Teaching Speaking Skills in EFL

TL;DR: Teaching Speaking Skills in EFL

Teaching speaking skills in EFL is vital but challenging. Oral tests, despite practical hurdles, are crucial due to the "washback effect," encouraging more classroom speaking. Learners often struggle with L1 translation, accuracy pressure, and anxiety, sometimes leading to "fossilization" of errors. Effective instruction balances fluency (ease of speech), accuracy (correctness), and automaticity (effortless production of language chunks).

The speaking process involves conceptualizing, formulating, articulating, and self-monitoring. Teachers must facilitate turn-taking and backchanneling while students utilize various communication strategies (like circumlocution or appealing for help) to overcome gaps. Successful activities encourage high participation, clear purpose, and appropriate challenge, using techniques like pair work, group work, and narrative tasks. Understanding these principles helps educators build confident, effective EFL speakers.

Why Teaching Speaking Skills in EFL is Crucial

Speaking is an everyday activity we often take for granted, yet it's an active use of language to express meaning. For English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, developing strong speaking skills is paramount for genuine communication beyond the classroom. This guide explores the complexities, challenges, and effective strategies for teaching speaking skills in EFL contexts.

The Unique Challenges of Assessing Speaking in EFL

Including an oral component in language tests, while essential, significantly complicates the assessment process. Both practicality and the reliable application of assessment criteria present challenges.

Practicality and Reliability Issues in Oral Testing

Setting and marking written grammar tests are relatively easy and time-efficient. However, a speaking test is not. Interviewing all students individually causes considerable disruption and takes significant time, potentially seeming to outweigh the benefits.

Moreover, different testers might have varying criteria for judging speaking, a problem less acute than when assessing writing or grammar. It's crucial to remember that a test of grammar is not a test of speaking!

Why Oral Components Matter: The Washback Effect

The need to test speaking through speaking becomes particularly acute if learners aim for public examinations like the Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE) or IELTS, which include a speaking component. Furthermore, if teachers or students are reluctant to engage in much classroom speaking, an oral component in the final examination can serve as a powerful incentive to 'do more speaking in class'.

This phenomenon is known as the washback effect of testing. The oral nature of the test "washes back" into the coursework preceding it, driving more focused speaking practice. Despite the difficulties, incorporating oral testing procedures into language courses makes practical sense.

Activities designed to test speaking are generally the same as those designed to practice it, so there's no need for disruption to classroom practice. The main challenge lies in deciding upon and consistently applying satisfactory assessment criteria.

Understanding Why EFL Learners Struggle with Speaking

Many EFL students find speaking difficult, even when they possess good grammar and vocabulary knowledge. This often stems from a lack of genuine speaking opportunities, leaving them feeling unprepared for real-world communication.

Common Pitfalls: Translation, Accuracy Pressure, and Anxiety

Some students tend to formulate utterances first in their L1 (first language) and then translate them into L2 (second language). This process significantly reduces speaking speed and fluency.

Others face intense pressure to be accurate and avoid humiliating errors. This can lead to overuse and over-prolongation of the self-monitoring process, negatively affecting fluency. They might search for the most appropriate word, then mentally review the draft for grammatical mistakes. This fear of making mistakes is a major barrier to becoming fluent.

The Role of Attentional Capacity

Students often have trouble distributing their attentional capacity between planning and articulation, especially when coping with new input. Their anxiety can cause excessive self-monitoring, further taxing their cognitive resources. Some adopt a different strategy, overusing the limited language they have at their "linguistic fingertips" rather than constructing novel utterances from scratch. This can lead to dropped articles, uninflected verbs, and altered word order.

What is Fossilization in Speaking Skills?

Fossilization refers to the process where incorrect language forms become habitual and are difficult to correct. This occurs when an error becomes sufficiently integrated into a learner's interlanguage system.

For example, many advanced Spanish L1 learners might not consistently distinguish between 'he' and 'she' in English. This could be a fossilized error. Errors, in general, take time to correct, but fossilized errors may persist unless the learner perceives a strong reason to correct them, such as severe hindrance to communication. Teachers can help learners notice fossilized errors by recording their speech or encouraging error tracking in a language portfolio.

Core Principles for Developing Speaking Skills in EFL

To achieve effective and confident speaking, instruction should focus on several key principles:

Fluency: Speaking with Ease

Fluency is the ability to link units of speech together easily, without strain, inappropriate slowness, or excessive hesitation. Fluent speakers place pauses appropriately and sparingly.

Fluency can be practiced effectively in creative or freer communication activities where:

• Speaking activities primarily focus on meaning and its negotiation.
• Students actively use speaking strategies.
• Overt correction from the teacher is minimized. In these activities, the teacher acts as a prompter, a participant, and a provider of feedback rather than a constant corrector.

