Using effective techniques to enrich students’ productive skills in English classrooms

This paper sheds light on the importance of speaking skills in English classrooms. First of all, this paper discloses the significance of the basic language skills of English. Later, this paper also explains the importance of speaking skills in English classrooms in a comprehensive way. It also explains the need to teach speaking skills. Then the kinds of speaking situations and the main advantages of speaking skills are explained elaborately. Furthermore, this paper also supplies several techniques to develop speaking skills among the EFL/ESL learners in the English classrooms.

Therefore, this study was aimed at investigating of the effective influences of using definite technics to improve students’ productive skills of the secondary school. The qualitative method was used by involving twenty students including secondary level. The participants were chosen purposively by considering various criteria. An open-ended questionnaire was distributed through a quiz- paper. The data were then analyzed inductively. The researchers find some problems, namely in pronunciation, fluently, vocabulary and accuracy.

Finally, this paper suggests some useful tips for the teachers to introduce various activities that involve the ELLs more on practicing their speaking skills in English classrooms. Moreover, it also suggests the ELLs improve their speaking skills as these are very useful for them to build their future career in a perfect way.

Keywords: pedagogical technologies, effective technics, pronunciation, speaking accuracy, audio-visual recordings, quantitative research, productive skills, oral communication.

In this globalization era, there have been drastic changes taking place all over the world. These tremendous vicissitudes occur when people have a strong desire to achieve something. People’s desires are fulfilled when they clearly express their ideas and opinions with others. Thus, they need to learn communication skills in order to fulfill their ambitions, desires, and goals. In this modern world, communication skills play a vital role and one must have mastery over these skills to get success in their respective fields. So, speaking is the most important skill among all the four language skills in order to communicate well in this global world. As English is widely used all over the world, there is a need for learners to acquire the communication skills of it to get success in their respective fields. Thus, the classroom is the ideal platform to acquire good communication skills, especially, speaking skills.

The object of study is the effective ways to improve learner’s productive skills.

Method of research.

The author used such research methods as quantitative methods with a descriptive approach. From the research data, conducted by researchers, researchers get many striking differences between students' speaking skill progress before and during the research. (Rahmawati, 2021)

Literature review.

Language has been a tool for communication for centuries. It is the way to interact with people to regulate their social behavior. Though there are many ways for communication, language is widely used as a tool. The process of sharing the information is communication. The transmission and interchange of ideas, facts, feelings or action is known as the process of communication. Language is important for communication. Language is the expression of human personality in words whether in speech or letter. It serves as the universal medium for conveying the common facts and feelings of everyday life. Students communicate with one another and with the teacher. Through the basic of the language skills, the learner can improve knowledge in the second language. Now the question comes why is it essential to develop mindful and thoughtful speaking skills? The answer is that speaking is one of the essential talents we acquire (Myers, 2017).

Speaking is considered as the ultimate goal of language learning and the most basic skills to be achieved (Dai & Lin 2020). Although humans live with natural speaking skills, these skills need to be developed through education so that they can be used in an appropriate and effective manner (Bozkirli., 2019). Student performance in speaking activities has been influenced by many factors, such as students lacking in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation (Maulina et al., 2019), besides psychological problems such as doubt (Sangaji, 2019). Some students don't want to talk because they think they don't have original ideas and/or are not confident in their language skills (Bomgaars & Bachelor, 2020). Also participation is low or uneven, related to contexts where students have fewer opportunities to talk when in a large class. Some students do not get a chance to speak because of the tendency of some other students to dominate, while others speak very little or nothing (Al-Ghazali & Alrefaee, 2019). Speaking is a means through which students can communicate with others to achieve certain goals and communicate their opinions, perspectives, hopes, and intentions (El Sakka, 2019).

Role-play is one of the most common speaking class activities. Role-play technique gets reluctant or shy students to speak. Additionally, it fosters class interaction. Each student can learn from one another (peer teaching). During the role-play, the teacher can function as either a facilitator, a spectator, or a participant. As a facilitator, the teacher provides feedback or new language, particularly during rehearsal time. Meanwhile, as a spectator, the teacher watches role-play and offers comments and advice at the end. Furthermore, as a participant, the teacher gets involved in the role-play. Here, the teacher can act as the model for speaking accuracy, fluency, and expressions.

Story completion is an engaging and enjoyable activity in speaking class. In using this technique, the students sit in a circle. The teacher starts to narrate a story, but after a few sentences, the teacher stops telling the story. Each student then takes a turn to continue narrating the story in four to ten sentences. Students can add new characters, events, descriptions to develop a story. In this way, the students build their confidence, interest and improve their speaking skills (Rifa'at & Suryani, 2018; Hidayati et al., 2019; Hamsia, 2018).

This technique provides students opportunities to generate their imagination and creative thinking in a relaxed way. The students are also encouraged to make meaning and construct their point of view on a story (Gravett, 2019).

Here, the student's voice is heard in the class. Hukom (2019) noted that story completion brings excitement and promotes equality in the classroom. Each student gets an equal opportunity to contribute to building up a story in a less intimidating activity.

Storytelling or telling the story is very useful for developing students' vocabulary and pronunciation and helps students develop their thinking skills and imagination. Storytelling helps develop integrated language skills at once; listening, speaking, reading, writing, interactional, vocabulary, and literacy. The students essentially retell a story that they have read or heard in their own words. When narrating a story, the students, first of all, remember the story, then reconstruct the memory, ideas, and then internalize them. After that, the students narrate it. Sometimes body language expressions are used to make the story more vivid. The utterances are also varied in terms of volume, dynamics, rhythm, intonation, and body language expression to drive the message more powerful.

Conclusion

As discussed previously, learning English in an EFL context is different from those in ESL and English as native language contexts because, in the EFL context, English is only learned as a school subject and not used for communication. Consequently, the students have minimal opportunities to practice it, unlike those in ESL and English as native language contexts who have limitless opportunities to practice and use the language for communication. This is a challenging task if we aim to develop our students' speaking skills.

Optimizing classroom time with appropriate learning activities can be a better choice. Practical activities such as dialogue, picture description, picture differences, showing videos and discussion, roleplays, and storytelling can be fun and formative to promote students' speaking skills. It is the teacher's authority to decide which activity to perform based on students' language proficiency level, learning goals, and resource availability, so the chosen activity is useful.

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