Using role plays and simulation activities in teaching speaking

The object of course work: to develop scientific and methodological recommendations on the role of education in speech teaching.
The aim of the course work is using role plays and simulation activities in teaching speaking.
The structure of the course work: introduction to the work, main part, section 4, conclusions and references.
1.Reasons for teaching speaking
Effective foreign language learning necessitates assimilation of all four skills, but special emphasis is put on teaching speaking, which has become noticed and appreciated in today’s methodology. Essentially, being able to speak a foreign language means having communicative efficiency. It is inconceivably difficult to imagine what life would look like if people could not communicate verbally.
Speaking is now the most emphasized skill in the field of foreign language teaching, but unfortunately, it is also recognized as the most difficult one to develop in classroom conditions. Students are constantly encouraged to use the target language during classes, but when the lesson is over, they have no possibility to use it in real communication. Of course, some learners seek the opportunity to speak their foreign language outside the classroom; however, most do not try to practise the target language at all.
Certainly, one of the disadvantages of teaching English as a foreign language is that students cannot use the language in everyday speech. Speaking a foreign language means being able to interact with people in authentic situations, not only during classroom controlled speaking activities. Therefore, teachers‟ task to develop that skill is extremely challenging and needs much time, as only by practice may learners succeed. In the majority of schools, however, communicative efficiency is still not a priority. In most classes teachers fail to provide students with activities that would reflect genuine interaction. Students rarely talk to each other and rarely have the possibility to talk to a teacher as well.
There are three main reasons for getting students to speak in the classroom. Firstly, speaking activities provide rehearsal opportunities-chances to practice real-life speaking in the safety of the classroom. Secondly, speaking tasks in which students try to use any or all of the language they know provide feedback for both teacher and students. Everyone can see how well they are doing both how successful they are and also what language problems they are experiencing. And finally, the more students have opportunities to activate the various elements become. As a result, students gradually become autonomous language users. This means that they will be able to use words and phrases fluently without very much conscious thought. Good speaking activities can and should be extremely engaging for the students. If they are all participating fully-and if the teacher has set up the activity properly and can then give sympathetic and useful feedback-they will get tremendous satisfaction from it.
Speaking is very important to be learned by students to develop their skills in learning English. Its functions are to share and to express the ideas. The first problem frequently found is that the students have little opportunity to practice speaking English in the real communication activity in their daily conversation. They usually use their mother tongue to answer the question from their teacher. An opportunity is an important factor to improve the students’ speaking skill. Learning the speaking skill is very challenging for learners in the foreign language context, because they have very few opportunities to use the target language outside the classroom. Without practicing language that they learnt, the students’ speaking skill cannot improve. Role play is one of activities which encourage the
students to speak-up, it can be applied by the teacher to motivate their students. The second problem is the students have a little vocabulary mastery since they learn English as a foreign language. They do not find English outside the classroom. There are a lot of vocabularies that they are unfamiliar with and itcaused problems because the communication only happens when both of the speaker and the listener understand what they are talking about. The students need to enrich their vocabulary much more to get the conversation to run well communicatively.
The third problem is mispronunciation. The students get difficulties in pronouncing some words because they are still confused on how to prono uncethem. The wrong pronunciation may cause misunderstanding between the speaker and the listener. For the example, when the students pronounce “good morning” tobe /gud maerning/.
The next problem is related to the students’ motivation. They fear of being laughed by their friends and have less confidence with their own ability when the studied in the class. It makes bad effect for them. They cannot prepare themselves to be the best guides when they graduate from the vocational school.
The last problem is the method used by the teacher. The teacher gives little opportunity to students to express their idea. The materials learnt by students are not appropriate too. It is not suitable with the basic competence topic of eleventh grade of vocational school, because the teacher often teaches grammar.
Speaking is one of the important parts of second language teaching and learning. Today’s goal of the teaching speaking is to impose students to use language communicatively in order to follow social and cultural rules in each communication circumstance. To use language communicatively, the students need to master communicative competence which involves grammatical competence, sociolinguistics competence, strategic competence and discourse competence (Richard, 2006:9). It is important for the teacher to think more about how to teach speaking. Learners of English need to make themselves completely involved to practice English in different kinds of learning activies and situation because learning speaking is quite challenging. It means that the teacher should provides them with many kinds of different activites to help them improve their ability in speaking. The speaking activities can run well when they practice a lot. Harmer (2007: 345-348) explains some important points related to the teaching of speaking to minimize the students’ reluctance in speaking. The first ispreparation.
Preparation is important because it gives enough time to the students to think about what they want to speak, before they perform speaking in public. The second is the value of repetition. It allows the students to revise on what they have done before, gets some chance to analyze what they have already done and gets them to draft and re-draft their writing. The third is taking the students into big group or small group. Through this way, the students can make sure that they get chances to speak and interact in big or small groups. Therefore, the students can share their idea with they friends. The last is manadatory participation: allowing the students to equal engage in a task without knowing
who gets the turn first and who gets the next. This can make the students more prepared and always ready to get their turn. From the explanation above, we can conclude that teaching speaking is not an easy to do. The teacher should provide them with many instrument and give them opportunity to practice it as much as possible. There are many important thing to consider before teaching speaking in order the students will not get any difficulties in practicing such as preparation, repetition, interaction and partcipation.
Brown (2004:142) divides sixteen skills of speaking. The skills are divided into two kinds of categories, micro skills and macro skills. They are mentioned as follows:
1) Micro Skills:
a) Produce differences among English phonemes and allophonic variants.
b) Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
c) Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed position, rhythmic structure and intonation contours.
d) Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
e) Use an adequate number of lexical words.
f) Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
g) Monitor one’s own oral production and use various communication strategic like pauses, fillers, self-correction, backtracking – to enhance the clarity of the message.
h) Use appropriate speech acts (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g. tense, agreement, pluralization), word order, patterns, rules and reduced forms.
i) Produce speech in natural combination – in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath groups and sentences.
j) Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
k) Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

2) The Macro Skills:

a) Use the functional expressions appropriately according to situations, participants and goals.
b) Use appropriate words choice based on the situation and the participants in face-to-face conversations.
c) Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as focal and peripheral ideas, events and feeling, new information and given information, generalization and exemplifications.
d) Use facial feature, kinesics, body language and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language.
e) Develop and use speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help and accurately assessing how well you interlocutor is understanding you.
In addition, Spratt, Pulverness and William Spare (2005:34) state when people are speaking, they usually use a different aspect of speaking. There are two main aspects of speaking aspects, fluency and accuracy. Fluency means being able to communicate with a language easily and well (Oxford: 2008). In addition, accuracy in speaking is the ability to produce correct sentences using correct grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. The macro and micro skills above show that the students need to learn the forms of language as well as the functions of language. In the teaching of speaking, they are introduced to the pieces of language to see the whole part of it. It is expected that showing the macro and micro skills of speaking to them could help them convey and negotiate meanings of language.