How to Teach Speaking Skill to The Older Learners

Speaking is “the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols in various contexts” (Chaney: 1998). Speaking with young learners is like playing with words and sounds. It is important for the development of young learners in their overall language-learning process. So, teaching speaking skills to young learners is one of the most crucial areas to teach a target language.

Group to be discussed and their characteristics:

The main concern of this paper is how to teach speaking skills to older learners under young learners whose age is above 7. According to Jean Piaget (1896-1980), the famous child psychologist, this group is in the concrete operational stage and in the formal operational stage. To him, this is the turning point in the cognitive development of a child. The common characteristics of this group are showing interest in analytical approaches and starting to think beyond the context which means abstract terms. They also showed interest in the world around them and gradually started to know about real-life issues.

Concerns and difficulties to teach speaking skills to older learners:

As a teacher, it is important to know about the learner's background knowledge, interests, their needs to develop their speaking skill in the target language before giving any task to them. At this level, learners have to learn how to manage a simple conversation in front of any person or a group. To handle simple conversations, what are the necessary steps the learner should follow, the teacher should teach them.

However, teachers frequently come up with some difficulties in teaching speaking skills because many elements are interconnected to speak fluently like vocabulary, pronunciation, structures, functions, and so on. To make teaching speaking easier to older learners, teachers can first teach them some phrases which are useful in the classroom like, sorry I did not get it, it is your turn, etc. to make them prepared for difficult tasks.

As older learners can apply and control language better than younger group teachers can give them some less controlled activities. Like, as storytelling, information gathering, role play, etc. But the teacher should be concerned that the activities must have a purpose, and meaning as well as not be so difficult and must create fun. So, the learner gets a challenge to complete the task which is motivating and not boring. 

Moreover, the teacher should be concerned about the talking time of the learners. He or she has to be aware of increasing the talking time of the learners by giving them any task or asking them any question where learners have to talk much. For example, ask to describe that object or animal not ask what is? If needed, help the learner to describe by giving hints or vocabulary lists. Teachers also may correct the mistakes of the learners but not often, because, in that case, the learners can lose their confidence level and their speaking flow will be broken down. So, when learners cannot go forward with their learning process, teachers can help them as better capable persons to make their progress in performance. This concept is known as ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) which was promoted by Russian Psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. He argues that working within the ZPD is a fertile ground for learning (Learning and Development). So, to teach speaking skills to older learners, teachers can use ZPD in various ways. It is also possible for strong peers to make a discussion environment.

Preferable activities:

1. Storytelling activity

The teacher will provide some papers to the learners individually and each of the papers will contain some pictures step by step which generate a short story. Then ask the learners to construct the story by using their learned knowledge of the target language and tell the others in the class the story one by one. If anyone in the class will not understand what the others said

; He or she can ask questions to clarify. 

In this clarification part, teachers may help the learners to give proper clarification if they will face any problem to clarify the matter for a proper vocabulary or grammatical structures.

By doing this task learners can express their ideas and thoughts by maintaining the format of beginning, development, and ending including the characters and setting of the story. It will also help them to develop their speaking quality and confidence level.

2. Role play activity

The teacher will divide the learners into groups of two or three persons and give each group one small piece of paper where a real-life situation that is very familiar to them like, the student with a librarian, or customer with a shopkeeper, or a waiter with a customer in a restaurant, or two strangers in public transport, etc. will be given according to the number of group members and tell the learners to discuss the situation among their partners and also decide their roles based on that situation for 10-15 minutes. Here, the teacher may give some useful vocabulary based on the situations in the paper but keep in mind the learner's age.

After the discussion period, the teacher will call one after one group in front of the class to act out the situation by playing their roles and ask them to listen and watch carefully while the other groups perform because after this session all the groups will have to give comments on the other group's performance.

By doing this task the learners can use some functional language of real-life context and get fun acting the role of their familiar person.

Conclusion

Speaking is a productive skill where the speaker has to think and speak simultaneously. To teach this skill to older learners, teachers have to diagnose the learner’s schemata about the target language as well as bear in mind that they always have to try to make an optimistic learning environment where learners feel secure to talk and get enough encouragement to gradually develop themselves.