By Irfan Nugroho (nugrohoirfan@gmail.com)
The discussion of speaking a foreign language (especially English) usually begins with the explanation of communication. Indeed, it is because one of the main goals of language teaching and learning is to reach ‘the ability to communicate’ (Dalton-Puffer, 2009: 197; and Labov in Rasool, 2008: 469). Communication is defined by Richards and Schmidt (2002: 89) as:
“the exchange of ideas, information, etc., between two or more persons. In an act of communication there is usually at least one speaker or sender, a message which is transmitted, and a person or persons for whom this message is intended (the receiver). Communication is studied from many disciplinary perspectives, is often viewed as a discipline in its own right, and is central to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and information theory.”
Simply people may assume, after reading the above definition,
that speaking is merely about communicating ideas to receiver. Speaking a
second language (L2), however, is considered ‘the most challenging of the four
skills’ because it consists of an intricate process of constructing meaning
(Celce-Murcia & Olshtain in Martinez-Flor, Uso-Juan & Alcon, 2006).
There are some factors greatly influences the effectiveness and efficiency of
someone’s communication in foreign language (Shumin, 2002: 204).
To speak in a foreign language, therefore, is not only
about expressing ideas in linguistically correct ways, but it also considers
some other factors that Scott Thornbury (2003: 11) calls the ‘extralinguistic
knowledge.’ The term ‘extralinguistic knowledge’ alone is actually a
simplification from what Dell Hymes calls the ‘Communicative Competence.’
In the last three decades, communicative competence has
become the most frequent debatable topic in the field of second language
acquisition, especially its importance to the teaching and learning of
speaking. The detailed explication of communicative competence alone will be
available later in this chapter. The writer would first provide some
definitions of speaking, which are dominantly based on the framework of
‘communicative competence.’
Speaking is almost the same as writing, if both are
viewed as productive language skills. The two skills are modes of ‘expressing
linguistic meanings’ (Halliday in Burns, 2006) and therefore Halliday (in
Burns, 2006) further argues that both are ‘different ways of saying.’ Deriving
from this point of view of speaking, Anne Burns (2006: 236-240) defines
speaking as:
“ephemeral, contextually, and culturally mediated, less standardized than writing, subject to rapid variation and change, and challenging to codify linguistically. It is not discrete communicative skill, and therefore is highly interactive and thus the participants make personal references to each other (I, you, he) and interpersonally focused, with speakers making direct references to their thoughts, emotions, and judgments relating to the events.”
Speaking would be ephemeral when it refers to a
conversation between two or more people in a specific situation and context.
And such a view of speaking is supported by Brown and Yule (in Nunan, 2001) who
characterize speaking as ‘short and often fragmentary utterances.’
For its nature to be ephemeral (short and fragmentary),
speaking then tends to be less standardized if compared to writing. The use of
contraction (I’m; He’s; or They’re) is allowed in spoken
conversation between two or more people; but, it is not liable to the field of
writing wherein “I am looking forward to
hearing from you” is much more favourable than “I’m looking forward to hearing from you.” The view of speaking as less
standardized gets “Amen” from Brown and Yule (in Nunan, 2001) who state that
speaking is ‘the loosely organized syntax, the use of non-specific words, and
phrases and the used of fillers make spoken language feel less conceptually
dense than other types of language.’
When two or more people are having a conversation, they
found it short and less standardized. For that reason, the anxiety to get
involved in the ongoing conversation decreases significantly. This contributes
to the next characteristics of speaking as suggested by Burns (2006) saying
that speaking is interactive, interpersonal, and subject to rapid variation and
change. ‘Changes in language styles’[1] occur in frequent times
when anxiety to speak decreases. If that so, the conversation becomes so
interactive that interpersonal exchange between the speaker and hearer is
obvious.
While the above definition is almost comprehensive to
detail the definition of speaking, Burns (2006) did not explicitly mention one
of the determining characters of speaking; that is the social value. For that reason, Sari Luoma (2006) in her book Assessing Speaking defines speaking as:
“part of the shared social activity of talking that is mutually interesting and relevant in the situation” (p. 20).
William Littlewood (2002: 43) suggests the inclusion of
‘social acceptability’ as another determining factor – along with ‘functional
effectiveness’ will make a communication effective. To him, speaking is:
“not only a functional instrument, but also a form of social behaviour. This means that the language someone produces will be evaluated in terms of its social acceptability as well as its functional effectiveness (p. 43).”
This, once again, suggests that speaking is not merely
about communicating ideas to receiver in linguistically correct ways
(grammatical competence), but there are some factors highly needed to be
considered, amongst them is the social dimension around the speaking activity
(sociolinguistic competence). Another determining factor in effective spoken
communication is the awareness of when to talk and when to be silent, listening
to other people speaking (strategic competence). The last determining factor in
speaking is that a speaker must be aware of the ways he/she arrange the ideas
in logic order; and this contributes to the existence of “discourse
competence.” These four factors – grammatical, sociolinguistic, strategic, and
discourse competences – then contribute to a concept that is called
“communicative competence.” For that reason, the next part of this chapter will
discuss about the communicative competence.
References:
Dalton-Puffer, Christine. 2009. “Communicative Competence and the CLIL Lesson.” In Zarobe, Yolanda Ruiz de & Catalàn, Rosa Marià Jimenez (Eds.). Content and Language Integrated Learning – Evidence from Research in Europe. Toronto, US: Multilingual Matters.
Rasool, Naz. 2008. “Language Policy in Britain.” In Hornberger, Nancy H (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Language Education. New York, US: Springer Science+Business Media.
Richards, Jack C & Schmidt, Richard. 2002. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. London, UK: Pearson Education.
Martínez-Flor, Alicia; Usó-Juan, Esther; & Soler, Eva Alcón. 2006. “Towards Acquiring Communicative Competence through Speaking.” In Usó-Juan, Esther & Martínez-Flor, Alicia (Eds.). Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills. New York, US: Mouton de Gruyter.
Shumin, Kang. 2002. “Factors to Consider: Developing Adult EFL Students’ Speaking Abilities.” In Richards, Jack C & Renandya, Willy A. (Eds.) Methodology in Language Teaching – An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Thornbury, Scott. 2003. How to Teach Speaking. London, UK: Longman Pearson Education.
Burns, Anne. 2006. “Teaching Speaking – A Text-based Syllabus Approach.” In Usó-Juan, Esther & Martínez-Flor, Alicia (Eds.). Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills. New York, US: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nunan, David. 2001. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Louma, Sari. 2006. Assessing Speaking. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, William. 2002. Communicative Language Teaching – An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[1] This is what Mauranen
(2008: 144) refers to ‘the prime motor of language change’ in speaking.
By Irfan Nugroho (nugrohoirfan@gmail.com)
ReplyDeleteThe discussion of speaking a foreign language (especially English) usually begins with the explanation of communication. Indeed, it is because one of the main goals of language teaching and learning is to reach ‘the ability to communicate’