Developing Speaking Skills in Foreign Language Teaching

This paper sets out to show the full scope of teaching speaking skills, which in its entiretymeans more than just teaching `speaking’. The concept of teaching speaking skills is presented withrespect to the notion of communicative competence. The main line of argument is consistent with theview that in order to become competent speakers, learners must acquire a good command of allfundamental areas of communicative competence: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse andstrategic.It also attempts to link relevanttheoretical concepts and thoughts to practice and considers their implications for languageteaching.Furthermore, it aims to present some of the ways of practicing speaking skills in the classroomfocusing on fluency and offers a variety of practical techniques which can be used in theclassroom. Finally, it seeks to answer my initial research questions, which are presented in one ofthe following sections of this chapter.