Teaching Assist.

EVA NUR MAZIDAH
120710209
TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIP
MIDTERM TEST

HOW TO TEACH ENGLISH SPEAKING


Speaking is one of the most prior skills that need to be had by language learners. In this case speaking activities are perhaps what students and teachers demand the most in terms of the affective involved. Some students may have anxiety in front of the class when they are asked to do presentation, etc. They are afraid of being incomprehensible, losing face, or even shy. Therefore, teachers have a major responsibility to create a good classroom environment where students can be prepared to take risk and experiment with language so that students can produce good pronunciation, vocabulary and structure accurately and more freely in practicing purposeful communication.
Classroom management becomes a key in the complex structure of some communication activities. There is a jigsaw task which combines reading, note-taking, reporting in group and discussing. What a teacher needs to do during those phases are careful directing, organizing, and monitoring. The principle key in jigsaw is started from simple pairwork activities to more ambitious activity. Pairwork might involve giving an explanation of what is needed with a teacher demonstration, the teacher asking the class to recap--two students to try it out, monitoring as the pairwork starts so that the teacher know whether or not each pair is on task and understands what to do. Though it is like ‘simple’ pairwork but it has so many factors determining its success. Age, gender and personality are the influences in making pairwork difficult experience and making oneself understood. These are two possibilities in making pairwork-- either through self-selecting, teacher-selecting or random-selecting—and teacher also needs to know the good and the bad of each selecting—levels of the students’ ability. The implications of pairwork would include in the ideal size of a group for a particular activity—in some information gap or problem solving tasks, the best way of selecting group members, the length of time discussion. Other activities are Role-play which can vary e.g. from simple dialogue taken from specific information on role cards, etc, and simulation which help students in groupwork and class discussion.
Group discussion provides opportunities to develop aspects of interpersonal communication and even fluency. Students can share their interests, opinions, histories, etc. they here are invited to give their opinion, agree or disagree, state preferences, etc. In discussion activities, what teachers do is in decision-making such how mush support to give for content and how this is presented; how much to structure the activity with phases and group roles; whether to establish or set a goal; how to organize feedback; how to encourage participation as much as possible.
Talking with students about spoken English, teachers have a chance of two basic approaches of conversation aspects, direct and indirect. In direct approach, it is applied a system analysis of systemic of speaking competence and takes students through a program of awareness rising and practice. The indirect approach simply involves students in conversation either through role-play and problem-solving tasks and gives them chances to practice in classroom activities.
In speaking, integrating pronunciation is required. Many teachers believe that pronunciation is also difficult work due to awkwardness, inhibition, embarrassment, etc. When teachers deal with new materials and new vocabularies, they should integrate the pronunciation before they move on to recognize and practice. The easiest aspects to integrate are on individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress and various types of linking. It is a fact that some students may not pronounce well therefore correction on pronunciation in this case needs to be done in as positive way as possible.
It was stated that recent years had seen a debate about the value of error correction in the classroom. It is believed that correction by the teacher is of dubious value. Due to this, it is needed comparing between systematic errors—incomplete or faulty knowledge of English and mistakes—inability to perform that knowledge in production e.g. carelessness, tiredness, distractions, etc. Teacher needs to know which errors to correct and impede communication. Global errors cause misunderstanding by the listener and local errors tend to relate only to part of what is said. There are some techniques treating errors e.g. noting down errors or separating words and giving these to them for reflection, recording the activity and asking students to listen and see if they can identify and correct errors, making note ‘key’ errors, noting down examples of errors and using these for a game in the next class.
It is true that correction is considered to be one of the most complex aspects in the classroom management which requires judgment and skill. For learners, this helps a wider process of recognizing and understanding their errors and having chances to try and try again in speaking activity.
There are many ways in boosting s[peaking ability in classroom. One of them is reduced here. Some strategies that are proposed can be insights to experimenting with different activities. Giving challenge to pose students activities and teachers’ management skills would be advantageous in developing speaking skill.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hedge, Tricia. (2000). Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. NY: Oxford University Press.