CONCEPT SPEAKING


     A. The Basic Concept of Speaking
1.   What is speaking?
                     Speaking is means of oral communication that gives information communication involves two elements, namely the speaker who gives the message and the listener who receives the message. In other words communication involves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive skill of speaking.
                     Widdowson states that speaking is a way in which the language system is manifested through the use of organs speech, that it is true that speaking is productive skill.[1]
                     Harmer states that communication between human is an extremely complex and ever changing phenomenon and it is not my intention to examine all the many variables that involved. But there are certain generalization that, we can make about majority of communicative events and these will have particular relevance for the learning and teaching of language.[2]
                     Further, he states that when the people are engaged in talking to teach other we can be fairly sure that they are doing for good reasons.
    They want to say something
a.   Want is used here in general way to suggest that speaker make definite decision to address other people. Speaking may of course, be forced upon them but we can still say that they feel the need to speak otherwise they would be keep silent.
b.   They have some communicative purpose
              Speakers say something because they want something to happed as a result of what they say. They may want to charm their listener. They may want to give some information or express pleasure. They may decide to be rude or to flatter, to agree or complain in each of this case they are interested in achieving this communicative purpose what is important the message they wish to convey and effect that want it to have.
c.   They select from their language store
              Speakers have an infinite cavity to create blew sentence in order to achieve this communicative purpose they will select from the state of the language they think is appropriate.
d.  They want to listen to something
              Once again want is used in a general way. But in order fro someone to understand what they are listening to (or reading) they must have some desires to do so.
e.   They are interested in the communicative purpose of what is being said.
              In general people listen to language because they want to find out what the speaker is trying to say. In other words what ideas they are conveying and what effect they wish the communicative to have.
f.    They process a variety of language
              Although the listener may have a good idea of what of the speaker is going to say next, in general terms. He or she has to be prepared to process great variety of grammar and vocabulary to understand exactly what is being said.
       B. Elements of the Spoken Language
      Harmer in the practice of English language teaching points out the elements of spoken language as follows:[3]
a.   Pronunciation
                  Native speaker (or competent users of the language) knows how to say a word that is how pronouncing it. This knowledge is made up of three areas, sounds, stress and intonation.
1)   Sound
                              On their own the sounds of a language may well be meaningless. If you say /t/ (the line show that this is phonetic script) a few time, e.g. ‘tu,tu,tu’, it will not mean very much in English. Neither will the sounds /k/, /a/ or /s/. But if we put all these sounds together in a certain order we  end up with the words ‘eats’ and that does mean something.
            All words are made up of sounds like this and speakers of a language need to know these sounds if they are to understand what it said to them and be understood in their turn. Some of the problems that speakers of English as a foreign language have are precisely because they have difficulty with individual sounds, for example the Spanish speaker who says ‘berry’ instead of ‘very’ or the Japanese speaker who says a word which sounds like ‘light’ instead of the intended ‘right’.
  2)  Stress
                     When they use a word native speaker know which part of that word should receive the heaviest emphasis. For example, in the word ‘photograph’ not all the parts are of equal importance. We can divide the word it three parts: ‘pho’, ‘to’, and ‘graph’. Competent speaker of the language will say the word like this, ‘PHOtograph’, stressing the first syllable. The situation changes with the word ‘photographer. Where the stress shifts to the second depending upon a word’ students grammatical function: ‘perMIT’ is a verb, but ‘PERmit’ is a noun, and the same is true of the words ‘imPORT’ and ‘Import’, for example.
3)   Intonation
Closely connected with stress is intonation, which means the tune use when you are speaking, and the music of speech.
Intonation means the pitch you use and the music you use to change that pitch. Do you use a high pitch when you say a word? Does your voice fall or rise at the end of the sentence? For example, if I say ‘you’re from Australia, aren’t you? Starting my question at the medium pitch of my voice range and dropping the pitch at the end of the sentence (on ‘aren’t you’) this will indicate to other competent speakers of English that I am merely speaking confirmation of a fact about which I am almost completely certain.
Intonation is a big indicator of involvement as well. Intonation is clearly important then, and competent users of the language recognize what meaning it has and can change the meaning of what they say through using it in different ways.
b.     Grammar
                  Grammar is the study of the classes of words, their inflection, and their functions and relations in the sentences (Webster:495). If you ask the average speaker of a language what they know about grammar they way remember the odd lesson from school, but beyond that they will say that they have forgotten what grammar they once knew. The same speaker, however, can say a sentence like ‘if I had known, I’d have come earlier’. Without thinking, even though it is grammatically complex. How is this possible?