Accuracy: The Foundation of Correctness

Accuracy is the ability to use vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation correctly. Accuracy is best practiced in activities with a conscious focus on language forms and a high degree of control over student output.

Practice is more meaningful if:

• It is contextualized, meaning structures, words, or chunks are used in common situations (e.g., "I'm opening the window" in a practical context, not a telephone conversation).
• The language is personalized, allowing students to express their own ideas, feelings, and opinions.
• It helps to build ease and confidence in students.

Automaticity: Towards Effortless Communication

During the processes of conceptualizing, formulating, articulating, and monitoring, a speaker's attentional resources are stretched thinly. To achieve fluency, some degree of automaticity is necessary. At the formulation level, automaticity is partly achieved through using prefabricated chunks of language.

Therefore, many controlled and guided speaking activities that focus on automatizing these chunks can significantly contribute to fluency development. This reduces the cognitive load, allowing students to focus more on meaning.

The Speaking Process: From Conceptualization to Articulation

Teaching speaking aims to equip learners with the ability to actively use language to express meanings that others can understand. Speech production is essentially linear, with words and utterances following each other, either spontaneously or in response to an interlocutor.

Stages of Speech Production

The process of speaking involves several stages:

1. Conceptualization: Deciding the discourse type, topic, and purpose (e.g., telling a joke about Hurvinek to amuse).
2. Formulation: Mapping out the speech at the discourse, syntax, and vocabulary levels. Speakers use discourse scripts (e.g., a story has a beginning, middle, and end) which are part of shared background knowledge, saving formulation time and easing the listener's load. To compensate for limited planning time, speakers might use an "add-on strategy," chaining together short phrases and chunks to form an extended turn. They also employ strategies to gain time, such as pause fillers (e.g., "eh," "um") or vagueness expressions (e.g., "sort of," "I mean").
3. Articulation: The physical act of producing sounds.

Self-Monitoring and Repair

Throughout these stages, the speaker is also engaged in self-monitoring and repair:

• Conceptualization: The speaker might decide to skip information they were about to say.
• Formulation: The speaker may slow down, pause, go back, and re-phrase.
• Articulation: Correcting slips of the tongue.

The Role of Interaction and Turn-Taking

Most speaking involves interaction. Key aspects of interaction include:

• Turn-taking rules: Speakers should take turns and listen. A speaker must recognize the appropriate moment to get a turn, signal their desire to speak, hold the floor, recognize others' signals, and yield the turn.
• Signaling listening: Using backchanneling (e.g., "uh-huh," "right," "really?") to show interest or understanding.
• Discourse markers: Using phrases like "that reminds me," "by the way," "well," "yes, but," "go ahead" to manage conversational intentions and turn-taking.

Essential Knowledge for EFL Speaking

Effective speaking requires both linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge:

• Linguistic Knowledge:

• Genre knowledge: Understanding the structure of different text types (e.g., a shopping dialogue). Many genres are recognizable across cultures and provide familiar frames for new language.

• Discourse knowledge: Awareness of discourse markers, conversational rules, and structure.

• Pragmatic knowledge: Understanding speech acts (e.g., offering advice: "I'd...," "if I were you...") and politeness (e.g., "What do you want?" vs. "What would you like?").

• Grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.

• Extralinguistic Knowledge:

• Topic knowledge.

• Sociocultural knowledge: Developing intercultural competence – the ability to manage cross-cultural encounters regardless of the language being used.

• Knowledge of the context.

• Familiarity with other speakers.

Effective Strategies for EFL Speakers to Overcome Challenges

Learners often employ various communication strategies to bridge gaps in their language knowledge or to manage difficulties in real-time communication.

Communication Strategies in EFL

These are techniques speakers use to convey meaning when their linguistic resources are insufficient:

• Circumlocution: Describing an object or idea instead of using its specific name (e.g., "I get a red in my head" to mean shy).
• Word coinage: Creating a new word (e.g., "vegetarianist" for vegetarian).
• Foreignizing a word: Adapting an L1 word to sound like an L2 word (e.g., turning Spanish "una carpeta" into "a carpet").
• Approximation: Using an alternative, related word (e.g., "work table" for workbench).
• Using an all-purpose word: Employing general terms like "stuff," "thing," "make," "do."
• Language switch (Code-switching): Using an L1 word or expression.
• Paralinguistics: Using gestures, mime, and other non-verbal cues to convey meaning.
• Appealing for help: Leaving an utterance incomplete to solicit assistance (e.g., Speaker 1: "The taxi driver get angry, he lose his, erm, how you say?" Speaker 2: "temper." Speaker 1: "he lose his temper and he shout me.")

