Lecture 2. Types of speaking activities.

Preparing for speaking activities.

Hand-out 1: Types of speaking activities
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Developing Speaking Activities

Traditional classroom speaking practice often takes the form of drills in which one person
asks a question and another gives an answer. The question and the answer are structured
and predictable, and often there is only one correct answer. The purpose of asking and
answering the question is to demonstrate the ability to ask and answer the question.

In contrast, the purpose of real communication is to accomplish a task, such as conveying

a telephone message, obtaining information, or expressing an opinion. In real
communication, participants must manage uncertainty about what the other person will
say. Authentic communication involves an information gap; each participant has
information that the other does not have. In addition, to achieve their purpose, participants
may have to clarify their meaning or ask for confirmation of their own understanding.

To create classroom speaking activities that will develop communicative competence,

instructors need to combine structured output activities, which allow for error correction
and increased accuracy, with communicative output activities that give students
opportunities to practice language use more freely.

Structured Output Activities

Two common kinds of structured output activities are information gap and jigsaw
activities. In both these types of activities, students complete a task by obtaining missing
information, a feature the activities have in common with real communication. However,
information gap and jigsaw activities also set up practice on specific items of language. In
this respect they are more like drills than like communication.

Communicative Output Activities

Communicative output activities allow students to practice using all of the language they
know in situations that resemble real settings. In these activities, students must work
together to develop a plan, resolve a problem, or complete a task. The most common
types of communicative output activity are role plays and discussions.
Lecture 2. Types of speaking activities.
Preparing for speaking activities.
Hand-out 2: Categories and Types of Speaking Activities
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Match the Categories and Types of Speaking Activities to their definition

INFORMATION GAP QUESTIONING ACTIVITIES

MONOLOGUES DRAMA-TYPE ACTIVITIES
OPINION EXCHANGE PROBLEM-SOLVING ACTIVITIES

CATEGORIES
AND TYPES OF DEFINING FEATURES
SPEAKING
ACTIVITIES
1  Learners have to play the role of someone else or act as
themselves in a given situation.
 Both activities are based on the idea of acting in a particular role.
It involves being an imaginary person usually in a hypothetical
situation and sometimes in a real one. These types of activities
contribute to the students the opportunities to practice the
language aspects of role-behaviour. In this way, they have the
opportunity to behave in situations they are likely to encounter
when using English in the real world. On the other hand, they
contribute to the development of conversational skills and are
suitable to develop students’ fluency and interaction.

2  Learners are asked to give solutions to a specific problem.

 In these activities, there is a problem to be solved; this problem
itself is what ultimately creates a communicative purpose.
Students are presented with a problem and they must plan or
decide the best solution to disentangle it.

3  Unidirectional form of expression by which learners explain /

describe something to their mates.
 As regards these activities, students have to stand in front of
their classmates and speak for a sustained period of time.
Accuracy is fostered here since information has to be given in a
logical order, using the appropriate vocabulary and being correct.
In contrast, those types of activities, where learners recount
stories or their own perceptions, promote fluency because ideas
have to be expressed in order, at a reasonable pace and without
significant breaks in the communication flow.
4  Learners have to share their pieces of information in order to
complete a task.
 In this type of activities, there is a knowledge gap between
students which can only be bridged by using the language.
Learners have to interact and exchange the information they
have in order to achieve the task outcome. Sometimes this
exchange of information is simple and mainly consists of fairly
predictable sequences of the language.
5  Learners give opinions which might not be shared by the others.
 In these activities, the main component is the active contribution
of learners with personal opinions that cannot be predicted
beforehand. These types of activities facilitate students to shape
their world out-look and to defend their position in negotiations.

6  Learners ask questions to obtain information from their mates.

 These communicative activities make students ask and answer
different questions based on a topic. Only one of the activities
contributes to the development of conversational skills.
Lecture 2. Types of speaking activities.
Preparing for speaking activities.
Hand-out 3: Preparing for Speaking Activities
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Watch Programme 6. Look at the activities in the box. Which advice below, A, B, C, or
D, describes how to prepare for each activity? Write the letter next to the activity.

Storytelling
Debate
Dialogue building
Information gap

A Pre-teach the language the students need to find out the missing information,
and make sure that the students don’t see what information their partners have.

B Organise the physical layout of the class and choose a topic that is relevant to
the students. Decide on the groups before the class, and decide who will control it,
and if you need someone to judge it. Let them brainstorm points they might make,
and give them practice in language they might use.

C Pre-teach a few essential words, but not all the vocabulary they will meet,
give them the first part, and ask them in groups to work together to predict
what happens next.

