A.

Speaking activity design

1. Topic & task
A good topic is one to which students can relate using ideas from their own
experience and knowledge. The ability-grouping topic is therefore appropriate for
most schoolchildren, schoolteachers or young people whose school memories are
fresh. It should also represent a genuine controversy, in which participants are likely
to be fairly evenly divided (as my own classes tend to be on this one). Some questions
or suggested lines of thought can help to stimulate discussion, but not too many
arguments for and against should be 'fed' to the class in advance: leave room for their
own initiative and originality.
Task A task is goal-oriented: it requires the group, or pair, to achieve an objective
in the form of an observable result, such as brief notes or lists, a rearrangement of
jumbled items, a drawing, a spoken summary. This result should be achievable only
by interaction between participants: so in the instructions for the task, you often find
instructions such as 'reach a consensus', or 'find out everyone's opinion'. But make
sure that the language needed (mainly vocabulary) is known to students: it might be
useful to review some useful words or expressions before beginning the task.
2. Sample activities
a) Dialogues
A simple dialogue is learnt by heart. For example:
Ani: What's that?
Budi: This? It's a frog.
Ani: Are you sure?
Budi: Yes, of course I'm sure.
Ani: Amazing!

Students perform it in pairs, and then again, in various ways, moods, roles,
imaginary situations and contexts. For example, they might perform it very fast or
very slowly, angrily or sadly; they might play the roles of a teacher and young
student, or of two James Bond-type spies where 'frog' is code for a secret weapon.
At a later stage they are encouraged to suggest variations or additions to the text.
b) Describing pictures
Each group of students has a picture (one of the two shown below) which all its
members can see. They have two minutes to say as many sentences as they can
that describe it; a ‘daughter’ marks a tick on a piece of paper representing each
sentence.
 At the end of the two minutes, groups report how many ticks they have. They then
repeat the exercise with the second picture, trying to get more ticks than the first
time.

c) Picture differences
The students are in pairs; each member of the pair has a different picture (either A
or B) Without showing each other their pictures, they have to find out what the
differences are between them.
d) Things in common
Students sit in pairs, preferably choosing as their partner someone they do not
know very well. They talk to one another in order to find out as many things as
they can that they have in common. These must be things that can be discovered
only through talking-not obvious or visible characteristics like 'We are in the
same class' or 'We both have blue eyes'. At the end they share their findings with
the full class.
e) Role play
Participants are given descriptions of characters and a situation on role cards, and
invited to improvise a scene based on these.
f) Solving a problem
The students are told that they are an educational advisory committee which has
to advise the principal of a school on problems with students.
3. Presentations
More advanced classes will need to learn to use spoken English not only for informal
interaction, but also for more formal presentations. Training in giving presentations is
particularly appropriate for those students studying English for Academic Purposes
(EAP) or for a career in business. Presentations involve longer stretches of speech and
may be accompanied by written or graphic material displayed on a screen or in the
 form of handouts. They are often followed by a question-and-answer session or
discussion.

Types of presentation
a) Short
At the early stages, classroom presentations may be very short: one to three
minutes long. Even one minute, however, still feels like a long time to have to
speak for a student whose English is limited and who has little experience of
presenting even in his or her.
b) Medium -length
Later, students may make presentations of five to ten minutes, which may be
supported by a picture or text shown on the board.
c) Long
The most advanced type is a full-length (15-minute or more) presentation, which
simulates presentations the student may later be required to produce in real life.
Such presentations need to be based on a clear structure: an introduction telling
the audience what the presentation is to be about; the main body, with clearly
ordered sections that include explanations and examples; and an ending,
summarizing and, where appropriate, drawing conclusions and making
recommendations.

Further reading:
Gammidge, M. (2004) Speaking Extra: A Resource Book of Multi-Skills Activities,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(Mainly for young adults and adults, but can also be used with adolescents: a variety of speaking
activities involving discussion, role play, storytelling)

Klippel, F. (1985). Keep Talking: Communicative Fluency Activities for Language

Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(Original and stimulating ideas for getting students to talk, mainly for more advanced students)

Seligson. P. (2007) Helping Students to Speak, Slough: Richmond Publishing.

