The Criteria of an Effective Speaking Task

30 elaborated previously. It focuses on giving feedback to the students as an attempt to improve their language accuracy.

c. The Criteria of an Effective Speaking Task

There has been a wide discussion among experts and practitioners about how to involve the students effectively in a speaking practice. Nation 2009 have argued that a speaking class should have five principles which are meaning ― focusing on meaningful and relevant language, interest ― m aintaining interest through a variety of activities, new language―avoiding overloading students with too much new language, understanding―providing plenty of comprehensible input, and stress free― creating a friendly, safe and cooperative classroom environment. In addition to the proposal by Nation above, Ur 1991 proposes that there are at least four characteristics of a successful speaking activity. They are the opportunities for students to talk a lot, the even participation of speaking, the high motivation and that the language is of an acceptable level. The opportunities for students to talk a lot refer to the state in which as much as possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in fact occupied by the students talk. Then, the even participation of speaking means that it has to be paid attention that the class discussion is not dominated by a minority of talkative participants. All students should get equal chance to speak. Next, the high motivation relates to the students’ eagerness to speak. A speaking activity should be designed to make the students interested in the topic and have 31 something new to say about or to make them willing to contribute to achieving a task objective. Last yet importantly, the language used should be of an acceptable level. This means that the language to be used in the activity should be understandable for the students. On the other hand, Thornburry 1995 proposes an idea of the criteria of speaking tasks. Those criteria are productivity, purposefulness, interactivity, challenge, safety and authenticity. Productivity means that a speaking activity needs to be maximally language productive in order to provide the best conditions for autonomous language use. Besides, a speaking task should also be purposeful because often language productivity can be increased by making sure that the speaking activity has a clear outcome, especially one which requires students to work together to achieve a common purpose. Next, there should be some interactivity in a speaking task. Speaking activities, in this case, in the classroom, should require students to take into account the effect they are having on their audience. This is because in the real world use of language, they have to be able to communicate or interact with other people. In addition to this, there should be a challenge in the task. The existence of the challenge will stretch the learners so that they are forced to draw in their available communicative resources to achieve the outcome. However, too much challenge will make students anxious. Therefore, the task should also provide safety which will enable the students to feel confident. Therefore, when they meet the challenges and attempting autonomous language use, they can do so without too much risk. The classroom should provide the right conditions for 32 experimentation, including a supportive classroom dynamic and a non- judgmental attitude to error on the part of the teacher. Lastly, speaking tasks should be authentic, meaning that the tasks should have some relation to the real-life language use.

d. The Principles of Designing a Speaking Technique