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
Richards 2006:18 states that an important aspect of communication in CLT is information gap that refers to a real
communicative in which people normally communicate in order to get information they do not possess. Thronbury 2005, 80-84 also
says that in these kinds of tasks there is a knowledge gap among learners and it can be bridged by using the language. So, in order to
get the information, the communicators have to communicate.
Littlewood 2002:22 labels these activities as functional communication activities that emphasize sharing the information
among learners and its processing. The example of information gap activities are exchanging personal information, discovering missing
information, identifying differences on pictures, role-plays, and so on.
c. Games
A game is an enjoyable activity with a set of rules or terms against each other Hadfield, 2005:20. Games can be suitable to
help students in mastering the language as well as relaxed in learning the language. There are many games that can be used in
speaking class such as spelling games, search games, matching games, etc.
d. Conversation
Dornyei and Thurrell 1992:22 explain that conversation is an activity which provides content for a wide range of
communication functions and domains of meaning in which learners practice managing longer sessions of social interaction
such as introducing new topics and taking turns. This activity can give more chances for students to express their own personality and
experiences in the target language.
e. Telling Stories
The aim of these activities is to get students to produce longer connected text so students can develop imagination and
some skill in the foreign language Klippel, 1991:130. The activities can be in the forms of chain stories, picture stories, keep
talking about a topic, and others.
4. Assessing Speaking
