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authentic communication is likely to occur in the classroom if students go beyond practice of language forms for their own sake and use their linguistic and communicative
resources in order to obtain information. d.
Jig-saw activities These are also based on the information-gap principle. Typically the class is
divided into groups and each group has part of the information needed to complete an activity. The class must fit the pieces together to complete the whole. In so doing they
must use their language resources to communicate meaningfully and so take part in meaningful communication practice.
e. Other activity types in CLT
Many other activity types have been used in CLT, among which are the following: 1
Task-completion activities: puzzles, games, map-reading and other kinds of classroom tasks in which the focus was on using one’s language resources to
complete a task. 2
Information gathering activities: student conducted surveys, interviews and searches in which students were required to use their linguistic resources to collect
information. 3
Opinion-sharing activities: activities where students compare values, opinions, beliefs.
4 Information-transfer activities: these require learners to take information that is
presented in one form, and represent it in a different form. 5
Reasoning gap-activities: these involve deriving some new information from given information through the process of inference, practical reasoning etc.
6 Role-plays: activities in which students are assigned roles and improvise a scene or
exchange based on given information or clues.
C. Rationale
The review of related theories functions as the base to make rationale. Rationale represents the relationship between variables stated in the review of related theories.
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Among the four skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing, speaking is often regarded by people as the most important skill. People, who can listen, read and write, but
cannot speak will not be thought as mastering the English language. This case especially occurred during the working filed.
However, the researcher observed and recognized that the speaking ability of students in class 0902 in the Business English Department of CsVTC, China was still
low and unsatisfying. The students’ difficulties in speaking are caused by: the lack of related vocabularies, low ability in constructing sentences and utterances, poor and
unsatisfying understanding about transactional and interpersonal expressions in English, and low motivation in participating in speaking activity caused by the shyness and
embarrassment in making mistakes. The situation was getting worse by the teacher’s wrongly chosen teaching material
and unsuitable teaching method which made the students felt very bored and lost interest in the speaking class. In the class, the teacher often conducted the speaking activity by
asking the students to read or translate the story or novel that the students didn’t like and had already read in their dormitory. Moreover, the teacher didn’t explore students’
potential for speaking as she didn’t provide many chances to the students to speak. The class was teacher-centered, it was the teacher who talked a lot and dominated the class.
As the problems mentioned above, approach or method need to be used to improve the situation urgently. Content-based Instruction is considered and recommended as a
useful and practical approach to improve the students’ speaking skill based on the following rationale:
To begin with, Content-based Instruction provides a natural context for using the target language in the classroom; it provides the students to acquire the language while
using the context of any subject matter so that students learn the language by using it within the specific context. In other words, the students will not only learn the particular
context of a subject matter by using the English, but also learn the particular language terms and skills through the specific context. As we know that different contents in
different texts can be used for different purposes. Communicative content-based texts will be used to train students’ communicative or speaking skills. In this study, the writer
will use communicative content-based teaching materials to improve the student’s
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speaking skill. Through the Content-based Instruction, the students will be provided with many useful and practical vocabularies and sentence patterns related to their future
career. Furthermore, Since CBI is an approach, rather than a method, different technique
or activities can be applied in the class to meet and suite the students’ needs; in the CBI class, students will have a lot of chances to speak English and to interact with each other
in conducting different tasks or activities. By frequently practicing, the students will have the ability to speak fluently and confidently.
Moreover, the Content-based Instruction will encourage the students to actively engage in the teaching and learning process as the contents fall under their interests and
the topics of the content occurred mostly in the real-world are familiar to them. That will make them talk much and frequently.
D. Hypothesis
