Identifying Subject Matter and Communication Situations

Given student's preliminary data, teachers can now have a picture as to what kind of instructional
content, learning experiences, materials or resources and strategies they will design to suit to the
profile of the learner. Knowledge about learner needs will act as the basis on which experiential content
is selected for instructional materials.

As learners show what they want to do with the target language, they directly or indirectly show the
type of environment where the language is to be used. It is important to explore the context of such
environments and form some idea of what skills their social needs of a speaker. The more learners say
their needs, the more the subject matter can be set towards the right sets of topics, situations,
functions, strategies, registers, and key structures. This step is a prior effort to outline the instructional
content of the target material, Among the difficult components to search for are communication
strategies and authentic sources for composing features of natural speech.

Identifying Verbal Communications Strategies

In the selection and design for the teaching of speaking, the teacher should incorporarate conversational
srategies for various speech situations and context. Those materials provide practiceand opportunities
where student act upon their interlocutors speech, employing different communicative strategies.

Conversational strategies must be included in teaching materials because they are essential tools to
serve the communication of meanings. One way is designing tasks for learners to act upon their
interlocutor's speech. When learners are helped to be aware of the use of speaking strategies they will
improve speaking skills. It is essential to build into materials many practical devices that can help
facilitate oral production and overcome communication difficulties arising under time pressure. 5 of
them: (1) using less complex syntax, (2) making do with short phrases and incomplete sentences, (3)
using fixed conversational phrases, (4) adding filler words to gain time to speak and (5) correcting or
improving what one has already said. These techniques help materials designers become more aware of
what is the normal process of speech production. They help learners realize how flexible spoken
language can be and how weaknesses can be taken as part of the interactive process.

Evaluating materials for Speaking Skills

A checklist by micro-evaluation of specific tasks through actual teaching practice and materials
modification:

Linguistic support - Do the materials provide appropriate and sufficient linguistic Input? Do the
materials help students get familiar with many features of spoken language? Is sufficient vocabulary
provided in the materials or do teachers and students have to generate vocabulary?

Content-based and affective support - Do the materials satisfy learners with moments of imagination,
creativity and cultural sensibilities? Do the materials contain visuals that support verbal learning? Do the
speaking activities enable students to use their cultural and individual knowledge? Is the cultural
content. relevant to the learners' cultural sensitivities? Are topics controversial enough to stimulate
debate but not too culturally wrong that they upset learners' feelings?

Skills support - Do speaking activities give students chances to both share and process information? Is
the language presented and organized to effectively facilitate verbal discussion in chunks of speech? Do
the activities enable learners to employ a wide range of communicative functions and strategies? Do
speaking activities encourage various forms of interpersonal communication, such as monologues,
dialogues and group discussion? Are speaking skills promoted in isolation or integrated with other skills?

Diversity and flexibility - Are the materials flexible enough to serve more than one type of learning
style, proficiency, maturity and interest? Are there supplementary materials to both support less able
learners and satisfy more ambitious learners? Do activities cover a variety of different proficiency levels?
Do the materials provide a variety of speaking activities?