Teaching Productive Skills to the Students: a secondary Level Scenario

2.6.3 Teaching Speaking Skills 
In this part of thesis I would like to introduce several suggestions by different 
authors for teaching speaking skills. 
Robert S. Brown and Nation claim that students should be offered form-focused 
instructions and meaning-focused instructions. 
 
Form-focused Speaking goes deeply into details of pronunciation, grammar 
and vocabulary. This stage is suitable for beginners. An effective way how to start 
teaching foreign languages is to base speaking on some simple, useful phrases and 
sentences e.g. greetings, simple questions and answers or personal descriptions which 
are easy to remember. These can be practiced by repetition drills. By repetition drills the 
teachers can change speed, the learner who is to repeat, the content of the sentence 
and the way of choosing the substitution. I agree with their opinion that: “Drills play a 
useful part in a language course in helping learners to be formally accurate in their 
speech and in helping them to quickly learn a useful collection of phrases and 
sentences that allow them to start using the language as soon as possible.” (“Teaching 
Speaking: Su
ggestion for the Classroom”) 

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13 
 
Meaning-focused Speakingis that stage of speaking where attention lays on the 
message being communicated. The activity develops learners
‟ ability to speak. For this 
R.S Brown and Nation suggest several ways: 
a.
The teacher presents new vocabulary or grammar (it is based on form-focused 
instruction) and then the students are given some practice. 
b.
Frequently, before the students start to speak they work in groups or pairs to 
prepare the activity. The activity gives learners the opportunity to learn from each other. 
c.
The students are given topics to talk about. They may prepare it for homework, 
use dictionaries or a reference text and then they present what they have prepared. 
d.
Often, the activities are supported by pictures or written texts. They appear in a 
raking activity or a problem solving activity where the text contains important data about 
the situation and so on. 
e.
Many speaking activities force students to ask each other. The pattern of these 
activities is that, each learner receives different information for completing the activity. In 
these kinds of activities students discover different names, two-way tasks or information 
gap. (“Teaching Speaking: Suggestions for the Classroom”) 
On the other hand, G. Broughton and his colleagues divide speaking activities 
into: a) Controlled oral work b) Guided oral work c) Free oral work.