Teaching and Researching Speaking

What is speech, exactly? Whose speech is being taught? Have we come to confuse ´speaking´ and ´language´?
This book attempts to address some of these fundamental questions and help the reader to understand some of the complexities of spoken discourse. The central argument of the book is that speech has been under-researched as a faculty in its own right and as distinct from the written form. The author presents an original stance on the topic of speaking and relates this to wider issues in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics; she summarises sometimes difficult and key texts and makes them relevant to the reader´s own potential research projects. The book presents the analysis of the state of teaching and researching speaking through three different stages: interactions and discourse, grammar and speaker choices, fluency and pronunciation.