1 Teaching Speaking Skills Teaching Speaking Skills Eyüp Yaşar KÜRÜM, PhD, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey Abstract Speaking is considered to be the mostly sought skill for an individual to be accepted competent in a foreign language. Speaking is more than to form grammatically correct sentences; it rather covers broad areas of mechanics, functions, pragmatics and social interaction. Therefore, any foreign language teaching methodology used in the classroom throughout the history has always sought to develop ways to improve the competency of learners in these areas. In contemporary methodologies the emphasis in speaking is fluency rather than accuracy. In a typical classification the speaking activities in a foreign language classroom usually falls into one of these categories: Awareness raising activities, Controlled activities and Autonomous activities. There are also some speaking strategies that can be implemented to encourage the unmotivated students to produce speaking. Keywords: Speaking, Speaking Competence, Types of Speaking Activities, Speaking Strategies. Contents 1. Learning Objectives 2. What is Speaking? 3. Historical Background 4. Classroom Practice 5. The Types of Classroom Practice Activities 6. The Motivation of the Learners 7. A Sample Lesson Plan 8. References 9. The Biography of the Author