Aspects of Speaking Performance

Speaking becomes important because speaking is a skill that can make people easily understand to what things explained. High School students’ speaking ability is expected to be good because they have learn English since some years before and they will have many performances related to oral skill in universities. But in fact, High School students’ speaking ability is still low. It is difficult to them to fulfil some aspects of speaking performance. Aspects of Speaking Performance:

1. Fluency

Lado (1961: 240) points out that speaking ability is described as the ability to report acts or situation, in precise words, or the ability to converse or to express a sequence of ideas fluently.

Thornbury (2005:6-7)
Research into listener’s perception suggests that pausing is one of the factors of fluency.

Thornbury (2005:8)
People can be said as fluent speakers if they fulfil the following features:

a.       Pauses may be long but not frequent

b.      Pauses are usually filled

c.       Pauses occur at meaningful transition points

d.      There are long runs of syllables and words between pauses

Foster and Skehan in Nunan (2004:87) propose a model in assessing speaking in which fluency is measured by considering the total number of seconds of silence and time spent saying ‘um’ and ‘ah’ by subjects as they complete a task.

2. Pronunciation

Thornbury (2005:128-129
Pronunciation refers to the student’s ability to produce comprehensible utterances to fulfil the task requirements.

Harmer (2001:28-33) provides more issues related to pronunciation. He suggest pitch, intonation, individual sounds, sounds and spelling, and stress.

Pronunciation becomes important because it gives meaning to what is being said. Wrong pronunciation may cause misunderstanding or people involved in a conversation are offended.

3. Grammar

Brown (2001:362)
Grammar is the system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence. In relation to contexts, a speaker should consider the following things:

a.       Who the speaker is

b.      Who the audience is

c.       Where the communication takes place

d.      What communication takes place before and after a sentence in question

e.       Implied versus Literal Meaning

f.       Styles and Registers

g.      The alternative forms among which a produce can choose.

Written Grammar	Spoken Grammar
Sentence is the basic unit of construction Clauses are often embedded (subordination) Subject + Verb + Object Construction Reported speech favored Precision favored Little ellipsis No question tags No performance effects	Clause is the basic unit of construction Clauses are usually added (co-ordination) Head + Body + Tail Construction Direct speech favored Vagueness tolerated A lot of ellipsis Many question tags Performance effects, including ü  Hesitations ü  Repeats ü  False stats ü  Incompletion ü  Syntactic blends

4. Vocabulary

Thornbury (2005:22) suggests three usual things used by speakers in what they are being said:

v  When people speaking, they are involving high proportion of words and expressions that express their attitude (stance) to what is being said.

v  Speakers usually employ words and expressions that express positive and negative appraisal because a lot of speech has an interpersonal function, and by identifying what people like and dislike, they are able to express solidarity.

v  A speech also usually employs deictic language, i.e. words and expressions that point to the place, time, and participants in the intermediate or a more distant context.

5. Interactive Communication

Thornbury (2005:129)
Interactive communication refers to the ability of a candidate to interact with the interlocutor and the other candidates by initiating and responding appropriately and at the required speed and rhythm to fulfil the task requirements.

Brown (2001:269)
The most difficulties faced by students in speaking are the interactive nature of communication. In speaking, especially when they are having conversation they are engaging in a process of negotiation of meaning. Thus, learners usually have problems in how to say things, when to speak, and other discourse constants. Although they have difficulties in this aspect, assessing students through the way they interact is good to train them to have natural speaking.

6. Appropriateness

Harmer (2001:24)
The term of appropriateness is related to some variables. When people are communicating they have to see what effects to achieve the communicative purpose. Those variables are:

a.       Setting

b.      Participants

c.       Gender

d.      Channel

e.       Topic

7. Complexity

Halliday (1985:87)
It is wrong that written language is highly organized, structured, and complex while spoken is disorganized, fragmentary, and simple.

Brown, Anderson, Shilock, and Yule is Nunan (2004:86)
What made speaking difficult were related to the type of information that had to be conveyed and were concerned the scale of the task and interrelationships among the different elements involved.

The spoken language is complex in a different way. The complexity of written language is static and dense, while spoken is dynamic and intricate.