3. Reduced forms Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc. all form special problems in teaching spoken English. Students who don't learn colloquial contractions can sometimes develop a stilted, bookish quality of speaking that in turn stigmatizes them.
4. Performance variables One of the advantages of spoken language is that the process of thinking you speak allows you to manifest a certain number of performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking, and corrections. You can actually teach learners how to pause and hesitate.
5. Colloquial language Make sure your students are reasonably well acquainted with the words and idioms and phrases of colloquial language and that they get practice in producing these forms.
6. Rate of delivery Another salient characteristic of fluency is rate of delivery. One of your tasks in teaching spoken English is to help learners to achieve an acceptable speed along with other attributes of fluency.
7. Stress, rhythm, and intonation This is the most important characteristic of English pronunciation, as will be explained below. The stress-timed rhythm of spoken English and its intonation patterns convey important messages.
8. Interaction Learning to produce waves of language in a vacuum—without interlocutors—would rob speaking skill of its richest component: the creativity of conversational negotiation.
Microskills of Oral Communication 1. Produce chunks of language of different lengths.
2. Orally produce differences among the English phonemes and allophonic variants.
3. Produce English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, and intonational contours.
4. Produce reduced forms of words and phrases.
5. Use an adequate number of lexical units (words) in order to accomplish pragmatic purposes.
6. Produce fluent speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Monitor your own oral production and use various strategic devices— pauses, fillers, self-corrections, backtracking—to enhance the clarity of the message.
8. Use grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), word order, patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9. Produce speech in natural constituents—in appropriate phrases, pause groups, breath groups, and sentence constituents.
10. Express a particular meaning in different grammatical forms.
11. Use cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
12. Appropriately accomplish communicative functions according to situations, participants, and goals.
13. Use appropriate registers, implicature, pragmatic conventions, and other sociolinguistic features in face-to-face conversations.
14. Convey links and connections between events and communicate such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
16. Use facial features, kinesics, "body language," and other nonverbal cues along with verbal language in order to convey meanings.
17. Develop and use a battery of speaking strategies, such as emphasizing key words, rephrasing, providing a context for interpreting the meaning of words, appealing for help, and accurately assessing how well your interlocutor is understanding you.