What Speakers Do

What Speakers Do

Speaking involves both a command of certain skills and several different kinds of knowledge. Speaking is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted; it is also so natural and integral to forget how we once struggled to achieve it until we have to do it all over again in a foreign language.

Speech production is linear and takes place in real time. Speech is produced utterance-by-utterance in response to the word-by-word and utterance-by-utterance of the person we are talking to. Speech planning time is severely limited. The planning of a utterance may overlap the production of the previous one. The contingent nature of speech accounts for its spontaneity.

When an association has been triggered in the speaker’s mind, he or she conceptualizes a story in terms of discourse type (story), its topic and its purpose. But first, the story idea has to be mapped out or formulated. Formulation is making strategic choices at the level of discourse, syntax and vocabulary.

DISCOURSE > SCRIPT >BEGINNIG

……………………………..>MIDDLE

……………………………..>END

Each of the stages of the script needs to be fleshed out at the utterance level. This is where the specific syntax needs to be chosen to be consistent with the speaker’s intentions. In English utterances tend to have a two part structure 1. The topic, what we are talking about, which is something already mentioned. And 2. The comment, what we want to say about the topic, which is usually new information.

As said before speech takes place in real time and planning is limited, so to compensate this limited time, the speaker uses an ADD-ON-STRATEGY. It is the chaining of short ideas, such as short phrases, clauses and chunks, which accumulate to have an extended turn.

When the utterance is expressed, it is necessary to assign certain words or phrases in the lay out depending on the situation (if it is formal or informal); the speaker must choose the most appropriate words. Production slips tend to occur when speakers are under pressure or tired.

Words need to be glued together by appropriate grammatical markers (articles, auxiliary verbs and word endings.) also at the formulation stage, words needs to have their accurate pronunciation (stress, intonation and pitch.)

Articulation involves the use of the organs of speech to produce sounds. A stream of air is produced by the lungs, driven through the vocal cords and shaped by the position and the movement of the tongue, lips and teeth.

Vowel sounds are produced primarily by the action of the tongue and lips while consonant sounds are determined by the point of air obstruction. Sounds are produced in a continuous stream such that the articulation of one sound will affect the articulation of the former sounds. Continual changes in loudness, pitch direction, tempo and pausing are used to produce meaningful utterances.

When speakers correct their own pronunciation slips there is an instance of self monitoring. It is a process that happens concurrently at the stages of conceptualization, formulation and articulation.

Hand in hand with monitoring is the ability to make running repairs. These can take form at an immediate correction or at a retrace-and-repair sequence that is when a speaker retraces a utterance and starts again with a different sequence of words.

To achieve a degree of fluency, some degree of automaticity is needed. Automatic focuses on the speaking task whether is planning or articulation. It is achieved through the use of pre-fabricated chunks.

Fluency has some factors such as speed and pausing. Speakers need to pause to catch up with its conceptualization, but frequent pausing it is a sure sign of a struggling speaker.

Another important point is the placement of pauses. Natural sounding pauses occur at the intersection

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