Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Speaking
However good a student may be at listening and understand-
ing, it need not follow that he will speak well. A discrimina-
ting ear does not always produce a fluent tongue. There has
to be training in the productive skill of speech as well. In
many cases, listening should lead naturally on to speaking.
This is particularly so at the phonological level where it is
essential to develop an ability to recognise a sound before
success in producing it is possible. The link between these
two areas is bridged by techniques such as those discussed in
Chapter 5. The rest of this section is primarily concerned
with grammatical and lexical problems of oral fluency in
communication, but much of what is said is equally
applicable to phonological matters.
It has been pointed out earlier that there is much in
common between the receptive skills of listening and
reading, and the productive skills of speaking and writing.
There are controlled, guided and free phases of production in
both oral and written work. The speech produced by the
student should be tightly controlled at first by the teacher,
then as progress is made there should be less rigorous
guidance, culminating in situations where the student is free
to produce utterances appropriate to the situation. This
progression applies to each teaching point at all levels of
achievement, though clearly at beginner stages there will be
heavy emphasis on controlled and guided practice, and more
and more freedom at advanced levels.
In the previous sections of this chapter, considerable stress
was laid on listening to as much natural, authentic English as
possible. This aims to go some way towards dealing with the
problem of understanding and being understood by real, live
English people. All too often, past teaching techniques have
led to a good passive understanding of the language, but no

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Listening and Speaking
77
capacity to use it. More recently through massive pattern
practice in audio-lingual and audio-visual courses, there have
been many students who could produce perfectly adequate
responses in the classroom when given a clear stimulus by
their teacher, but who were incapable of dealing at all
convincingly with the social situation when they met their
first Englishmen talking together. It is particularly important,
therefore, that these stages of controlled, guided and free
practice should always be seen in relation to the functional
use to which the student will have to put his oral fluency. He
must be prepared by his teacher for actual communication
with others (apart from monologues and talking to oneself,
speech is basically a communicative, social art), and the
teaching must develop this competence in the learner.