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Research and the teaching of speaking in the second language classroom
Chapter · January 2017

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Research and the Teaching of Speaking in the Second Language Classroom
Anne Burns


Introduction
This chapter reviews the theory and practice of recent approaches to the teaching of speaking. It begins by outlining key theoretical areas that need to be considered: the nature of speaking and the skills, knowledge and affective factors involved, the processing of speech, the features of spoken lan-guage, differences between spoken and written language, and what discourse analysis reveals about its textual and grammatical features. I argue that teachers need to have awareness of a range of such theoretical areas in order to understand and address the speaking needs of their students explicitly. To this end, I survey some key areas of research that could enhance pedagogical knowledge. The chapter concludes by considering further directions in research on the teaching of speaking.

The Increasing Demand for Competent English Speakers
Teachers have long known that mastery of speaking skills is important for many second language learn-ers; however, the teaching of this skill is problematic for many teachers because of the complexity of spo-ken interaction and a lack of consensus about what principled approaches should be adopted to teach speaking (Bygate, 2001). In recent years, however, competence in speaking English has come into much greater prominence in many educational systems, many of which have been criticized for placing too heavy an emphasis on reading and writing instruction and national testing (Baldauf et al., 2012). Wit-ness, for example, the most recent Course of Study guidelines (2008) implemented in junior high school from 2012 by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), which seek greater balance in English teaching “to develop students’ basic communication abilities, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing (MEXT, 2008, p. 1). The policy places particular emphasis on teachers using English in the classroom, increasing vocabulary, and fostering communicative abil-ity through communication practice (Tahira, 2012). Such moves are to be found in many other recent policy developments in Asia (see Kirkpatrick & Sussex, 2012) and elsewhere and are driven by the glo-balization of English and international pressure for countries to produce English-competent citizens to enhance their geopolitical and economic development and competitiveness. As Lazaraton (2014, p. 106) comments, however, “the act of speaking is staggeringly complex” (and one might add that so is the immense body of literature on speaking and the spoken language), which makes it one of the most per-plexing of the traditional four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing to teach and assess. Given
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increasing demands to foreground speaking in language curricula, it is important that English language teachers have an awareness of some of the key areas relevant to teaching speaking so that they can “teach speaking” effectively rather than simply “do speaking” (Goh & Burns, 2012) in the classroom.
The Complexity of Speaking and Speaking Competence
Speaking is complex because speakers are involved in a rapid and dynamic process incurring “a high element of doing various things at the same time” (Johnson, 1996, p. 55). To be competent they must combine various skills, knowledge, and processes that take account of the contexts of production, and result in speech that is culturally and socially relevant, appropriate, and comprehensible to their interlocutors, as well as managing micro-level reactions and responses to what they utter. Competent speakers must at the same time be listeners who can take account of the interactional and unpredict-able dynamics of speech (Ellis, 2014). As Bygate (2001, p. 16) comments, “all this happens very fast, and to be successful depends on automation.” Goh and Burns (2012) propose that speaking compe-tence can be thought of as “combinatorial,” involving the use of linguistic knowledge, core speaking skills, and communication strategies, which must all cohere simultaneously to constitute speaking competence and to facilitative fluent and intelligible speech production.
Linguistic Knowledge
Linguistic knowledge encompasses structure, meaning, and use (Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983) through four types of knowledge: phonological, grammatical, lexical, and discourse. Speakers must know how to produce the language at the segmental (micro—consonant and vowel sounds, word stress) and suprasegmental (macro—utterance stress, rhythm, intonation) levels of pronun-ciation and to appreciate what communicative functions are served by features such as prominence (weak/strong emphasis) and tone (chunking of sounds) (see Burns & Seidlhofer, 2010). In recent years, attention has been drawn to the importance of raising learners’ awareness of suprasegmental features to enhance their abilities in global communication (e.g. Zhang, 2004). Grammatical knowl-edge is a fundamental requirement for speaking any language. Speakers need to have syntactical knowledge of, for example, word order to create meaning, verb inflection to denote tense and aspect, the ability to parse utterances to make further responses (Rost, 2001), and understanding of how spoken grammar differs from written (McCarthy & Carter, 1995).
Lexical knowledge relates to the number of words or individual vocabulary size (estimated by Owens, 2001, to be around 80,000 words for a native speaker by the end of high school) that a speaker knows. However, a distinction is usually made between productive (what learners can produce) and receptive (what learners can recognise but not produce) vocabulary. Learning fixed and idiomatic utterances—formulaic “prefabricated” expressions (Wray, 2002, p. 9)—is said to enhance a learner’s productive performance, particularly at early stages, as does learners’ awareness of semantic rela-tionships among lexical sets (words related to the same topic, function, or form) and collocations (words that cohere semantically) (Webb & Boers, in press); in this respect, Nation (2011) points to the value of knowledge of high-frequency multiword groups (see also Shin, 2007) in facilitating spoken language production. Ways of expressing modality (lexical phrases denoting stance, attitudes, and levels of certainty) are also an important area for development of pragmatic competence in spoken language (Bardovi-Harlig, 2003). Finally, discourse knowledge relates to an understanding of the functional purpose of different kinds of talk and how different contextual factors influence the kind of linguistic resources that are harnessed for organising and structuring stretches of speech (e.g. narrative, recount, lecture, casual conversations). Speakers also need to be aware of pragmatic norms (e.g. three-part exchanges in short conversations; Carter, 1998) and sociocultural practices

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and expectations in different societies, particularly in an era where English is widely used globally and intercultural pragmatic knowledge is increasingly important in meaning negotiation.