                  Linguistic have been investigating the native speakers’ knowledge for years, just as they have been trying to think of the best way of describing that knowledge and the grammatical system. What they found is that the grammatical system is rule-based and that competent users of the language ‘know’ these rulers in some way.
                  So our average native speakers who say they do not know grammar are both right and wrong. They do not consciously know any grammar and could not produce any rules of grammar without study and thought. But they do have a language competence which is subconscious and which allows them to generate grammatically correct sentences.
c.   Vocabulary
                  Of course competent speakers of the language also know the lexis (vocabulary) of a language, although that knowledge will vary depending, for example, on their education and occupation. They know what words mean and they also know the subtleties of some of those meanings. Competent speakers of English know what a heart is but they do not get confused by sentences like ‘He wears his heart on his sleeve’.
                  Competent speakers of language follow what is happening to their language and how words change their meaning and sometimes cross grammatical borders.
d.  Appropriacy
                  Knowledge of language use is the knowledge of how to use language appropriately, how to get it to do what we want it to do in the right circumstances. Thus a British speakers of English would be unlikely to invite a high status superior to dinner by would be in appropriately informal in such language would be in appropriately informal in such circumstances. Equally they would be unlikely to say ‘ I was wondering if you would be interested in partaking of a hamburger’ to their best friend. We can think of many more examples: doctors speaking to doctors about an illness use different language from doctors talking to patients, adults do not speak to children in the same way as they speak to each other, lectures do not talk 2.000 students in a big hall in the same way as they talk to two of them over a cup of coffee.
e.    Fluency
                  Fluency is probably best achieve by allowing the stream of speech to flow then, assume of this speech spills over beyond comprehensibility, the “river banks” of instruction or same details of phonology, grammar or discourse will channel the speech or more purpose full course.
                  To speak fluently, we must have both of Rhythm in our speaking and absence of non fluencies in our words. Rhythm has to do with the regularly or regularity of accenting and phrasing with which we present our words.
                  The presence of non fluencies in our speech hurts us in two ways that if makes out speech more difficult to understand and it lower our credibility deserves some explanations.
                  Typically, non fluencies are interpreted by listener as being indicative of things nervousness and experience. Either, interrogation is detrimental to us as a source, if our speech is fluent (that is free from fluencies). The audience will interpret that fluency is the mark of confidence and experienced speaker. Our credibility thus rises, it is important to our success, than our speak in manner that is both Rhythm and free from influence.

B.     Regional Dialect
The best way to develop a regional accent is to spend time in that region. You can not learn an accent, you absorb it. Accent modification is a method used to change an accent in order to achieve neutral accent.
Everyone speaks with an accent. You may speak English with an accent from a different region in the United States. You may speak English with an accent because english is not your first language. You may speak french with english accent. In our world today, people move from state to state and from country to country. One thing that we take with us no matter where we move is our accent.
Many people learn to speak a second ir third language. But even so, they may have trouble communicating because they still have accent from their first language. This is usually because they learned later language as an adult. They may undergo special training or classes to focus only on pronouncing the new language more like a native. This is accent reduction for purpose of better communication.
When  an individual feels that his or her accent interferes with overall communication in a social or work setting, that person may seek accent modification, more commonly known as accent reduction. A reason for accent reduction is when you move to a different are within your own country. Certain accents can make things difficult.
Accent reflect the unique characteristics and background of a person. Many people take great pride in their accents. However,  some people may have difficulty communicating because of their accent. These difficulties include the following:
a.       People not understanding you.
b.      Avoiding social interaction with those who may not understand you.
c.       People focusing on your accent more than on what you are trying to say.
d.      These types of communication problems may have negative effects on job performance, educational advancement, and everday life activities. It may also negatively affetc your self esteem if you are having trouble communicating because accent. For all of these reasons, some people want to modify or change their accent.
Having rejected the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ , we can now turn to an even more fundamental question : how clear are the boundaries between varieties? The hierarchical model of the familiy tree implies that the boundaries between varieties are clear at all levels of the tree. Is this so? In particular, is it possible to continue such a tree downwards, revealing samaller and smaller varieties, until one comes to the level of the individual speaker (the ‘idiolect’)? The answer must be no.
