Teachers’ Role in Teaching Speaking Against the Incongruencies between Curriculum and Curriculum Implementation

The English language has long been regarded as an important tool in creating a marketable human capital. To be involved with the current, highly competitive economy, a developing country needs to produce a generation of marketable human capital. This is of the utmost importance in achieving economic prosperity. Hence for developing countries like Malaysia, which regarded English as a second language, English is taught in school as a second language. However, the English Proficiency level of the new generation in Malaysia is dwindling and this affected the production of good human capital. Weaknesses that lead to the decline are both systemic and in its implementation as there exist lack of cohesiveness with the curriculum, the implementation and finally with the assessment. In the middle of this are teachers and their struggle in producing students who can use English communicatively. This paper aims to discuss the decline of speaking skills as a result of incongruencies of the curriculum and its implementation and teachers’ role in creating marketable human capitals amidst the existence of these incongruencies.