Assessing Young Learners' Speaking Ability in the Fifth Grade of Three Elementary Schools in Padang

The function of assessment in learning and development is to provide a measurable way of planning and supporting students’ progress. Assessment is carried out by means of checks and tests carried out throughout the course. Assessors should provide feedback throughout ensuring that learning is occurring and the learner is at the correct level. It is also important that assessor’s decisions are also consistently reviewed and internally and externally verified.

One of the most effective ways to facilitate the learning of oral language skills is to take into account the background and everyday life experiences of the students. Once students' prior knowledge and facility with oral language is determined, the classroom program can be planned to develop necessary skills on the developmental continuum. From this starting point the techniques and skills which are taught in the classroom program need to be further extended and used across the whole curriculum. Although the oral language program is delivered at the classroom level, the policy for the development of language skills needs to exist, and be implemented, across the whole school.

Daisy, Communicative Language Teaching - a comprehensive approach to English Language, Language in India;feb2012, vol. 12 issue 2, p249, ISSN 1930-2940

I will highlight in this research precisely at how to avoid the lack of communications in the classroom by clarifying the big rule of Communicative language teaching (CLT) in both, improving communications skills and creating the best field of practicing new vocabulary, grammar rules and pronounce words correctly.

Perhaps the most dramatic the development that has taken place in the field of English language teaching in the last 50 years has been the shift in its primary function.. from being mainly the native language of nations such as the UK or USA, to being mainly a global means of communication. The speakers of English whose L1 is another language already vastly out number native English speakers, and their number countries to grow. For most of its learners, English is therefore no longer a foreign language. This development has brought with it a number of changes in the principles and practice of English language teaching.

Being able to include activities that are helpful for every single one of our students and that meet their different needs in our daily lesson plans is one of the challenges that English teachers have to face every day. Consequently, the goal of this essay will be to give a useful explanation about each language skill and how they are affected by the different classroom approaches teachers use through the process of learning English.

Questions to be dealt in this article with include what is emphasized communicative approach in communicative language teaching and analysis of definition which helps explain communicative language teaching, the next point is how do the roles of the teacher and student change in communicative language teaching and importance of particular roles within the teaching-learning group, and there have been highlighted a few clear benefits like allowing the students to contemplate about some topic and express their views, which train in real life the ability to utilize language to communicate and some unfavorable features in communicative language teaching like focusing too much on oral skills in consequence of not enough emphasis on the correction of pronunciation and grammar errors. Examples of issues that can be used with a communicative approach are described, and sources of appropriate materials are provided.

Speaking is the second skill of the four language skills. In the same study made by Naveed Fakhar (n.d.) Speaking is a skill that requires a person make words via producing sound that can be interpreted as a information, idea or thought. Speaking proficiency can be categorized into 6 types: No practical, elementary, limited working, minimum professional, full professional and bilingual

Daisy, Communicative Language Teaching - a comprehensive approach to English Language, Language in India;Feb2012, vol. 12 issue 2, p249.

In the previous chapter, the literature on communicative competence has been discussed. The researcher began with defining communicative competence and briefly talked about four theories and five theoretical frameworks. Later on, the researcher talked about elements of communicative competence as well as its sub-elements and how to teach them with relations to the four language skills. Finally, the researcher discussed communicative language teaching (CLT) as it depends on communicative competence in its basis. So far, in this chapter, the researcher will talk about the research design as well as the methodological tools that will be used in collecting data.

(7) Students’ reading and written work is based upon the oral work they did earlier.

In teaching speaking teachers should know a).the concept of speaking, the element of the sound for instance phonemes because some of the students and including teachers still find difficulties in pronouncing them and b).models of learning and teaching and focused on CLT . Common to all version of Communicative Language Teaching is a theory of language teaching that stars from a communicative model of language and language use, and that seeks to translate this into design for an instructional system, for material, for teacher and learner roles and behaviors, and for classroom activities and technique. The range of exercise types and

It’s important to engage students in doing some communicative practices. Richard (2006) explained that communicative practices are those activities that focus on exchanging real information and using language in an authentic context, thus the communication is based on the specific situation and not predictable. Communicative language teaching has been proven to be effective in improving students’ communicative abilities and other language skills. Richards and Rodgers (2001) also wrote that an important goal of communicative language teaching is to help students improve their communicative competence and other language skills. This indicates that the communicative activities can help language learners

- Focus on learners’ communicative competences development ( including linguistic competence , actional competence, discourse competence, socio-cultural competence and strategic competence)

Student also need English both for pursuing their studies and communicate in real life situation after they leave university. English needed to perform a large number of communicative acts i.e. comprehend and interpret professional material in English, read general books and magazines for information or pleasure, persuade people to do certain other activities. Our approach to language teaching should then be such that students are enabled to use English for the purposes they would need to use it.