Activities to Promote Speaking

b. Activities to Promote Speaking

Teachers can use varied activities to promote speaking in learning process. Some of them are acting from a script, communication games, discussion, prepared talks, questionnaires, simulation, and role plays Harmer, 2001: 271- 275. Those activities make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun. It also provides a rich environment where meaningful communication takes place in order to develop basic interactive skills necessary for life. 1 Acting from a Script Teachers can ask the students to act out scenes from plays or from their course books. Besides, the students can act out dialogues they have written themselves in order to make speaking more lively and interesting. They pretend that they are in various social contexts and have variety of social roles. Before performing the dialogues, the teachers need to give enough time for practicing and to help the students to go through the scripts by drawing their attention to appropriate stress, intonation, and speed, as if they were theatre directors. By doing this, the teachers will be able to encourage the students to learn and produce language at the same time. 2 Communication Games A game is an activity which provides pleasure and fun for the players that is supported by rules for the purposes of communicative language teaching. Games which are designed to provoke communication between students frequently depend on information gaps because authentic communication involves an information gap: each participant has information that the other does not have. One of the communication games that can be used in teaching speaking is „Lie Detector‟. Here, the students work in groups of six to seven. One member of each group has to leave classroom while others deciding a set of questions they want to ask. Then the students who went outside return to their groups to answer all questions honestly, except one question. After that, the rest of the group has to guess which answer is not true by giving reasons to justify their opinion Klippel, 1984: 35. 3 Discussion A whole class discussion often fails because students are not confidence with their ideas or language. Teachers can overcome that problem by holding „buzz group‟ quick discussions in small groups before students being asked to speak in front of the whole class. It can be a good start since it reduces the students‟ anxiety and gives them a chance to share their ideas. The students can also do more challenging activity like debating in which they prepare arguments in favor or against various propositions. Here, not only the students who have a great role in a discussion but also the teachers because the success of discussion depends on their ability in prompting and encouraging students. 4 Prepared Talks As the name suggests, in prepared talks, the students have to prepare what they are going to say beforeh and. As a result, their talks become more „writing- like‟. One of prepared talks that is often used in the teaching of speaking is telling stories. The students briefly summarize a tale or story they have heard before or create their own stories. 5 Questionnaires A questionnaire is a list of questions to be answered to get information. Students can design questionnaires by choosing any appropriate topics they wish with teachers‟ help. Later, the results obtained from questionnaires can be used as the basis for discussions or prepared talks. 6 Simulation and Role Play In the simulation activities, students replicate real world situations that they encounter in the real world. Jones as cited in Harmer 2001: 274 proposes some characteristics for a simulation to work. First, students must think themselves as real participants in the situation. Second, students should be told about the context they are in, such as the classroom is an airport check-in area, a meeting room, a shop, etc. Third, teachers should give students examples about how the activity is constructed and how to carry out the simulation effectively. A bit different from simulation, in a role play, students get information about who they are, and what they think and feel. A role play has appeal for students because it allows the students to be creative and to put themselves in another person‟s place for a while.The students are allowed to be as creative as possible by acting out roles for a particular scenario. Simulation and role plays offer some advantages. Both are motivating, allowing hesitant students to be more expressive in their opinions and behavior, and allowing students to use a much wider range of language since they broaden the world of the classroom to include the world outside.

c. Feedback in Speaking