Importance of Speaking Skills

Speaking is considered as the most important skill of the learner, most of the time the proficiency of this skill is which judges the knowledge of the learner of the second language. People have to many reasons to improve their ability of the skill such as expressing ideas, creating relationships, exchanging information etc. Even though, the development of this skill is not an easy task for anybody, there are many aspects that have to be taken into account in the learning process, the learner must be active and dynamic practicing and exchanging patterns that are important in the development of the skill, during the process the learner must be expose to a natural environment and natural speeches of the target langauge that enable them to develop their awarness of conversational features and strategies, so the task for the teacher is to incorporate real communication in the classroom promoting interactive and realistic activities in order to help students gain confidence and feel motivated, even though despite its importance, for many years, teaching speaking has been undervalued and English language teachers have continued to teach speaking just as a repetition of drills or memorization of dialogues. Fortunately, today's world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students' communicative skills, because, only in that way, students can express themselves and learn how to follow the social and cultural rules appropriate in each communicative circumstance.

There is no doubt that students learn to speak in the second language by interacting. Today there are many methodologies that can help efficiency for this aim. One of them can be the communicative approach that is based on real-life situations that require communication. By using this method in ESL classes, students will have the opportunity of communicating with each other in the target language. ESL teachers should create a classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can occur when students collaborate in groups to achieve a goal or to complete a task

It is essensial for the students to practice as much they can in the class and in daily life as well, simple activites such as share ideas about an event, or find solutions in their discussion groups are effective to improve the skill. Before the discussion, it is important that the purpose of the discussion activity is set by the teacher. In this way, the discussion points are relevant to this purpose, so that students do not spend their time chatting with each other about irrelevant things. For example, students can become involved in agree/disagree discussions. In this type of discussions, the teacher can form groups of students, preferably 4 or 5 in each group, and provide topic of interest for them..

Teaching speaking is a very important part of second language learning. The ability to communicate in a second language clearly and efficiently contributes to the success of the learner in school and success later in every phase of life. Therefore, it is essential that language teachers pay great attention to teaching speaking. Rather than leading students to pure memorization, providing a rich environment where meaningful communication takes place is desired. With this aim, various speaking activities such as those listed above can contribute a great deal to students in developing basic interactive skills necessary for life. These activities make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun for them.