(Basic problems with getting students to speak and how to overcome them; practical ideas for a
activities)

Ur, P. (1981) Discussions that Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(A variety of oral fluency activities based on tasks: mainly for intermediate
and advanced students)

B. Speaking assessment
1. Grammar
Grammar-test items require students to respond to cues in order to prove that
they have understood and can apply a grammatical rule, and they should be
 designed to be quickly and easily assessed and graded. They are very often ‘closed
ended’: require one predetermined right answer. But a similar problem arises in
grammar testing as that discussed above with regard to practice: if a student fills
in all the right answers in such a test, this does not necessarily mean that they are
able to produce the target grammar in their own unguided output. It just means
that they can get the grammar right when they are thinking about it.
If we give tasks that ask students to invent their own phrases, sentences or
longer passages (‘open-ended’ items), this will give a truer picture of how well
they know the grammar. But it will be more time-consuming and sometimes
difficult to assess. There is a payoff between how valid the test is in providing
reliable information on how much the learner knows, and how practical it is to
administer and check.
2. Vocabulary
We need every now and again to check how much of the vocabulary we
have taught student has in fact been mastered by them, either receptively or
productively. It is also useful to do an assessment of how much vocabulary
students know overall, including both what we have deliberately taught and what
they have learnt on their own. This is most conveniently done through a variety
of vocabulary tests.
3. pronunciation
The term pronunciation as it is understood here includes not only the sounds of
the language, but also the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns. Students do not need
necessarily to model their accents on English native speakers – indeed, some native
speakers are notoriously difficult to understand! – but their speech does need to be
clear. Some learners consistently get particular sounds wrong, and as a result their
speech is less ‘comfortable’ to listen to, and occasionally incomprehensible. In that
case, you may wish to spend some lesson time improving your students’
pronunciation.

Further Reading

Swan, M. (1994) Design criteria for pedagogic language rules. In M. Bygate, A.

Tonkyn and E.Williams (eds.), Grammar and the Language Teacher (pp. 45–55),
Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International.
(A useful set of guidelines for the explanation of grammatical rules to a class)

Swan, M. (2005) Practical English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(A very accessible and user-friendly guide to English grammatical usage, with plenty of
examples, including common learner errors)

Ur, P. (2009) Grammar Practice Activities (2nd edn), Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
(A collection of game-like or communicative activities that provide meaningful practice
in the different grammatical features of English)
C. Speaking teaching methods
1. The grammar – translation method ( indirect method )
The grammar-translation method was widely used until two or the decades ago.
Some of its characteristics are still present in most foreign language classrooms. The
method was originally used to teach Latin, a language which was not taught for
everyday communication. However the method was gradually generalized to teach
living or modern languages such as English, French, etc. It has been used by teachers
of English for about a hundred year
As a discipline, this method aims at mastery of the general rules governing the
written language and translation from and into the foreign language. To help pupils
achieve such aim, linguists and grammarians prescribe the whole grammar of the
language according to certain criteria what is right and what is wrong. That is, they
are concerned with making rules on how people ought to speak and write in
conformity with some agreed standards.
However, this method is still in use in many educational systems. As for the Arab
world, a purely grammar-translation method has not been used for teaching although
some aspects of it have been used. What happened, until the sixties, was that teachers
were employing procedures and techniques drawn from this method, the direct
method and the Reading method. Thus grammar and translation teaching went hand
in hand with language use through demonstrations, dramatization and reading silently
and reading aloud. This situation continued to prevail until the audio-lingual method
and the communicative approach emerged in the last two decades.
2. The Direct Method
As said earlier, the grammar-translation method could not be of help to those who
want to speak the foreign language with a reasonable degree of fluency. In order to
overcome this shortcoming, the direct method was developed for the teaching of
foreign languages. It became popular throughout the early years of the twentieth
century. By ‘direct’ is meant teaching in the foreign language, without use of the
mother tongue. The theory, however, was based on the assumption that learning a
foreign language is very much like learning one's mother tongue, i.e. ‘that exposing
the language impresses it perfectly upon the learner's mind' (Lado 1961: 5). This
belief has proved to be false because learning the native language in childhood does
not assure the acquisition of a foreign language adequately in adulthood. Moreover,
language acquisition in childhood is a trait while language learning in adulthood is a
skill. Psychologists believe that unless the first language is acquired by early
childhood, the capacity to acquire any human language will become meager and
limited. In contrast, the learning of a second language is not restricted to people of a
particular age. Nonetheless, the direct method was received with enthusiasm by
foreign language teachers in Europe and the United States.
Further Reading

Brumfit C.J 1979. The communicative Approach to language teaching. OUp.

Harris D.P 1969. Testing English as a Second Language. McGraw Hill, New York.
Harsh W. 1975. Three approaches: traditional grammar; descriptive linguistics and
generative grammar, The Art of TESOL, part (1), FORUM, Washington, D.C.
Lado R 1961. Language Testing .McGraw Hill, Nw York
Lado R 1964. Language teaching : A Scientific Approach. McGraw Hill, New York.