If we consider the most straightforward variety differences based on geography, it should be possible, if the family tree model is right, to identify what are called Regional Dialects within any larger variety such as English. Fortunately, there is a vast amount of evidence bearing on this question, produced by the discipline called DIALECTOLOGY, particularly by its branch called DIALECT  GEOGRAPHY. their result are plotted on a map showing which items were found in which village (since dialect geography tends to concentrate on rural areas to avoid the complexities of towns). The dialect geographer may then draw a line between the area  where one item was found and areas where others were found, showing a boundary for each area an ISOGLOSS[4].
C.    Diglosia
Diglosia is a relatively stable language situation, in wich in addition to primary dialects of the language, which may include a standard or regional standard, there is a very divergent, highly codified, often grammatically more complex, superposed variety, the vehicle of the large and respected body or written literature, either of an earlier period or in an other speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation (word. 15 (159):336).[5] 
D.    Module Of Neutral English Training
Neutral English training includes the following modules:
1.    Phonetic
When phonetic studies all possible speech sounds that may be produced by human beings in general, it is called ‘General Phonetics’ it decribes all possible movements of speech or gans and their resulting sounds that are used by man in his speaking. However, phonetics may narrow down its scope by studying speech sounds as used in an individual languge such as in English. Indonesian and so on. This writting, for instance, deals especially with speech sounds that are used as signalling units in communicating ideas in the English language, and is accordingly called ‘English phonetics’. It is meant for Indonesian students learning English. Sometimes references are made to indonesian speech sounds for the sake of comparison.
Form of English described here was the dialect that was spoken by educated British people in the southern part of England. And which was especially heard through the B.B.C. English was spoken throughout the world cannot be expected to he uniform and it is only natural that it varitied with time and place, monir differences in pronunciation, and probably in grammar. Do not matter as long as the language is readily understood in the English speaking world. There are no two people who speak exactly a like. Differences in pronuncation between one speaker and another are caused by geographical, social and historical factors; or they may also be caused by adividual peculiarities such as stuttering, lisping, or other speech deficiencies.
The style of pronuncation adopted here is the so called ‘Slower Colloquial Style’ . Which is intermediate between the formal style of lecturing and the rapid familiar style. This style is most suitable for foreign students since other styles can be easily learned from the slower colloquial style.[6]
2.    Vowel & Consonant Sounds
The words vowel and consonant are very familliar ones, but when we study the sounds of speech scientifically we find that it is not easy to define exactly what they mean. The most common view is that vowels are sounds in which there is no obstuction to the flow of air as it passes from the larynx to the lips. A doctor who wants to look at the back of a patient’s mouth often asks the patient to say “ah” ; making this vowel sound is the best way of presenting an unobstructed view. But if we make a sound like s or d it can be clearly felt that sounds like s and d should be called consonants. However, there are many cases where the decision is not so easy to make. One problem is that some English sounds that we think of as consonants, such as the sounds at the beginning of the words ‘hay’ and ‘way’, do not really obstruct the flow of air more than some vowels do. Another problem is that different languages have different ways of divinding their sounds into vowel and consonant; for example, the usual sound produced at the beginning of the word ‘red’ is felt to be a consonant by most English speakers, but in some other languages (some dialects of chinese, for example) the same sound is treated as one of the vowels.[7]
3.    Syllable and Word Stress
The syllable is a very important unit. Most people seem to believe that, even if they cannot define what a syllable is, they can count how many syllables there are in a given word or sentence, if they are asked to do this they often tap their finger as they count, which illustrates the syllable’s importance in the rhythm of speech. As a matter of fact, if one tries the experiment if asking English speakers to count the syllables in, say, a tape recorded sentence, there is often a considerable amount of disagreement.[8]
The distribution of stress in a word in English cannot be predicted. This means that each word in English has its own stress pattern. Which should, therefore be learned together with its meaning. Because of this irregularity in the distribution of stress it is advisable to consult a dictionary in case of doubt. It is very common for English words and their derivatives to have different stress patterns.[9]
4.    Sentence Formation
