Methods of teaching speech

Language came into life as a means of communication. It exists and is alive only through speech. When we speak about teaching a foreign language, we first of all have in mind teaching it as a means of communication.

In teaching speech the teacher has to cope with two tasks. They are: to teach his pupils to understand the foreign language and to teach them to speak the language. So, speech is a bilateral process. It includes hearing, on the one hand, and speaking, on the other. When we say "hearing" we mean auding or listening and comprehension.

Practical value of this paper is determined by the fact that the developed material and proper tasks and exercises make available the use of this work as a manual in teaching a foreign language at classroom or as a given homework, or as a useful material for elective additional courses of foreign language at school.

The paper consists of introduction and two chapters followed by conclusion. The first chapter is about the most common difficulties in auding and speaking a foreign language. Also it consists of psychological and linguistic characteristics of the speech. Further we find differences between prepared and unprepared speech and in this chapter we learn to find mistakes of pupils and how to correct them. In the second chapter are given the exercises, which help the teachers to obtain results in teaching speech.

Auding or listening and comprehension are difficult for learners because they should discriminate speech sounds quickly, retain them while hearing a word, a phrase, or a sentence and recognize this as a sense unit. Pupils can easily and naturally do this in their own language and they cannot do this in a foreign language when they start learning the language. Pupils are very slow in grasping what they hear because they are conscious of the linguistic forms they perceive by the ear. This results in misunderstanding or a complete failure of understanding.