Avoidance and Discourse Strategies

• Avoidance strategy: The speaker decides the message is unachievable and abandons it or replaces it with a less ambitious one.
• Discourse strategy: The speaker borrows segments of other speakers' utterances, often as unanalyzed units (e.g., Speaker 1: "When did you last see your brother?" Speaker 2: "Last see your brother six years ago..."). A related strategy is repeating one's own previous utterance for emphasis or to gain time (e.g., Speaker 1: "The woman hear a noise..." Speaker 2: "What kind of noise?" Speaker 1: "The woman hear a noise, loud one...").

Designing Engaging Speaking Activities for EFL Classrooms

Helping young learners develop speaking skills and strategies is vital. It addresses the lack of genuine speaking opportunities that often leaves students feeling unprepared for communication outside the classroom.

While the mental processing stages for L1 and L2 speaking are similar (conceptualizing, formulating, articulating, self-monitoring), the challenge in L2 is the actual language.

Characteristics of Successful Speaking Activities

For an activity to be truly effective in developing speaking skills:

• Learners talk a lot, maximizing language productivity.
• There is a clear purpose, something children want to say or a required outcome.
• Participation is even among all learners.
• Motivation is high.
• There is an appropriate challenge, forcing learners to draw on their available communicative resources.

Organizing Speaking Activities in Large Classes

Even in large classes, effective speaking activities can be organized using various configurations:

• Pair work (PW)
• Group work (GW)
• Snowball (pairs merge into fours, fours into eights, etc.)
• Two lines facing each other (after each exchange, one player moves to the opposite end, and everyone shifts to face a new partner).
• "Speed dating" style activities.
• Mingling activities.

Nurturing Conversational Interaction and Narratives

Discourse in young learner classrooms should follow patterns children find familiar. Familiarity of content and context helps children as both speakers and listeners in a foreign language.

Very early on, children can learn to express when they don't understand and to formulate questions to seek clarification. We need to help children develop skills to produce various types of talk, including narratives, descriptions, instructions, arguments, and opinions.

Narratives and descriptions are the most accessible discourse types for young learners. Narrative discourse and mental organization are primary in children's development, featuring in early social experiences. Children are exposed to narratives from a very young age and develop skills in producing them, which can be transferred to foreign language learning. What is often lacking is the actual language itself.

Activities that foster narrative skills include:

• Reading and retelling stories.
• Retelling stories from textbooks.
• Telling personal stories or anecdotes.
• Creating and telling real or made-up stories based on pictures or objects (e.g., "show and tell").
• Telling jokes.
• Talking about books, films, and videos.
• Children creating and presenting their own stories.
• Games that involve storytelling.

Types of Spoken Tests and Activities

The activities designed to test speaking are often the same as those used for practice. These include:

• Interviews
• Live monologues
• Recorded monologues
• Role-plays
• Collaborative tasks and discussions

Testing Speaking Effectively

An assessment of learners' speaking skills can be done through an interview incorporating different oral tasks. A placement test without a spoken component, or any overall language proficiency test, provides an inadequate basis for assessing speaking, whether it's for progress during a course or achievement at the end of it. The skills of speaking are essentially the same and, in theory, should be transferable from the speaker's first language into the second.

Frequently Asked Questions about Teaching Speaking in EFL

Why is assessing speaking skills in EFL so complex?

Assessing speaking skills in EFL is complex due to practical challenges like the time required for individual interviews and the difficulty in reliably applying assessment criteria. Different testers may also have varying subjective judgments, unlike the more objective marking of written grammar tests.

What is the 'washback effect' in language testing, and why is it important?

The "washback effect" refers to how a test's nature influences the teaching and learning that precedes it. If an EFL exam includes a speaking component, it acts as a powerful incentive for both teachers and students to engage in more speaking practice in the classroom, thereby improving oral proficiency development.

How can teachers help EFL students overcome speaking anxiety?

Teachers can help by creating low-pressure, meaning-focused activities where overt correction is minimized. Encouraging the use of communication strategies like circumlocution or appealing for help, and building automaticity with prefabricated chunks, can also boost confidence. Personalizing language tasks allows students to express their own ideas, reducing anxiety.

What are the key differences between fluency and accuracy in EFL speaking?

Fluency is the ability to speak smoothly and continuously, linking speech units with ease and appropriate pacing, without undue hesitation. Accuracy, on the other hand, is the ability to use grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation correctly. While distinct, both are crucial for effective communication, with activities often designed to target one or the other, or a balance of both.

What is 'fossilization' in language learning and how can it be addressed?

Fossilization is when an incorrect language form becomes a persistent habit, difficult to correct. It occurs when errors become integrated into a learner's developing language system. Teachers can address it by helping learners notice their fossilized errors, perhaps through recordings or error logs, and by providing a clear reason for correction, especially if the error significantly hinders communication.