Notes: The Speaking Skill | English Language & Pedagogy for CTET & TET Exams - CTET & State TET PDF Download

Introduction

• Speaking is a productive skill, an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving and processing information. It is, often, spontaneous, open-ended, and evolving, helping us to communicate our thoughts, ideas, suggestions and comments, in the most natural and reliable way. This capacity to put words together, in a meaningful way, to reflect thoughts, opinions, and feelings provides the speaker with important advantages, such as the ability to inform, persuade, and direct. Speaking can be formal or informal. Informal speaking is typically used with family and friends, or people you know well.
• Formal speaking occurs in business or academic situations, or when meeting people for the first time. Good speaking skills is the act of generating words that can be understood by listeners. Speech has its own skills, structures, and conventions, different from written language. A good speaker is clear and informative and synthesizes this array of skills and knowledge to succeed in a given speech act.

Methods to Teach Speaking Skill

• Where am I?
  Objective: To learn the proper use of prepositions.
  Method: Distribute flashcards with pictures on them. Ask learners to describe the position of various things in the picture.
• All Jumbled Up
  Objective: To improve the learners’ powers of concentration.
  Method: Make pairs. Give the learners a jumbled up dialogue. Learners discuss and rearrange the dialogue.
• Story Time
  Objective: To develop conversational skills and imagination.
  Method: Ask two learners to choose a topic and begin a conversation on it. At any one point, they can stop and two more learners continue the dialogue. The tone and content of the dialogue needs to remain constant till the class can do so.
• Say It Again
  Objective: To sensitise learners to the concept of tone.
  Method: Give learners a few sentences and ask them to use different tones (a
  polite tone/an angry tone), so that they comprehend how tones can render dif-
  ferent meanings.