Possible Activities to Teach Speaking Questions and Answers

d. Possible Activities to Teach Speaking

Teachers need to conduct various activities in teaching speaking since speaking skills have often been viewed as the most demanding skills in a second or foreign language learning Bailley and Savage in Celce-Murcia et. Al., 1995:103. The activities should be communicative so that students can practice to use the target language as if they are in real communication. In accordance to this, Harmer 2007:75 points out that since foreign language teaching should help students achieve some kind of communicative skills in a foreign language, all situations in which real communication occurs naturally have to be taken advantage of and many more suitable ones have to be created. 1 Pre-Communicative Activities Pre-communicative activities need to be given before entering the communicative activities. Through pre-communicative activities, the teacher isolates specific elements of knowledge or skill which compose communicative ability, and provides learners with opportunities to practice them separately or called learning the part-skills of communication Littlewood, 2002:85. The examples of pre- communicative activities are matching, drilling, question and answer practice, pronunciation practice, mentioning words related to a topic, completing a crossword puzzle, completing sentences, grammar exercises, and many others. 2 Communicative Activities There are many communicative activities that can be used in the classroom which encourage the students to be involved in the activities and able to use the language to communicate. They are, for examples, as follows:

a. Questions and Answers

Questions and answers are simply just questioning and answering activities. Klippel 1991:12 divides these activities into several parts such as warming up activities, interviews, guessing games, jigsaw tasks, and questioning activities. Simple questions and answers activities are often used as warming-up activities. Klippel 1991:12 adds that the purposes of conducting warming- up activities are to get to know each other a little at the beginning and to get students into the right mood before starting on some new project or task.

b. Information Gap Activities