Other accuracy- based activities.

In the past, speaking activities invariably involved drills (uncontextualized pattern practice exercises), which have fallen out of favor in teaching. Brown (19994) recommends that if drills are to be used, they should lead to more authentic communication activities.

(For example, when practising conditionals, the students can be given the task to finish the sentences, using the structure: If I were …, I would be… More advanced students would be expected to use more than just the structure: If I were…,I would be …, because… or Find smn, who…(the teacher can practise grammar tenses, vocabulary, structure, etc

IV.Communicative competence

The middle part of this century was characterized by a zeal for the scientific linguistic analysis of the structures of languages and for the application of such analysis to behaviorist approaches to languages teaching. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of intense research into the nature of the legitimate interlanguage systems of learners, with a focus on errors as important keys to understanding the makeup of those systems But a new wave of interest characterizes the 1980s, a focus on communicative language teaching for the ultimate goal of communication with native speakers. Such a focus has centered on speaking and listening skills, on writing for specific communicative purposes, and on-'"authentic" reading texts. Underlying the communicative language teaching movement are a number of important theoretical principles of language behavior."

Communicative Competence is the "aspect of competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning interpersonally within specific contexts." It is not intrapersonal as we saw in Chomsky's early writings, but rather, a dynamic interpersonal construct that can only be examined by the performance of two or more individuals in the process of negotiating meaning.

Canale and Swam defined four different components, or subcategories, that make up communicative competence: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic. The first two components reflect the use of the linguistic system itself: Grammatical competence "encompasses: knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology." It includes the mastery of linguistic code of a language. The second subcategory is discourse competence. This is the ability to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. Discourse is from the simple spoken text to a long written text. Grammatical competence focuses on the sentence-level grammar, discourse competence focuses on the stringing of sentences together to communicate meaning.

The last two components define the functional aspect of communication. Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interaction." The fourth component is strategic competence. Swain and Canale define strategic competence as "the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variable or due to insufficient competence," in other words it comprises the ability to make repairs, to cope with limited knowledge of the language, to sustain communication through paraphrasing, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, and guessing, as well as shifts in register and style.

The functional aspect of communication Focusing on linguistic forms of language,vocabulary and grammatical structures, does not mean that someone has mastered the language. Mastery of these forms means nothing if the learner cannot use those forms for the purpose of transmitting and receiving thoughts, ideas, and feelings between speaker and hearer. Forms of language are used to convey a function. For example: "How much does that cost?" serves the function of asking a question: "I'm meeting friends this evening." serves the function of making plans.

The functional approach to describing language views language as a way of behaving and making others behave. Van Erk and Alexander have developed a taxonomy list of 70 different functions to be taught in English curricula. Examples include: greeting, parting, inviting, accepting, requesting, agreeing. apologizing, and sympathizing.

The analysis of the functions of language is also known as discourse analysis. Discourse as earlier described refers to language that is more than sentence level. As mentioned earlier, prior decades focused on linguistic form and on descriptions of the structure of language, which were basically at the sentence level. Now the emphasis on communicative competence has shifted the focus to the discourse level. Without context it would be difficult to communicate with each other. Through discourse, we greet, request, agree, persuade, question and much more. A second language learner not familiar with contextual discourse constraints of English might utter sentences with perfect pronunciation and perfect grammar, but fail to achieve the communicative purpose of for example, apologizing to a dinner host, and appear to be impolitely complaining. Learners need to manipulate structures, so that they can learn how to use the structures in discourse.

The importance of the functions/ discourse can be seen in the rules of communications. In a conversation, the speaker must first get the attention of the listener, then nominate a topic. Next, he must develop the topic. As he develops the topic, he must take turns listening and speaking, ask for clarification, and avoid certain topics and interruptions. When it is time to end the topic, he must know how to terminate the topic.

Another important issue in describing communication is speech registers depending upon the context of communication in terms of subject matter, audience, occasion, shared experience, and purpose of communication. The communication can be informal or formal or intimate.

Finally, nonverbal aspects of language play a very important role in communication. This is particularly true in social contexts, when it is not what you say that is important but how you say it—what you convey with your body language, gestures, eye contact, physical distance, and other nonverbal messages.

As we have seen, communicative competence is such an intricate web of psychological, sociocultural, physical, and linguistic features that it is easy to get entangled in but one part of the web. And it is probably impossible in the near future to describe the whole nature of human discourse in such a way that language teachers are provided with ready solutions to the teaching of foreign language.

Teaching speaking

1. Speech is a process of communication by means of language. For example, (1) a pupil tells the class a story about something which once happened to him; (2) the teacher asks questions on the story read by the pupils at home and starts a discussion; (3) pupils speak on the pictures suggested by the teacher, each tries to say what others have not mentioned; (4) pupils listen to the story and get some new information from the text; (5) they see a sound film and learn about something new from it, etc.

