Argumentative Speaking Skills

Chapter II Review of the Related Literature The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of critical thinking tasks on argumentative speaking of intermediate EFL learners. This chapter begins with the definition of the speaking skill. The second section presents the definition and various aspects of critical thinking. The researcher then reviews the task-based language approach in teaching English.

2.1. Speaking
Among the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), speaking is considered the most imperative one. Competency of speaking skill is referred to as knowing the foreign language; that is why the majority of foreign language learners are keen on initially learning to speak (Ur, 2006).
According to Brown

Thornbury (2007) asserts that the production of language in speaking skill is quite different from writing. Unlike writers, speakers and listeners should produce and process spoken interaction simultaneously. By virtue of time constraints they have no chance to change what they have produced.
Richards (2008) maintains that speaking in traditional methods suggested procedures such as repetition after what teacher says, memorization of a dialog which encompassed the linguistic view. However, by the advent of communicative language method, the approaches to teaching speaking have replaced with functions, skills, tasks, and ungrammatical aspects of organization. Bygate (1987) declared that in order to excel in speaking proficiency, being aware of linguistic features is not sufficient, yet applying this knowledge is crucial to communicate

It means that in spoken language or speaking, the vocabulary used must be very familiar and it is used in everyday conversation in order to understand the spoken discourse. Vocabulary is a basic building block of language learning. Students need to know words, their meanings, how they are spelt and how they are pronounced. Thus, when teaching vocabulary, the teachers have to make sure that they explain the meaning as well as the spelling and pronunciation. Vocabulary is the knowledge of meanings of words. What complicates this definition is the fact that words come in at least two forms: oral and written. Oral vocabulary is the set of words for which we know the meanings when we speak or read orally. Written vocabulary consists of those words for which the meaning is known when we write or read silently. These are important distinctions because the set of words that beginning readers know are mainly oral representations. As they learn to read, written vocabulary comes to play an increasingly larger role in literacy than does the oral vocabulary (Hiebert and Kamil, 2005:3). Moreover,
Vocabulary is a set of lexemes including single words, compound words and idioms (Richards and Schmidt, 2002:580). method offered" (Louma, 2004,