process of constructing meaning. This process requires speakers to make decisions about why, how and when to communicate depending on the cultural and social context in which the speaking act occurs. Additionally, it involves a dynamic interrelation between speakers and hearers that results in their simultaneous interaction of producing and processing spoken discourse under time constraints. Given all these defining aspects of the complex and intricate nature of spoken discourse, increasing research conducted over the last few decades has recognized speaking as an interactive, social and contextualized communicative event.
Therefore, the key role of the speaking skill in developing learners’ communicative competence has also become evident, since this skill requires learners to be in possession of knowledge about how to produce not only linguistically correct but also pragmatically appropriate utterances. Drawing on these considerations, this subtheme first outlines the advances that have been made in learning the skill of speaking over the last decades. It then considers how this knowledge becomes the basis for teaching speaking from a communicative perspective. Finally, it presents the importance of integrating this skill within a communicative competence framework so that learners can acquire their English language communicative competence through speaking.
Up to the end of the 1960s, the field of language learning was influenced by environmentalist ideas that paid attention to the learning process as being conditioned by the external environment rather than by human internal mental processes. Moreover, mastering a series of structures in a linear way was paramount. Within such an approach, the primacy of speaking was obvious since it was assumed that language was primarily an oral phenomenon. Thus, learning to speak a language, in a similar way to any other type of learning, followed a stimulus-response-reinforcement pattern which involved constant practice and the formation of good habits. In this pattern, speakers were first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external stimulus and their response consisted of imitating and repeating such input. If this was done correctly, they received a positive reinforcement by other language users within their same environment. The continuous practice of this speech-pattern until good habits were formed resulted in learning how to speak.
Consequently, it was assumed that speaking a language involved just repeating, imitating and memorizing the input that speakers were exposed to. These assumptions deriving from the environmentalist view of learning to speak gave rise to the Audiolingual teaching approach. This instructional method emphasized the importance of starting with the teaching of oral skills, rather than the written ones, by applying the fixed order of listening-speaking-reading-writing for each structure. Thus, learners were engaged in a series of activities, such as exercises and substitution exercises, which focused on repeating grammatical structures and patterns through intense aural-oral practice.
However, rather than fostering spoken interaction, this type of oral activities was simply a way of teaching pronunciation skills and grammatical accuracy. Consequently, although it can be assumed that this approach to learning and teaching speaking stressed the development of oral skills, speaking was merely considered as an effective medium for providing language input and facilitating memorization rather than as a discourse skill in its own right. In fact, significant aspects, such as the role that internal mental processes play when learning to produce new and more complex grammatical structures, were neglected under this view. The task of paying attention to those processes was the focus of study in the following years.
Another approach is speaking within an innatist. By the late 1960s, the previous view of learning to speak as a mechanical process consisting in the oral repetition of grammatical structures was challenged by Chomsky’s theory of language development11. His assumption that children are born with an innate potential for language acquisition was the basis for the innatist approach to language learning. Thus, as a result of this assumption and together with the discipline of psycholinguistics that aimed to test Chomsky’s innatist theory, the mental and cognitive processes involved in generating language began to gain importance.
Within such an approach, it was claimed that regardless of the environment where speakers were to produce language, they had the internal faculty or competence in Chomsky’s terms, to create and understand an infinite amount of discourse. This language ability was possibly due to the fact that speakers had internalized a system of rules which could be transformed into new structures by applying a series of cognitive strategies. Given this process, speakers’ role changed from merely receiving input and repeating it, as was the view in the environmentalist approach, to actively thinking how to produce language. Consequently, it was assumed that speaking a language was a descontextualized process which just involved the mental transformation of such an internalized system of rules.
These innatist assumptions about learning to speak did not result in any specific teaching methodology. However, the emphasis on practicing exercises and repeating grammatical structures advocated by the audiolingual approach was replaced by “an interest in cognitive methods which would enable language learners to hypothesis about language structures and grammatical patterns”12. In this type of methods, learners took on a more important role in that they were provided with opportunities to use the language more creatively and innovatively after having been taught the necessary grammatical rules. Although this approach recognized the relevance of speakers’ mental construction of the language system in order to be able to produce it, speaking was still considered to be an abstract process occurring in isolation. In fact, this innatist view of learning and teaching speaking did not take into account relevant aspects of language use in communication, such as the relationship between language and meaning (i.e., the functions of language) or the importance of the social context in which language is produced. The consideration of these aspects took place in subsequent years.
There is also another approach which is called interactionist. This approach is based on interactionist ideas that emphasized the role of the linguistic environment in interaction with the innate capacity for language development.
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