Coursebooks as materials serve teaching aspects of English uses in terms of four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), which are seen as central to language learning, in what ways? The skills component focuses on learners’ faculty to actually process language and scaffolds aspects of linguistic knowledge. The focus is on learners’ linguistic behavior and their capacity to use the language in a variety of contexts requiring different skills, sometimes separately but more frequently together. Taking into account the level and overall objectives, it is necessary to determine whether the coursebook adequately addresses each of the four skills and whether there is a suitable balance between the skills. It should be noted that not all teaching situations reach an in-depth and balanced treatment of all four skills. Clearly, the linguistic system as well as other knowledge should be combined, with four skills as the foundational tools to build up this. Coursebooks, with this objective, should help students learn how to use English just as much as they help them learn about the English system—explicit or not.
Teachers in EFL’s context may discuss about the ways students practice language skills – reading, writing, speaking, and listening as mentioned above. These skills are often divided into two groups: receptive skills and productive skills.
Speaking, falling into productive way of using of language, are skills where students actually have to produce language themselves (Harmer, 2007). Using as a whole language faculty, speaking skills should never be considered as an individual skill.
Consequently, it makes sense to integrate different skills in teaching language. On the other hand, it is widely believed that productive skills, in particular speaking, are the necessary aspect to be assessed to gain information of the process of language learning. According to Richards (2001), the ability to speak language reflects students’ development of learning. As stated by Ur (1996), of all the four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), speaking seems intuitively the most important: many if not most foreign language learners are primarily interested in
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learning to speak. For that reason, to view on the practice of teaching speaking in Vietnamese context as of this study may give an insightful implications. The next part will deal with the concepts of speaking and speaking skills.
2.2.2 On speaking and EFL’s speaking skills
Speaking is seen as an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving, processing and utilizing both verbal and nonverbal components (Burn & Joyce, 1997). Speaking may be viewed as a process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and nonverbal expressions in a variety of contexts. It is clear that speaking is a crucial part of TESOL’s contexts; and learning English is often related to learning how to speak the language.
In fact, speaking ability is seen as the measure of knowing a language. For that reason, EFL learners may need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge that include: mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary);
functions (transaction and interaction); and social and cultural rules and norms (Brown & Jule, 1983). In the communicative model of language teaching, teachers help their students develop this body of knowledge by providing authentic practice that prepares students for real-life communication situations. It can be concluded that if learners want to learn how to speak English, they have to know the nature of speaking. It means that they know how to use right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation and importantly they can pay attention to how and when to speak in order that the listeners can understand they are saying, which are delivered though teaching speaking skills.
Of its purposes, speaking is used for many different purposes and each of them involves different skills. When the learners are engaged in conversations, the purpose of speaking here may be to express opinions, to persuade someone about something or clarify information. In some situations, speaking is used to give instructions or to get things done, for example, to describe things or someone, to complain about people’s behavior, asking and giving services and others. Therefore, the EFL learners’
ability to speak is a very complex task. EFL learners should be told about the purpose
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of speaking skill in classrooms due to the fact that when they know their purpose of learning English speaking, which motivates them to use the target language to communication in classroom, it may led to learners’ success in learning. In sum, speaking skills should be taught and practiced in the classroom because the language course truly enables the students to communicate in English.
2.2.3 Teaching Speaking with coursebooks
Several questions may rise that are in what content and in what ways one should teach speaking skill in EFL’s context. To find the answers, ones may agree that it is essential to facilitate students resources of knowledge, namely schemata (McCarthy, 2000), to successfully articulate authentic. These resources are contained in the students’ need to speak fluently in English. This need is about the ability to practice language proficiently in terms of phonetics and phonology aspects, discourse aspects, and functional aspects. Then, these aspects should be surveyed when explore the teaching of speaking using the coursebook. Moreover, coursebooks provide learners not only the content but a standardized knowledge (Richard, 2005). This concept presents an aspect to learn about when researchers take EFL’ teaching learning domain. Recent studies seem to to regard other skills (Tran, 2011; Phan, 2013 on reading skill) but speaking skill. To sum, it may appear a gap to research language skills teaching in terms of speaking skill regarding to aspects of learners’ need to speak English fluently.