D Set the scene, build up the story in the imagination of the students. Get
students into pairs to predict what is going to happen with the conversation, then
they can compare what they predicted with what comes up on the tape. Then ask
them to practise.
Lecture 2. Types of speaking activities.
Preparing for speaking activities.
Hand-out 4: Speaking task sequence. Examples of Speaking Activities
Lecture 2. Types of speaking activities.
Preparing for speaking activities.
Hand-out 6: Speaking task sequence

A PLAN FOR A TEACHER TO ORGANISE A

SUCCESSFUL SPEAKING ACTIVITY

 Decide on the mode of work

 Give clear instruction
 Check if the students understand the instruction
 Provide necessary input
 Feedback and assessment
 Activities to facilitate spoken production and spoken interaction

Structured Output Activities

Information Gap Activities

Filling the gaps in a schedule or timetable: Partner A holds an airline timetable with some of the
arrival and departure times missing. Partner B has the same timetable but with different blank
spaces. The two partners are not permitted to see each other's timetables and must fill in the blanks
by asking each other appropriate questions. The features of language that are practiced would
include questions beginning with "when" or "at what time." Answers would be limited mostly to
time expressions like "at 8:15" or "at ten in the evening."

There are different gaps that can be exploited.

The information gap is very commonly exploited by teachers. Student A has some information,
e.g. concerning the prices of food. Student B needs to know these prices, and so asks A questions to
find the information. The information gap is ideally suited to pair and small group work and usually
relies upon pre-prepared information cards.
The experience gap
All students in classes have had different experiences in their lives – so this is immediately a gap. In
some classes this gap is very marked. For example, a multilingual adult class in the UK will have
had very different life experiences. A monolingual primary class will obviously show less
difference.
Questionnaires can exploit the experience gap – particularly those that aim to practice past forms,
e.g. a questionnaire to find out what games people played when they were children.
The opinion gap
Everyone has different opinions, feelings and thoughts about the world. Finding out about
someone’s feelings and opinions helps close the gap between people. The number of personalised
activities in many textbooks shows the value of this gap.

The knowledge gap

Students know different things about the world. This gap can be exploited in brainstorms and
general knowledge-style quizzes.

Jigsaw Activities

Jigsaw activities are more elaborate information gap activities that can be done with several
partners. In a jigsaw activity, each partner has one or a few pieces of the "puzzle," and the partners
must cooperate to fit all the pieces into a whole picture. The puzzle piece may take one of several
forms. It may be one panel from a comic strip or one photo from a set that tells a story. It may be
one sentence from a written narrative. It may be a tape recording of a conversation, in which case
no two partners hear exactly the same conversation.

In one fairly simple jigsaw activity, students work in groups of four. Each student in the group
receives one panel from a comic strip. Partners may not show each other their panels. Together the
four panels present this narrative: a man takes a container of ice cream from the freezer; he serves
himself several scoops of ice cream; he sits in front of the TV eating his ice cream; he returns with
the empty bowl to the kitchen and finds that he left the container of ice cream, now melting, on the
kitchen counter. These pictures have a clear narrative line and the partners are not likely to disagree
about the appropriate sequencing. You can make the task more demanding, however, by using
pictures that lend themselves to alternative sequences, so that the partners have to negotiate among
themselves to agree on a satisfactory sequence.

More elaborate jigsaws may proceed in two stages. Students first work in input groups (groups A,
B, C, and D) to receive information. Each group receives a different part of the total information for
the task. Students then reorganize into groups of four with one student each from A, B, C, and D,
and use the information they received to complete the task. Such an organization could be used, for
example, when the input is given in the form of a tape recording. Groups A, B, C, and D each hear a
different recording of a short news bulletin. The four recordings all contain the same general
information, but each has one or more details that the others do not. In the second stage, students
reconstruct the complete story by comparing the four versions.

With information gap and jigsaw activities, instructors need to be conscious of the language
demands they place on their students. If an activity calls for language your students have not
already practiced, you can brainstorm with them when setting up the activity to preview the
language they will need, eliciting what they already know and supplementing what they are able to
produce themselves.

Structured output activities can form an effective bridge between instructor modeling and
communicative output because they are partly authentic and partly artificial. Like authentic
communication, they feature information gaps that must be bridged for successful completion of the
task. However, where authentic communication allows speakers to use all of the language they
know, structured output activities lead students to practice specific features of language and to
practice only in brief sentences, not in extended discourse. Also, structured output situations are
contrived and more like games than real communication, and the participants' social roles are
irrelevant to the performance of the activity. This structure controls the number of variables that
students must deal with when they are first exposed to new material. As they become comfortable,
they can move on to true communicative output activities.

