Speaking Strategies Employed by Second Year Students at Mettu College of Teachers Education

Communicative language teaching should not just aim to teach learners the language they need in communication, but also the communication strategies or speaking strategies to manage interaction in English. This study was conducted to investigate and describe the speaking strategies employed by second year English major students at Mettu College of Teachers Education. It also aimed to identify how well the instructors are aware of the importance of speaking strategy instructions and play their roles in terms of the provision speaking activities and strategy training in teaching learning process of speaking skills. The targeted populations for this study were 46 students who were learning English as a major subject and one English language teacher who was teaching the spoken English course in 2006 E.C academic year. In this descriptive research design, both quantitative and qualitative data gathering instruments were used. The result of the analysis revealed that the students employed a variety of speaking strategies. However, regarding individual speaking strategies under the different categories of direct and indirect strategies, some known speaking strategies appeared to be employed less frequently and were less developed. Furthermore, findings of this research showed that although the teacher is aware of the importance of speaking strategy training and provides a variety of speaking activities, the activities provided were more of fluency oriented and strategy training was rarely provided. Therefore, this study recommends 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. Key terms: Speaking strategies, strategy training, categories of strategies