Developing Teacher Oral Competency Framework for Secondary School Teachers: Moving Towards Meaningful Teaching of English Language

Abstract

The secondary school English curriculum in Malaysia advocates that English could provide greater opportunities for students to improve their knowledge and skills in cross cultural settings. Additionally, they will be able to interact with students from other countries and improve their proficiency in English. Given the increasing importance of international interactions among English users from different backgrounds and the current approaches in ELT pedagogy in literature, this paper examines the oral competency skills of a group of English teachers. Data was collected in a seminar specially carried out for a group of selected English teachers. Through micro-teachings sessions, the English teachers demonstrated their use of oral communication skills in delivering the content of the subjects. This seminar was an attempt to establish the collaboration among recognised Excellent English Teachers and their colleagues to enhance their oral communication skills in classrooms. The results indicated the potential of developing an oral competency framework that could be constructed and referred to by secondary English teachers so as to enhance their effectiveness of teaching the content knowledge to their students. This oral competency framework would provide an excellent opportunity to help realise the purpose of using English as the medium of instruction as proposed within the curriculum.