Improving speaking skills through the use of integrated listening and speaking material for student teachers academic year 2012/2013
Introduction
Speaking was the most difficult skill based on some observations. Students faced some obstacles, which came from internal problems, such as anxiety, worried about making mistakes and lack of self confident, and external ones: lack of speaking practice and input from receptive materials – listening and reading. Their problems influence their listening and speaking performance that will be explained in the next sub chapter. However, in fact, most of activities and materials were not designed to support both speaking and listening. Listening and speaking influences each other as the more students get input from listening, the richer the knowledge they acquire then the more fluent they become.
In order to be able to demonstrate comprehensible meaning, students need to get relevant and meaningful input either from listening or reading so that they acquire not only full understanding of the messages being spoken but also the model to communicate them in the appropriate speaking context. Rivers (1996, 196) in Osada (2004, 55) says “Speaking does not of itself constitute communication unless what is being said is comprehended by another person”. One investigation from Dupuy (1999) in Nation (2009) about “narrow listening” – an approach based on Krashen’s idea, reported improvements in students listening comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary as well as increased confidence in French. The improvements were resulted from listening as many times as they wish to a range of 1 – 2 minute aural texts on a range of familiar and interesting topics. Hence, the points that should be taken into account are the integration of listening (meaning-focused input) and speaking (meaning-focused output) and language-focused learning such as the language features: pronunciation, spelling, vocabularies, grammar and discourse (Nation and Newton, 2009). Consequently, the design is not only focus on increasing the frequency of listening and speaking practice but also integrating the material and activities, both listening and speaking of the given texts.
Discussion
Rubin (1994, 78) states that text type has been noted as a factor affecting listening comprehension. It is assumed that since most written texts are more syntactically complex, less redundant, denser, and use fewer pauses than spoken texts, they are potentially more difficult to understand (i.e., cognitively taxing). Conversely, because conversational texts are less complex syntactically, more redundant, and have more pauses, they are potentially easier to understand. People communicate what they have in mind everyday, as it is a part of daily life. Even though words are always spoken daily and produced ten thousands for average people, it does not make speaking easier, especially for foreign learners (Thornbury, 2009: 1). Speaking is a skill, whichdeserves attention, as it is a foreign language. Thus, speaking is routine communication, which needs to be paid attention; in addition it should be had and developed (Luoma, 2009: 20). Due to these definitions, lecturers need to see factors that make speaking difficult, strategy to speak and develop it, types and characteristics of spoken language. Thus, teaching the comprehension of spoken speeches is therefore of primary importance if the communication aims is to be reached (River, 1966, 204 in Osada, 2004, 55)
As Osada (2004, 56) says that in order to understand spoken messages, students need to integrate information from a range of sources: phonetic, phonological prosodic, lexical, syntactic, semantics, and pragmatic. The difficulties come from both side speaking and listening. The fact that we achieve all this in real time as the message unfolds makes listening complex, dynamic, and fragile (Celce-Murcia, 1995, 366)
Spoken language has its own features, which are different from written language. Buck (2001, 4) in Osada (2004) points out that there are three characteristics of speech that are particularly important in the listening comprehension construct: (a) speech is encoded in the form of sound; (b) it is linear and takes place in real time, with no chance of review; and (c) it is linguistically different from written language. Brown (2001: pp. 270-271) suggests some characteristics of spoken language, which can make oral performance easy as well as, in some cases, difficult. First, clustering deals with the way of the speakers organize their output both cognitively and physically (in breath groups) through such clustering. Second, redundancy deals with the way the speaker has opportunity to make meaning clearer through the redundancy of language by capitalizing on this feature of spoken language. Third, reduced forms refer to contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc; all form special problems in teaching spoken English. Fourth, performance variables deal with a certain number of performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking and corrections, which appear during the process of thinking as the speaker speaks. Fifth, the teacher should also make sure that the students are well acquainted with the words, idioms, and phrases of colloquial language and that the students get practice in producing these forms. Sixth, rate of delivery refers to an acceptable speed along with other attributes of fluency should be achieved by students. Seventh, stress, rhythm, and intonation, which are the most important characteristics of English pronunciation, convey important messages. The last characteristic is interaction.
Therefore, ideally, students get input from listening skill how to speak accurately and fluently. It can be stated that students need more practical activities, which provide them with more listening practice and input from listening material and audio-visual media that contain good model of accuracy, fluency, pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, grammar and standard rate of delivery. As Dunckel (1991, 437) says that although it has become generally accepted practice to provide beginning-level learners with a considerable amount of comprehensible input (Krashen, 1981), Rickerson (1984) stresses the need to provide foreign/second language students with opportunity to produce the language to enhance the motivation during language learning. Thus, it is expected that the result of more input and listening practice, their speaking skills improve to the upper level. It is a good starting point for them since they will play as model for their future students. Hence, it meets the teaching competence of current PBI curriculum that graduated student teachers should acquire
Research problems
In identifying the problems, I carried out some observations in three speaking classes. Based on the observations, there were many errors done by the students when speaking. There were errors in the accuracy, pronunciation, spelling, stress, rhythm, intonation and grammar. Beside that, most of the students viewed speaking as difficult skill. They encountered some problems when speaking English, such as how to start a conversation, how to connect from idea to another one, anxiety, nervous, and worried about making mistakes. These problems hindered them from having a fluency in speaking, thus made them think that it was not easy to speak.
The activities and the materials that were given to the students did not give a chance to practice speaking. Most of the activities in the classroom were dominated by doing some exercises in their modules that did not enrich students’ speaking skills. Their activities were reading some dialogues in book and it happened most of the time. Therefore, students’ production did not sound natural which was based on real conversations.
The activities and the materials that were given to the students did not give a chance to practice speaking. Most of the activities in the classroom were dominated by doing some exercises in their modules that did not enrich students’ speaking skills. Their activities were reading some dialogues in book and it happened most of the time. Therefore, students’ production did not sound natural which was based on real conversations.
Furthermore, students only got input from the teachers who read the dialogues and they followed her/his without having other input from audio-visual or movies which contain native sounds in real communication. Sometimes students did not know certain natural expression in real life, for instance: how’s life? Are you heading somewhere? Thus, students’ speaking ability ended up in low accuracy, fluency, pronunciation, stressing, rhythm and grammar. Due to the lack input of listening, consequently, students had difficulties in understanding clustering, reduced forms; colloquial language and translating phrase and idiom so that they cannot give expected response.
Due to the lack of using other media but English book or printed materials, students did not get a chance to develop what they got. Students needed to get more input not only from the printed book the had but also from other media such as audio-visual material that can be herd to scaffold their knowledge so that students have good model how to speak naturally. Nowadays, we find that gadget is about young generation. They put their life - recent activities, personal pictures, favourite movies and music, agendas in their gadget such as tablet, Smartphone, notepad, MP3 player, ipod, etc. This habitual situation is a challenge for educators to put English closer to students in their daily life. Then, gadget is a part of their life. The soft file of English material and the media can be saved in their gadget such as audio – visual PowerPoint, Vodcat, Podcast, movies and music. Once students have them in their gadget, they can learn the material anytime and anywhere. It means that they have the control how and when to learn which is can be matched with