Abstract:
This study was conducted to investigate and describe the speaking strategies employed by second year students at Mettu Teachers Training. College in their attempt to study English as a major subject during their English classes. It also aimed to explore what the speaking activities and teacher's roles looked like in teaching learning process of spoken English classes. In this descriptive research design both quantitative and qualitative data gathering instruments were used to accomplish the objectives of the study. More specifically, the instruments used in this study were questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations. The targeted populations for this study were 46 students who were learning English as a major subject and an English language teacher who was teaching the spoken English courses in 2006 E.0 academic year. The collected data were analyzed using the software SPSS 16.0 to calculate frequency, percentage and mean. The result of the analyses revealed that students employed a variety of speaking strategies. However regarding individual speaking strategies sub summed under the different categories of direct and indirect strategies, some known speaking strategies appeared to be employed less frequently. Furthermore, findings of this research showed that the teacher is aware of the importance of speaking strategy training and provides variety of speaking activities. However, the activities provided were more of fluency oriented activities and strategy training was rarely provided and some known speaking strategies appeared to be employed less frequently and were less developed. Therefore, this study was concluded by recommending that the students should be provided with adequate courses on speaking skills and more strategy training should be given in using wide varieties of speaking strategies they rarely or infrequently employed by embedding them into regular classroom activities. The teachers should also give due emphasis to find ways of practicing additional speaking activities and strategy training in spoken language classrooms.
