Opportunity of speaking skills for adults

Opportunity of speaking skills for adults

Adult ESL and EFL learners have countless daily opportunities for listening and speaking in English as they interact as workers, family members, community members, and classroom learners. Most listening, however, combines short bursts of face-to-face listening interspersed with speaking – such as discussions at the workplace, social conversations with neighbors and colleagues, telephone conversations, and others encountered such as  doctors, social workers, police officers, store clerks, and school staff etc.In each context, learners have a purpose for listening and a communication task.   Adult learners may need to distinguish facts from opinions or express their own point of view and change their language according to the use and according to the speaker as (Brown, 1994, p. 241) says:-

“There is tremendous variation cross-culturally and cross linguistically in the specific interpretations of gestures and body language”.

Learning to speak a foreign language requires more than knowing its grammatical and semantic rules. Learners must also acquire the knowledge of how native speakers use the language in the context of structured interpersonal exchange, in which many factors interact. Therefore, it is difficult for EFL learners, especially adults, to speak the target language fluently and appropriately. Speaking a language is especially difficult for foreign language learners because effective oral communication requires the ability to use the language appropriately in social interactions. Diversity in interaction involves not only verbal communication, but also paralinguistic elements of speech such as pitch, stress, and intonation.