Classroom Speaking Activity Teaching Speaking
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.
2 Brainstorming
In this activity, students will be able to share their ideas freely because they have to give and say their ideas in limited time based on particular
context or given topics. It is effective to improve their fluency because they are not criticized for their ideas.
3 Interviews
Conducting interviews with other people will help students to socialize and then give them opportunities to practice speaking both inside and
outside the class. 4
Story Telling Story telling fosters the
students’ creativity and self confidence. By using this activity, students can express their ideas in sequence format of the
beginning, development, and ending of the story. They will tell the story in order with their own language.
5 Reporting
In this activity, the teacher can ask the students to read a magazine or newspaper, or watching news in television. Then, on the next class, they
should make a report of it in classroom. 6
Picture Describing This activity is one of the ways to improve students’ speaking ability.
Here, the teacher provides the students with some pictures and then ask them to describe the pictures. This activity fosters the students’
imaginations and creativities as well as their public speaking ability.
Moreover, Harmer 2007:271 suggestes that there are six effective activities that students can do to improve their speaking skills. Here are those activities:
1 Acting from a script
By doing this activity, the students can be asked to act out from a script given by their teacher before. When the students are practicing, the
teacher can give attention to their intonation, stress, and speed. This kind of activity will encourage students to frequently perform in front of the
class. 2
Communication games Games are very effective to encourage the
students’ interests and attentions. Games also help the teacher to create contexts in which
language is useful and meaningful. 3
Discussions Discussion is one of the effective ways to encourage students’ speaking
ability. Here the students can share their ideas to another students and it will help them to speak better and better if they are speaking in the
discussion actively. But discussion also has the difficulties like some students are shy and reluctant to share their opinions in front of the whole
class and sometimes they are not confident of the language they used to express their ideas. They are still afraid of making mistakes.
4 Prepared Talks
In this activity, the students are prepared to talk by making a presentation based on a certain topic. Because they are prepared, students should
speak from notes rather than from a script to avoid this activity being like a writing activity.
5 Questionnaires
In doing this activity, the students can act as a questioner or respondent because in this activity both the questioner and the respondent have to
speak actively so it will be very useful to make the students speak. Students can design questionnaires on any appropriate topic as what they
want or interested. The results of the questionnaires can form the basis for discussions or prepared talks.
6 Simulation and Role-Play
Simulation and role-play stimulate a real-life encounter and can be used to encourage general oral fluency. Students take on the role of characters
different from themselves or with thought and feelings they do not necessarily share.