The speaking activities are the ones that are designed and delivered by teacher to class so that students can carry out oral speaking tasks to meet up the requirements of
teacher or the exercise. In learning a foreign language, teaching speaking takes a lot of time and preparation from teacher who has responsibility to design different speaking activities to facilitate students speaking and enhance their skills. Predominantly, speaking activities in classroom are based on traditional learning style. Students often follow textbook‟s instruction and discuss speaking tasks with each other. Teacher can give feedback and correct their pronunciation and grammar. When designing speaking activities, teacher needs to understand the principles for teaching speaking. The teacher should be aware of the differences between second language and target language learning contexts. At this point, the challenge a teacher face may be determined partly by the target language context (Brown, 2000; 54) . The differences of language uses and cultural aspects should be introduced to students to help them avoid making the same mistakes which do not exist in two languages. The speaking activities also guarantee to improve or at least give students practice with fluency and accuracy. For language learners, it is important that speaking activities provide them opportunities to develop both accuracy and fluency. While accuracy is the extent that students‟ speech matches what other people say when they use target language , fluency refer to how speakers use the language quickly, confidently and naturally with proper hesitations and pause in their communication. One other important principle of designing speaking activities is to offer students opportunities to talk and interact by using group work, team work, pair work, and limiting teacher‟s talk. If the teacher takes part in so much into student‟s talk then students will not have time for speaking.
In fact, this can prevent and discourage students to speak also. The role of speaking in teaching language is to teach students how to speak; consequently students are able to produce language by themselves. When students carry out group work and pair work, they would be able to play different roles in communication and discussion, if teacher is removed or limited in these practices, then students enjoy more on diverse roles of speaking.
Next, the speaking tasks should be practical, meaningful and useful. It is a fact that students learn more if they see the application and usefulness of what they learn.
Speaking activities should involve to practical purposes that students find useful for
their learning. In addition, it is the responsibility of teacher to design activities that involve guidance and practice in both transactional and interactional speaking for students. This means teacher should combine and engage interactional speech which is used to communicate with someone for social purposes to establish and maintain social relationships with transactional speech which involves communicating to get something done in classroom since the language learners will have to speak target language in both transactional and interpersonal settings, finally this practice will help students master the target language.
Brown ( 2004) has proposed a six different categories of classroom speaking performances.
Figure 1. The category of speaking performances
Step 3: Responsive
After repeating and get familiar with the language, students produce the language themselves.
They will respond to teacher‟s question and interact with other classmates in a very simple form of language. Typical activities for this stage is question and answer, give instruction and
direction ( Brown , 2000:273)
Step 1: Imitative
In this phase, students repeat the information they listen from a tape. Usually, they repeat very simple phrases, vowels, consonants or short sentences ( Brown, 2000:273)
Step 2: Intensive
After repeating and get familiar with the language, students practice some speaking performances which focuses on grammatical and phonological aspects of language.
Speaking activities in language classroom can be diverse and presented in many different formats. O‟Malley and Pierce ( 1996) says that authentic activities such as
The purpose of this technique is to provide students opportunities to practice short
conversation to convey idea, exchange information, and opinions with others. Students can adopt short interview, dialogue with other classmates ( Brown, 2000: 273)
Step 5: Interactive ( Interpersonal ; dialogs)
At this stage, students are directed to produce conversations. It is necessary for students to engage social themes into their conversations. Slangs, idioms, phrasal should be encouraged and introduced to students‟ conversation ( Brown, 2000: 274)
Step 6: Extensive ( Monologue) Step 4: Interactive ( Transactional dialogs)
At this level, students are able to produce and take part in producing language frequently.
They can join the monologue, respond to speech, change their positions when communicating. Some forms of this technique that students can implements are presentations, story telling, making news reports ( Brown,2000: 274)
role- play, drama, simulations can be useful to use real life conversation. Repetitions, pauses, interruptions, body language, gestures can be implemented in these situations and make the conversations more natural.
The teacher is also expected to create speaking tasks to foster and motivate students in learning the speaking skill and make them practice speaking English consistently. By using the right and appropriate activities that match students‟ interests and ability and syllabus inspire students to learn. Usually, in classroom, discussion is commonly used to stimulate students to negotiate and express their opinions. Harmers(
2001: 272) mentions the whole range of discussion from basic to high level of students. The buzz group is a good organization of students into different team to have quick discussion with other members in a group before any member is asked to speak in public. Students are also expected to predict the content of some reading, or talk about their reaction after reading and discussing the reading with other members.