If the teacher wants his students to do well in the interactive speaking activities he may list the following goals for the students: 1) participation-students will participate in the lesson if the teacher selects activities which involve them. Students might be used to drills exercises and resist the efforts and attempts of the teacher to involve them. Then the teacher should choose the topics that are personal, interesting to his target audience. 2) interaction, it can be stimulated if you give your students an opportunity to talk to each other about what is important to them. 3) fluency, in interactive speaking activities the teacher creates conditions for his pupils to communicate their own ideas, opinions and wishes. Students will not be always accurate in their use of the language, but this is not important. In the communicative approach fluency takes priority over accuracy. The teacher keeps notes on the mistakes and gives feedback later. 4)confidence, the teacher increases confidence by providing comprehensible input and not by pressuring or making students talk before they are ready. 5) communication strategies: active listening and managing conversation. Being a good listener builds a confidence, necessary for taking an active role in communication. The teacher provides the list of phrases, encourages them with the body language (smile, eye contact, nodding of the head) The teacher introduces the basic communication strategies for managing the conversation (guess, paraphrase, change)

II.Main difficulties are:

1. restriction of the classroom, traditional classroom sitting arrangement often works against the teacher in interactive teaching. The horseshoe sitting arrangement and a group lay out allows more eye contact between speakers and more central space for role plays.

2. limited practice time, if the teacher wants his students to have more speaking practice he chooses breaking into groups. There are various ways to organize groups: buzz groups, panels, fishbowls, star, opinion market, carousel, network and others.

3. learner anxiety, the teacher’s role is to prevent anxiety by using various techniques: providing your class a sort of supporting and encouraging family, being specific in your feedback, while including the element of competitiveness in the activities, take care to have it under control.

4. speech must be motivated. It is necessary to ensure conditions in which the pupils will have a desire to say something in a foreign language. Respect pupil’s opinion even if you do not agree with them. Speech is always addressed to the interlocutor. Speech is always emotionally colored. Give pupils such tasks as prove something, give reasons, express opinions. Speech is situational. Situations the teacher creates must be real , imaginary, problematic.

3.The development of speaking follows the same pattern both in the mother tongue and in a foreign language from reception to reproduction as psychologists say, and from hearing to speaking if we express it in terms of methodology.Since "language is not a substance, it is a process." (N. Brooks) and "language doesn't exist. It happens." (P. Stevens), we should know under what conditions "it happens". What are the psychological characteristics of oral language? They are as follows:

- Speech must be motivated, i. e., the speaker expresses a desire to inform the hearer of something interesting, important, or to get information from him.

- Speech is always addressed to an interlocutor.The teacher should organize the teaching process in a way which allows your pupils to speak to someone, to their classmates in particular.The speaker will hold his audience when he says something new, something individual (personal). Try to supply pupils with assignments which require individual approach on their part.

-Speech is always emotionally colored for a speaker expresses his thoughts, his feelings, his attitude to what he says.

-Speech is always situational for it takes place in a certain situation.While teaching speaking ,real and close-to-real situations should be created to stimulate pupils' speech.

These are the four psychological factors which are to be taken into account when teaching speech.[

4. In teaching monologue we distinguish 3 stages: statement level, utterance level, discourse level. First, students learn to make up sentences in a foreign language according to the sentence pattern. Then the students fulfill various exercises on substitution, extension, transformation, completion. If the pattern is repeated several times with some changes, a pattern becomes a habit. After that pupils learn to use sentence –pattern in the utterance, following the model. Then they do it without help. This is a pen. It is red. It is on the desk. Discourse level is possible, when pupils have acquired habits and skills in making statements and combine them in a logical utterance.. At this level pupils speak on the picture, a film strip, a text, or make up a story of their own To help them the teacher uses visual prompts. These three stages in developing speaking should take place throughout the whole course of instruction.

5. Teaching dialogue. A pattern dialogue is used as a teaching unit. We distinguish 3 stages: receptive, reproductive and constructive or creative. First, pupils listen to the dialogue recorded or read by the teacher. The teacher presents the necessary language. Pupils learn the dialogue by heart and reproduce it. They may change some elements in it. As a result of this work they master the structures of the pattern dialogue. Then pupils make up their own dialogue They are given a picture or a verbal situation to talk about.

6. Role play is the activity for which the context and the roles are determined by the teacher., but the students have freedom to produce the language appropriate to the context and the roles. Role play has an important role I teaching fluency. It provides the teacher with the feedback on how well the students have learned the material,, it maximizes the pupil talking time, provides variety of activity and interaction and makes a more student –centered classroom. Possible problems are: some pupils can’t act: the teacher can’t correct all the mistakes, there is noise in the classroom It is sometimes difficult to allocate roles and organize the role play. Procedure for the role play should include the following: language input, when the teacher revises vocabulary, setting of the context, when students get acquainted with the situation, which they will role play. Visuals can help to make the work more effective., then allocation of the roles and statement of aims, familiarization with the roles on the cards, role-playing . Then the pupils report back about their experience, after that the teacher reports and make a remedial session on mistakes .Follow up includes some discussions on the topic or written assignment for home work.