Teaching english speaking skill at preparatory schools in sulaimani city

The present study tries to find out how teaching speaking skills is taught in the preparatory schools in Sulaymaniyah city and how the teachers exploit the speaking activities in the preparatory stage text book, what kinds of teaching strategies are used by preparatory English teachers in teaching the skill under study?, and What problems face preparatory English teachers while teaching the skill? A class observation was done to collect data in order to describe the situation in which eleven of them were observed during teaching. During observation of this study, teachers used a variety of strategies to teach speaking, including storytelling, picture describing, role play, games, and pair work. Teachers follow the classic methods to teach specified as grammar translation method, and with a rare using of Pair work was considered to be the most popular method by the teachers in teaching speaking. And, according the findings some problems indicated in which they cannot exploit the speaking activity well. Several of them refer the difficulties to internal factors such as native language usage by both the teachers and learners. And, plenty of them present the problems that relates to external factors such as the environment of teaching, the course book and teaching materials. Moreover, limited time for teaching English language, it makes less opportunity for speaking skill teaching To conclude, although, the preparatory English language teachers in Sulaymaniyah city used some strategies to teach speaking skill, they faced some difficulties.