Communicative Output Activities

Communicative output activities allow students to practice using all of the language they know in
situations that resemble real settings. In these activities, students must work together to develop a
plan, resolve a problem, or complete a task. The most common types of communicative output
activity are role plays and discussions .

In role plays, students are assigned roles and put into situations that they may eventually encounter
outside the classroom. Because role plays imitate life, the range of language functions that may be
used expands considerably. Also, the role relationships among the students as they play their parts
call for them to practice and develop their sociolinguistic competence. They have to use language
that is appropriate to the situation and to the characters.

Students usually find role playing enjoyable, but students who lack self-confidence or have lower
proficiency levels may find them intimidating at first. To succeed with role plays:
 Prepare carefully: Introduce the activity by describing the situation and making sure that all
of the students understand it

 Set a goal or outcome: Be sure the students understand what the product of the role play
should be, whether a plan, a schedule, a group opinion, or some other product

 Use role cards: Give each student a card that describes the person or role to be played. For
lower-level students, the cards can include words or expressions that that person might use.

 Brainstorm: Before you start the role play, have students brainstorm as a class to predict
what vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic expressions they might use.

 Keep groups small: Less-confident students will feel more able to participate if they do not
have to compete with many voices.

 Give students time to prepare: Let them work individually to outline their ideas and the
language they will need to express them.

 Be present as a resource, not a monitor: Stay in communicative mode to answer students'

questions. Do not correct their pronunciation or grammar unless they specifically ask you
about it.

 Allow students to work at their own levels: Each student has individual language skills, an
individual approach to working in groups, and a specific role to play in the activity. Do not
expect all students to contribute equally to the discussion, or to use every grammar point you
have taught.

 Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the class on the outcome of their role plays.

 Do linguistic follow-up: After the role play is over, give feedback on grammar or
pronunciation problems you have heard. This can wait until another class period when you
plan to review pronunciation or grammar anyway.
Discussions, like role plays, succeed when the instructor prepares students first, and then gets out of
the way. To succeed with discussions:

 Prepare the students: Give them input (both topical information and language forms) so that they
will have something to say and the language with which to say it.

 Offer choices: Let students suggest the topic for discussion or choose from several options.
Discussion does not always have to be about serious issues. Students are likely to be more
motivated to participate if the topic is television programs, plans for a vacation, or news about
mutual friends. Weighty topics like how to combat pollution are not as engaging and place heavy
demands on students' linguistic competence.

 Set a goal or outcome: This can be a group product, such as a letter to the editor, or individual
reports on the views of others in the group.

 Use small groups instead of whole-class discussion: Large groups can make participation difficult.

 Keep it short: Give students a defined period of time, not more than 8-10 minutes, for discussion.
Allow them to stop sooner if they run out of things to say.

 Allow students to participate in their own way: Not every student will feel comfortable talking
about every topic. Do not expect all of them to contribute equally to the conversation.

 Do topical follow-up: Have students report to the class on the results of their discussion.

 Do linguistic follow-up: After the discussion is over, give feedback on grammar or pronunciation
problems you have heard. This can wait until another class period when you plan to review
pronunciation or grammar anyway.
Two stages of teaching any dialogue:

1. Presenting the dialogue:

1. Introduce the activity telling Ss that they’re going to read & listen a dialogue.

2. Present the most important or the key individual words included in the dialogue.

3. Ask Ss to look at the dialogue and the pictures to talk about the scene of it:
a. Who are the speakers?
b. Where are they?
c. What are they talking about?
d. What do you think is happening in each picture?

4. Then ask Ss to read the whole dialogue silently or listen to it extensively to answer a pre-question.
The answer is the main idea of the dialogue.

5. Next, ask or put two more questions on the board and ask Ss to listen to the dialogue on the cassette
( or read by the teacher ) to answer those questions.

6. Read the dialogue aloud, this time to focus on the important phrases or expressions included in the
dialogue.

2. Practising the dialogue:

1. Invite pairs of Ss to the front of the class with their books to role play or act out the dialogue.

2. Write the dialogue on the board or distribute it printed on a paper with some missing parts. Ask Ss to
work in pairs to fill in the gaps. Elicit the answers from as many pairs as possible.

3. Focusing on the important language functions included in the dialogue, divide the dialogue into mini
dialogues or some situations, each one includes a prompt and its response, give each mini dialogue
with a missing part & ask Ss to fill in the gaps in pairs and act out each situation.

4. Invite pairs of Ss to the front of the class without their books to role play or act out the dialogue
telling them that some personal modifications should be done.