Three effective steps in teaching speaking through reading comprehension to senior high school students

Nowadays, the development of speaking skills is considered the linguistics as an important part of language teaching and learning. In our country, speaking lesson also gets place in language teaching although it is not emphasized as much as reading. The objective of speaking lesson in our country is to develop oral skills of the students so they might able to use the skills in the simple English correctly in a variety of everyday situations. The students are expected to be able to use structural features being drilled in a real communication. In fact, the ability to speak a foreign language is not easily acquired. It needs much practice and efforts to form the habits of the new language. Broadly speaking, a student who wants to learn to speak a foreign language might find many problems. The problem may come from both external and internal side. The motivation and enthusiasm in learning to speak can be internal problems, while the opportunity, time allotment, material of teaching, techniques and methods become the other problems. Teaching speaking through reading comprehension is designed in the hope of being a useful help for teachers to overcome the problem of the students in developing their speaking ability. It provides some aspects of reading that can improve their speaking ability. The aspects are: (1) Reading comprehension can provide ideas or informations needed to start the conversation activities. (2) Interesting reading passage can motivate the students to learn speaking. (3) Reading comprehension helps students to enlarge their vocabularies needed to make the communication goes fluently. (4) Reading comprehension assists students to predict the meaning of new words in context. (5) Reading comprehension helps students provide grammar patterns needed to help students to use language in acceptable manner. (6) Reading comprehension promotes the cultural understanding which is needed by the students to use language in appropriate manner. (7) Reading comprehension can help students to improve their pronunciation, stress, juncture, rhythm, etc., by reading aloud. In order to apply the contribution of the reading comprehension in the teaching of speaking, the writer designs it in three suggested steps. They are: (1) Speaking before-reading activity which has purpose to prepare students to participate in the speaking class. (2) Speaking while-reading activity which includes the activity of reading the given passage, seeking information from the reading passage, giving explanation and correction, and drills. (3) Speaking after-reading activity which includes the discussion of the reading text and free conversation. Needless to say, reading comprehension is advisable to apply in the teaching of speaking in order to improve the students’ speaking ability, and at last to culminate its goal