Exploring the Teaching of Speaking Through Action Research: Teachers’ Voices

Developing language learners’ oracy – the ability to communicate effectively through speaking and listening – is a considerable challenge for many language teachers. This is because these skills demand different types of specific knowledge, competence, and strategies, both social and cognitive. In this contribution, which takes the perspective on oracy in relation to producing speech, I briefly outline some of the key features of speaking which teachers may need to focus on explicitly in their teaching to meet their learners’ needs. I then argue that Action Research (AR) provides teachers with powerful tools to explore pedagogic issues, puzzles, and challenges about teaching speaking that occur in many classrooms on a daily basis. After briefly highlighting the main features and steps of AR, I provide four examples of how language teachers I have worked with in Australia have used AR to explore some of the specific features of speaking described earlier to address learners’ speaking needs and to revitalise their classrooms, their pupils’ learning, and their own professional practices. My fundamental argument is that the voices of teachers who do AR in their classrooms serve to enrich the language teaching profession.