            An aural conjunctive concept formation experiment used as stimuli sentences varying systematically in Voice (active/passive), Mood (declarative/interrogative), Modality (affirmative/negative), tense, and lexical content. Target classes were the eight sentence types defined by all combinations of the first three syntactic variables. Aural processing was more difficult than visual, but higher education level facilitated concept acquisition for males and females equally. The 64 undergraduate subjects tended to avoid syntactic analysis in depth, classifying sentences on as cursory a basis as the task allowed. The simple, unequivocal syntactic signals of Mood and Modality meaning were readily apparent, but the discrimination of Voice was complicated by ambiguous syntax semantic associations and lack of discourse context. Voice is thus not seen as a determinant of utterance type, but as a context- and content-dependent realization of agent or object focus in transitive messages.[10]
5.    Intonation
No definiton is completely satisfactory, but any attempt at a definition must recognise that the pitch of the voice plays the most important part. Only in very unusual situations do we speak with fixed, unvarying pitch, and when we speak normally the pitch of our voice is constantly changing. One of the most important tasks in analysing intonation is to listen to the speaker’s pitch and recognise what it is doing; this is not an easy thing to do, and it seems to be a quite different skill from that acquired in studying segmental phonetics. We describe pitch in terms of high and low, and some people find it difficult to relate what they hear in someone’s voice to a scale ranging from low to high. We should remember that ‘high’ and ‘low’ are arbitrary choices for end points of the pitch scale. It would be perfectly reasonable to think of pitch as ranging istead from ‘light’ to ’heavy’, for example, or from ‘left’ to ’right’, and people who have difficulty in ‘hearing’ intonation patterns are generally only having difficulty in relating what they hear (which is the same as what everyone else haers) to this ‘pseudo-spatial’ representation.[11]
6.    Articulation Exercises
Vowel movements. Overemphasize vowel by drawing them out. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, Eeeeeeeeeeeee. Warms up vocal cords for the morning. Pen in mouth. Insert pen behind canines,read. Drool. Have handkerchief available to catch drool. Enhances articulation, builds cheek muscles. The “and” drill. Insert and the and word and “and” and between and every and word and. Pronounce an as if you were a southerner: and ah is a two syllable word enhances each word as a distinct unit, rather than encouraging slurring. Read backwards. Right to left, bottom to top. Enhances the ability to clearly distinguish between words. Overenunciation. Slowly read evidence, exaggerating each syllable. Enhances the ability to speak in a voice other than monotone. Chat with unlce willy. Speak to clueless uncle willy gets most of his information from the weekly world news, wich means that he really likes to hear speakers talk “from the heart” in an impassioned manner. Enchances persuasive appeals and emphasis. Hold a chair. Hold a chair to your stomach, with the evidence on the chair. Speak. Enhances the strength of the diaphragm and projection. Say “abiday” and or “gibbida” over and over again. Then say ta ka over and over again. These words hit the key consonants that often blur together during speeches.[12]
7.    Pretonics  
The tonic carries a fall or rise in pitch movement. Syllables, from the first stressed syllable, and up to the tonic, we call the pretonic. We do not consider sequences of syllables before the tonic which do not include a stressed syllable since they convey no linguistic contrasts in meaning.
a.    Level pretonics, before low tonic, whether falling of rising, level pretonics  tend to remain level, at the same pitch height as the onset of the tonic. Before a high fall, however, the level pretonic may tend to rise towards the onset pitch of the tonic, example
                                                                Don’t be, so im’patient then.
b.    Stepping pretonic, in stepping pretonics comprising more than one stressed syllable, the stressed syllables step down successively, with intervening unstressed syllables more or less on the same level as the preceding stressed syllable, or dropping towards, but not below, the pitch of the next stressed syllable.
c.    Sliding pretonic, stressed syllables in the sliding pretonic are successively lowered in pitch as in the stepping pretonic, but the untressed syllables intervening between stressed syllables follow a falling countour which drops below the level of a following stressed syllable. `


                                     [1]Widdowson. H.G., Teaching Language as Communication (Oxford University Press: 1983), p.59
[2]Jeremy Harmer, The Practice of English Teaching. New Edition (London: Longman, 1991), p.46
[3]Ibid., p. 11 
[4] R. A Hudson ,  Sociolinguistic, (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne Sydney , 1980). P. 39  
[5] Abdul Chaer & Leonie Agustina, Sosiolinguistik (Edisi Revisi Cet.II PT Asdi Mahasatya, Jakarta; 2004), P. 92.
[6] Ramela, English Phonetics (IKIP SEMARANG PRESS, 1985), P.3
[7]  Peter Roach. English Phonetics and Phonology (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne Sydney , 1983). P.10.  
[8] Ibid., p. 56.
[9] op.cit P.24
[10] www.springerlink.com/content/l3741613p8486872
[11] Ibid., p.112
[12]  http://www.speaking.pitt.edu/student/public-speaking/excerises.html

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