One of the characteristics of speech in everyday life is that speech is spontaneous. That is, in most situations, people do not plan ahead of time what
they are going to say. Only in more formal situations, such as when a person has been asked to give a speech, do people plan and organize their speech.
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The fact that speech is spontaneous means that it is full of false starts, repetitions,
incomplete sentences, and short phrases. Therefore, teachers may require their students to do more forward-thinking and planning than native speakers do in real
life. Another aspect of producing spoken language is the time-constraint. The students must be able to produce unplanned utterances in real time, otherwise
people will not have the patience to listen to them. Based on the facts explained above, we should consider the goal of
English teaching today, that is to develop “communicative competence” rather than a mere mastery of structures, vocabulary items, or pronunciation.
Communicative competence is the aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within
specific contexts.
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4. Classroom Speaking Activities
Most English teachers face the problem of having passive students who show no willingness to speak in class, or students who seem interested enough to
speak but find it difficult to express themselves.
Traditional classroom speaking practice often takes the form of drills in which one person asks a question and another gives an answer. The question and
the answer are structured and predictable, and often there is only one correct, predetermined answer. The purpose of asking and answering the question is to
2006, p. 1. From: http:iteslj.org http:iteslj.orgArticlesKayi-Teaching Speaking.html.
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Jack C. Richards, Teaching Listening and Speaking from Theory to Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 21.
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H. Douglas Brown, Principles in Language Learning and Teaching, New York: Pearson Education, 2000, p. 246.
demonstrate the ability to ask and answer the question. In contrast, the purpose of real communication is to accomplish a task,
such as conveying a telephone message, obtaining information, or expressing an opinion. In real communication, participants must manage uncertainty about what
the other person will say. Authentic communication involves an information gap; each participant has information that the other does not have. In addition, to
achieve their purpose, participants may have to clarify their meaning or ask for confirmation of their own understanding.
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To create classroom speaking activities that will develop communicative competence, which is the aim of teaching speaking as explained above, instructors
need to incorporate a purpose and an information gap and allow for multiple forms of expression.
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Therefore, the teacher should provide students with communicative activities in which the student can engage actively in teaching and
learning process. They must use the target language to share some information. For
instance, one student has the direction to a party and must give them to a classmate. One type of speaking activity involves the so-called ‘information gap’-
where two speakers have different parts of information making up a whole. Because they have different information, there is a ‘gap’ between them.
Speaking activities which can improve students’ speaking competence as suggested by Richards
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are: 1. Information-gap activities: this refers to the fact that in real communication,
people normally communicate in order to get information they do not possess. In this activity, each student has different information and they
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Gillian Brown and George Yule. Teaching the Spoken Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 13.
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Developing Speaking Activities, http:writing.colostate.eduguidesteachingeslspeaking.cfm
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Jack C. Richards, Communicative Language Teaching Today, New York: Cambridge University Press: 2006, pp. 19-20.
need to obtain information from each other in order to finish a task. They must use target language to accomplish it.
2. Jigsaw 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.
3. Task-completion activities: puzzles, games, map-reading, and other kinds of classroom tasks in which the focus is on using one’s language resources to
complete a task. 4. Information-gathering activities: student-conducted surveys, interviews, and
searches in which students are required to use their linguistic resources to collect information.
5. Opinion-sharing activities: activities in which students compare values, opinions, or beliefs, such as a ranking task in which students list six
qualities in order of importance that they might consider in choosing a date or spouse.
6. Information-transfer activities: These require learners to take information that is presented in one form, and represent it in a different form. For
example, they may read instructions on how to get from A to B, and then draw a map showing the sequence, or they may read information about a
subject and then represent it as a graph. 7. Reasoning-gap activities: These involve deriving some new information
from given information through the process of inference, practical reasoning, etc.
8. Role plays: activities in which students are assigned roles and improvise a scene or exchange based on given information or clues.
B. Information Gap Activities