A further consideration is whether the content on the coursebook designed to teach skills is specially written as a semi-authentic (originally authentic but simplified) or authentic texts. Some authors thought that authentic materials can be introduced even at beginning level, so long as the questions, activities, etc. based on them were suitably graded. Others would argue that for beginners, the selection of appropriate authentic materials is sophisticated and typically consists of rather trivial topics, such as shopping lists and asking for direction. Typically, elementary-level content is written specifically for the coursebook in practice. When it comes to the coursebook, authentic or semi-authentic material should be chosen rightly because it
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adds more daily life, relevance, and motivation for students. One can be certain that the language models being presented are genuine when employing authentic or nearly authentic material. Teaching skills should embrace this principle: examples of language that are presented and practiced should serve as good learning models and be representative of language used in real-life.
Speaking seems to be the most practical skills of four skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing). Speaking is thought having this importance may due to the reason that speaking included all of other kinds of knowing. Classroom activities develop learners’ competence to make communication through speaking therefore they are the important component of language teaching. Likewise, learners when taking a productive task can become demotivated if the words or the grammar is not provided yet. In speaking activities, supplying key language items will help students achieve success. Language production activities therefore need to support speakers solving communicative situations in real life. Take this into consideration, the coursebook should be questioned in terms of supplying language uses.
Moreover, it is the case that a prestige way of teaching and learning English should be a pedagogically effective model. This model may depend on the students’
wants and needs, the language uses of the teachers, the learning materials (Harmer, 2007). It seems to be appropriate to let students have something to follow and some standards to judge their performance in the learning materials within this model. In most EFL’ context in Vietnam, coursebook usually are used to provide these standards. However, one may notice a tendency in English centres that in most courses speaking skill is taught to past exams instead of providing standards. Roles of materials to serve this aim of providing standards thus need to be observed in real practices. Regarding the purpose of this research, studying the materials for improving speaking skill may provide information.
2.2.4 Communicative Language Teaching’s approach
The coursebook in the current study refers to CLT’s approach, then to examine this approach as an instruments in teaching methodology is worthy. It is informative
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to see this approach in theoritical discussion in history of approaches and methods in language teaching. Richards & Rodgers (2001) hold that CLT, as an approach (not a method) should (a) take communicative competence the goal of language teaching and (b) make procedures for the teaching language skills that embrace the interdependence of language and communication. The approach’s extensiveness thus differentiates it from any of the other approaches or methods, in scope and status.
Littlewood (1981, p.1) states, “One of the most characteristic features of communicative language teaching is that it pays systematic attention to functional as well as structural aspects of language”. Howatt (1984, as cited in Richards & Rodgers, 2001), discussing on other perspective, proposes a comparison between a ‘strong’ and a ‘weak’ version of Communicative Language Teaching. The ‘strong’ version insists on acquisition of language through communication. On the other hand, the ‘weak’
viewpoint (the standard practice in recent years) acknowledges the importance of using the language for communicative purposes in a wider program of language teaching. That is to say, the ‘weak’ viewpoint looks on ‘learning to use the language’, the ‘strong’ expects on ‘using the language to learn it’. The meaning can be drawn from this approach is that activities that composed of real communication will promote learning. Consequently, activities should be designed according to how well they elicit the learner to find meaningful ways of language use.
Communicative Language Teaching, as an approach, is a diverse set of principles that entails a communicative view of language and learning and that can be utilized to support a wide variety of classroom procedures. These principles include (a) learning language by communicating; (b) including authentic and meaningful communicationin goals of activities; (c) take fluency a priority (d) integration of different language skills; (e) practicing trial and error and being creative (Richards &
Rodgers, 2001). These principles may provide some insights into the review of an in- use coursebook that employs CLT’s approach.
In a different aspect, language learning activities, a major strand of CLT are based on the fundamental belief that if meaning-focused communicative tasks are
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given to students, then language learning will take care of itself, and that let the language in use are presented and bring on opportunities to use it are two ways facilitating a student to gain knowledge and skills (Harmer, 2007). CLT’s exercises typically let students being exposure in real communication. The focal point is on the students’ successful achievement of the communicative task as well as the accuracy of their language use. To be truly communicative, students should have a desire to communicate what these activities aim to hone from the very beginning. Besides, there are other conditions: a purpose for communicating, being focus on the content, a variety of language structure. Therefore, materials for students should do not focus solely specific language form. In other words, CLT’s activities should be varied to capture real communication. A key to the achievement of communicative purpose and the desire to communicate is the information gap that can be provided through these activities. This requirement for materials using CLT should be considered in coursebook’s evaluations.