Facilitating foreign students’ speaking performance

This paper addresses the issue of developing communicative efficiency in speaking practice of B1-B2 language learners. This is a level where learners have mastered a solid grasp of the language to handle basic communicative tasks without much struggle, yet they sometimes have difficulties in making themselves easily understood in various speaking settings. Lack of competence in adjusting speech performance to reduce misunderstandings if notovercome, constitute a formidable obstacle to communicative efficiency. The teacher is there to scaffold learners with tools they need to be more understandable to their conversational partners. One way to tackle this problem is to develop students’ ability to craft a speech that is simple, clear, and effective. To help students with B1-B2 levels of English proficiency communicate effectively, the article suggests developing speaking modulation skills which in the context of language learning means the ability to adapt phonological, grammatical, syntactic, morphological, and pragmatic features of speech to the recipient’s understanding. The paper also provides suggestions on how to encourage students to sharpen their speaking modulation skill. This descriptive work is based on the analysis of publication related to the contents of this research problem and perceptions of classroom observation. The findingsindicated that both strategies, modulation and modeling, support intermediate-level learners in the development of speaking English efficiency since they empower the speakers with the capacity to accomplish the intended communicative purpose through the adjustments comprehensible to the recipients. The work’s outcome will be beneficial in the academic sector to assist instructors in developing classroom speaking strategies.