Class activities for developing speaking skills.

Tlepina Zhanat Nuradinovna.

Temir region. Kyzylzhar secondary school.

Teaching Speaking. Class activities for developing speaking skills.

Speaking is the process of building and sharing thoughts and ideas through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts. Speaking skills contribute to successful communication process. Communication is one of the most important skills for students in learning English. It implies exchanging opinions, information, notions of social, cultural and political aspects of everyday life. But communication, moreover, includes a surprised face, a smile, a nervous movement, etc. The world around us is the world of communication in various spheres. Therefore, speaking is a crucial part of foreign language learning and teaching. However, today's world requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve students' communicative skills, because, only in that way, students can express themselves and learn how to follow the social and cultural rules appropriate in each communicative circumstance. In this case, the purpose of the teacher is to transform the communication with students to a pleasant, attractive and emotional lesson. Real communication is always informative, unpredictable, and unexpected. In order to teach real and meaningful communication in the class, the teacher must apply different ways to their teaching and, therefore, the communicative approach which is one of the most effective and widely used methods to teach English nowadays. The communicative approach has been applied in many countries in the world. This has brought positive effects on teaching English.

Activities to Promote Speaking

Discussions

After a content-based lesson or a part of it, a discussion can be held for various reasons. The students may aim to arrive at a conclusion, share ideas about an event, or find solutions in their discussion groups. It is essential that the speaking should be equally divided among group members. At the end, the class decides on the winning group who defended the idea in the best way. This activity fosters critical thinking and quick decision making, and students learn how to express and justify themselves in polite ways while disagreeing with the others. For efficient group discussions, it is always better not to form large groups, because quiet students may avoid contributing in large groups.

Role Play

One other way of getting students to speak is role-playing. Students pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles. In role-play activities, the teacher gives information to the learners such as who they are and what they think or feel. Thus, the teacher can tell the student that "You are David, you go to the doctor and tell him what happened last night, and…"

Information Gap

In everyday communication, spoken exchanges usually take place because there is some sort of information gap between the participants. Communicative activities may involve a similar real information gap. In this activity, students are supposed to be working in pairs. One student will have the information that other partner does not have and the partners will share their information. Information gap activities serve many purposes such as solving a problem or collecting information. Also, each partner plays an important role because the task cannot be completed if the partners do not provide the information the others need.

Brainstorming

Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is effective and learners generate ideas quickly and freely in a limited time. The good characteristics of brainstorming is that the students are not criticized for their ideas so students will be open to sharing new ideas.

Storytelling

Students can briefly summarize a tale or story they heard from somebody beforehand, or they may create their own stories to tell their classmates. Story telling fosters creative thinking. It also helps students express ideas in the format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and setting a story has to have. Students also can tell riddles or jokes. For instance, at the very beginning of each class session, the teacher may call a few students to tell short riddles or jokes as an opening. In this way, not only will the teacher address students’ speaking ability, but also get the attention of the class.