Developing Speech Skills

Approaches to the teaching and learning of speech skills have been influenced by developments in the fields of language teaching, linguistics and speech technology. Within the broad area of language teaching, teaching and learning of speech skills have passed through three stages. These stages involve comparing the mother tongue (L1) and the target language (L2), the analysis of errors in the process of language learning, and the analysis of a text beyond a sentence. In addition to this, there have been several developments under the influence of linguistics, especially in the domain of speech sounds. Technological advances such as recorders, players, CD-ROMS and various software packages have helped analyse speech sounds enormously. In fact, technology has made it possible to teach all varieties of a given language