Core Speaking Skills
In many traditional classrooms, there is a heavy focus on teaching knowledge about pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and discourse. However, as many learners who have experienced these types of classrooms have come to realize, such knowledge is not sufficient in itself to enable them to become effective speakers. They must also learn how to proceduralise or ‘put into action’ such knowledge through use in different contexts. Four broad categories of core speaking skills for proceduraliza-tion can be outlined: pronunciation, speech function, interaction (or discourse) management, and discourse organisation skills. Pronunciation skills mean that learners can articulate and blend the sounds of the language, assign word stress to create meaning, and use appropriate intonation pat-terns (see Burns & Seidlhofer, 2010). Various studies have shown that prosodic features such as stress and intonation have a greater impact on learner intelligibility than articulation of single sounds or phonemes (Derwing et al., 1998; Hahn, 2004). More recently, McKay and Brown (2015) have argued that in light of the use of English as an international language, English teachers and learners need to move away from native speaker norms and sensitize themselves to both global and local standards for intelligibility. Speech function skills (Cohen, 1996) enable learners to perform a communicative function or speech act, such as requesting (permission), expressing (agreement), explaining (rea-sons), giving (instructions), offering (advice), or describing (settings), while interaction manage-ment is to do with regulating speech during interactions (e.g. initiating conversations or clarifying meaning). An important consideration in relation to speech functions is that learners need to be aware of appropriate usage in different cultural contexts, such as who has seniority or status, or what politeness markers (such as hedging) may be important to create effective communication.
In the spontaneous two-way process that characterises much natural speech, the management of interaction is also an important skill. While interaction skills overlap to some extent with speech-function skills, they have a specific regulatory purpose in enabling speakers to create, negotiate, and (re-)direct the interaction (Gass & Torres, 2005). These skills entail recognising what speakers are trying to achieve and reading non-verbal clues such as body language. Learners need practice in skills such as gaining, keeping and offering turns, and managing topics in order to initiate, sustain, and negotiate interactions (Bygate, 1987). Discourse organisation skills relate to the ability to manage the unfolding of the interaction, including being able to anticipate how particular genres and sub-genres are structured and patterned (Bygate, 1998) and knowing how to select grammar and lexis to estab-lish coherence and cohesion. Coherence (Gernsbacher & Givón, 1995) is created cognitively through both domain-specific lexical knowledge using devices such as noun-pronoun referencing, reiteration of lexis, and relexicalisation drawing on related vocabulary, and grammatical processing cues, with both processes contributing to the construction of local and global coherence. Cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976/2013) refers to construction of text so that it ‘hangs together’; speakers create cohesion through semantic resources that link the text to what has gone before, including joining different parts through devices such as conjunction or connection, or employing signposting expressions that indicate additions or changes to the message.
Communication Strategies
Communication strategies (e.g. Dörnyei & Scott, 1997) enable speakers to deal with the constraints of cognitive processing in a situation where face-to-face interaction is rapid, spontaneous, and unpredictable. Because speakers often cannot afford time to prepare what they say in advance, they

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need coping strategies to deal with the “mismatch between their communicative intentions and their linguistic resources” (Váradi, 1992, p. 437). Cognitive communication strategies fulfill two broad purposes to enable the interaction to continue. First, reduction strategies can help the speaker avoid having to keep on speaking; they are a form of face-saving device, but they also limit the continuity of the interaction, as they include topic avoidance (moving away from or shifting the focus of the topic), message abandonment (being unable to continue the message), or meaning replacement or semantic avoidance (becoming less specific or vague). Achievement strategies, on the other hand, are psycholinguistic strategies (Kellerman & Bialystock, 1997) to enable the speakers to communicate with whatever resources they have: such strategies include lexical substitution, generalisation (e.g. president for principal), exemplification (e.g. cat, dog, horse for animals), circumlocution (e.g. with big ears and tail like horse for donkey), word coinage (e.g. tall hill for mountain), or literal translation (e.g. going to the house of me for going home). Apart from these kinds of cognitive strategies, meta-cognitive strategies—or strategies to manage thinking and speech production—may be employed during speech production. Speakers may prepare what to say by planning ahead, self-monitoring, noticing how they create and negotiate meaning while speaking, or self-evaluating how and what was produced following interaction. Interactional strategies are a further type of communication strategy that enable speakers to manage meaning negotiation: these kinds of strategies include con-firmation checks (asking listeners if they have understood), comprehension checks (paraphrasing to confirm understanding), repetition (repeating all or part of what is said) and repetition requests (asking someone to repeat), clarification (asking for further explanation), or assistance appeals (ask-ing for help with difficult expressions).


Speaking and Cognitive Processing
From the above discussion it is clear that speaking is a highly dynamic psycholinguistic process involving complex cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills. To conceptualize speaking as a cognitive process, Levelt (1989) proposed a model of speech processing (see Figure 18.1) that has influenced

	FORMULATION	Interactive	ARTICULATION	Speech
		processing of
		speech in
F		working
-	Knowledge			F
		memory
SEL				SEL-
	about the	CONCEPTUAL	Knowledge
	language:		about the
		PREPARATION
MONITORING	grammar,		language:	MONITORING
	vocabulary,		pronunciation
	register and
	discourse	Knowledge about the topic
	structure
		Long-Term Memory
	Knowledge about the topic, language and context
		of interaction