Teaching Speaking in Senior High School
real-life language use and encouraging the atomization of language knowledge. He also stated that communicative activities or tasks are characterized by some
aspects, such as: 1
The motivation of the activity is to achieve some outcome, using the language.
2 The activity takes place in real time.
3 Achieving the outcome requires the participants to interact e.g., to listen
as well as to speak. 4
Because of the spontaneous and jointly constructed nature of the interaction, the outcome is not fully predictable.
5 There is no restriction on the language used.
In designing various and communicative activities of speaking, the teacher should design the activities which can give the opportunities to the students to
practice speaking as much as possible. Richards and Renandya 2002 suggested that effective and interactive activities should be meaningful, manipulative, and
communicative for the students. There are six types of classroom speaking performance according to Brown
2001:271. Those are: 1
Imitative In this type of classroom speaking performance, students are drilled to
focus on some particular elements of language forms in a controlled activity instead of carrying out meaningful conversations.
2 Intensive
Intensive speaking includes any speaking performances that are designed to practice some phonological or grammatical aspect of language.
3 Responsive
Responsive speaking deals with short replies to teacher’s or other students’ questions or comments.
4 Transactional dialogue
In transactional dialogues, students convey or exchange specific information.
5 Interpersonal dialogue
This kind of dialogue is carried out to maintain social relationship among the participants.
6 Monologue
It is usually in the form of oral reports, summaries, or short speeches. Kayi 2006 proposes some activities to promote speaking to the students so
the students can practice speaking and produce oral language well. Those activities are:
1 Information Gap Activities
In this activity, students have to work in pairs to share information to each other. This activity has some purposes such as collecting
information and solving a problem. This kind of activity is effective because it encourages students to talk extensively in the target language.