Which methodology should be used to teach/learn oral skills?

Abstract

Spoken language, though it represents important daily language production, is still obscure and badly understand. In addition, it is not effectively taught. Being ephemeral and uncontrollable, the oral dimension of language has a negative image compared to the written one and only used to support it. The teaching/learning of oral skills is a controversial issue among foreign language teachers. It is vague, unintelligible and not widely practiced. This study attempts to rehabilitate this concept of oral skills and to prove that the acquisition of oral communication skills can be, independently from writing, a full objective in the foreign language classroom. It also aims to suggest a methodology of teaching/learning and evaluating the oral performance which takes into consideration its specific characterstics.