The Optimization Of Teacher Talk In The Strategies-Based Speaking Instruction

Speaking seems intuitively the most important among the four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). English learning in China is a conscious foreign language learning and skill training process in the non-target language environment. College students, who take English as foreign language, encounter many difficult situations in speaking, in which they are communicatively incompetent. Hopefully, the strategies-based speaking instruction is intended to help and encourage those unhappy learners to adopt a more responsible, optimistic approach to coping with the realistic challenging communicative contexts with the help of effective and self-generated strategies. Speaking instruction does not take place in a vacuum, and teacher talk plays a vital part in the acquisition or learning of a foreign language. Optimizing teacher talk functions as an effective means to enable learners to acquire the appropriate skills and strategies to take more responsibility for their improvement in speaking proficiency in a self-directed way. The marriage of the seemingly irrelevant elements will shed a lot of light on effective and successful EFL learning and teaching.The present paper adopts a qualitative research method. It involved three forms of data: observation, questionnaires and self-reports, serving as triangulation to increase the validity and reliability of the study. 38 subjects participated in the data collecting process. Through the analysis and discussions of the results of observation data, questionnaire data and self-report data, we arrive at the following findings: speaking strategies can improve speakers' competence on accuracy and fluency in speaking English and optimizing teacher talk can facilitate the implementation of speaking instruction in a strategies-based approach. In the classroom practicality, individualization orientation, tasked-based orientation, phonological refinement orientation are proposed to put into practice the marriage of optimal teacher talk and strategies-based instruction to commit learners to the improvement in speaking proficiency.