ABSTRACT
What is the overriding objective of a speaking component in a language teaching syllabus? It seems a tautology to suggest that it is to enable the student to speak the target language. However, that simple objective is actually quite complex when authentic speech in context is given a central role, as I am arguing in this book it should be. These complexities about what is being taught work at many levels. As teachers and researchers, we have preconceptions about the spoken form that influence our attitudes to it. These affect how we think about speech at the level of interaction, at the level of language choices, and in what we think it means to be a ‘fluent’ speaker. Speaking is ‘primary’, as noted in Chapter 1, but messy and difficult to define; it is fundamental to language learning but open to the vagaries of individual use and context. The production of teaching materials and the handling of speaking in the language classroom show these tensions about how we define the norms of speaking particularly clearly.
