What is Meant By Speaking A Second Language

What is Meant By Speaking A Second Language
No language skill is so diffucult to assess with precision as speaking ability, and for this reason it seemed wise to defer our consideration of oral production test until last.
Like writing, speaking is a complex skill requiring the simultaneous use of a number of different abillities which often develop at different rates. Either four or five components are generally recognized in analyses of the speech process:
1. Pronunciation (including the segmental features-vowels and cosonants-and the stress and intonation patterns)
2. Grammar
3. Vocabulary
4. Fluency (the ease and speed of the flow of speech)
To these should probably be added (5) comprehension, for oral communication certainly requires a subject to respond to speech as well as to initiate it.
When we refer to a student skill in speaking a second language, our fundamental concern is with his ability to communicate informally on every day subject with sufficient ease and fluency to hold the attention of his listener. Thus in our test of speaking abiliti we are primarily, if not solely, interested in the foreign student control of the signaling system of English-his pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary-and not with the idea content or formal organization of the message he conveys.


The major problem in measuring speaking ability
It is probable that performance on these test is positively related to general ability to converse in a foreign language, altough, as will be explained directly, we still lack very reliable criteria for testing out this assumption. General fluency, too is fairly easy to assess, at least in gross terms it usually takes only a few minutes of listening to determine wether a foreign speaker is able to approximate the speed and ease with which native speakers of the language typically produce their utterances. It is only when we come to the crucial matter of pronunciation that we are confronted with a really serious problem of evaluation.