Abstract

The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) concerns teaching a second or foreign language for the ultimate goal of communication with other speakers of the target language. English education at the secondary level in Bangladesh is based on a Communicative curriculum. Teaching English at the secondary level is expected to concentrate on enabling the learners to acquire ‘communicative competence’ in English through constant and regular practice of the four basic skills. Accordingly, practice and development of Bangladeshi secondary level learners’ speaking skill is vital. However, the speaking skill as well as the listening skill is often neglected in the language learning process and under-represented in the testing system. Consequently, the students mostly fail to acquire the speaking skill in English satisfactorily. Hence, the purposes of the study were to explore the prospect of development of learners’ speaking skill in English, and to identify the challenges of teaching and learning the speaking skill in Bangladeshi secondary schools. A mixed-method research design was used for this study. Concisely, the findings of this research paper reveal the challenges of developing the speaking skill in the secondary schools of Bangladesh and consolidate the significance and necessity of developing the speaking skill of Bangladeshi secondary level learners through utilization of proper and suitable teaching techniques, language learning tasks and activities, teaching materials, and modern teaching-learning aids.

Keywords: CLT, the speaking skill, the secondary level learners, the learner-centred approach, interactive teaching, skill-practice