Article Review 2: Developing Classroom Speaking Activities; from theory to practice

This is a review of " developing classroom speaking activities; from theory to practice" by Jack Richards

to read the original article click here.


Nowadays oral skills have primary importance among other skills, and teachers and textbooks use a variety of approaches to create conditions for oral interaction through group work, task work and other strategies. In designing speaking activities or instructional materials for second or foreign language teaching it is also necessary to recognize the very different purposes for which students need speaking skills. According to Chastain (1988: 270), speaking a language involves more than simply knowing the linguistic components of the message, and developing language skills requires more than grammatical comprehension and vocabulary memorization. Like other skills, speaking is a process; there are two kinds of speaking: talking to and talking with (Ibid: 274-275).

In the next part Richards gives us a classification of different functions of speaking which are transactional and interactional.

Talks as interaction refers to "conversation" and describes interaction which serves a primary social function. The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to present themselves to each other than on the message.

Talk as transaction refers to situations where the focus is on what is said or done. The message is the central focus here and making oneself understood clearly and accurately, rather than the participants and how they interact socially with each other.

Burns distinguishes between two different types of talk as transaction. One is situations where the participants focus primarily on what is said or achieved. The second type is transactions which focus on obtaining goods or services, such as checking into a hotel.

Talk as performance refers to public talk, that is, talks which transform information before an audience such as morning talk.

Implications for teaching:

Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an oral English course. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the course will focus on. The second issue is identifying teaching strategies to "teach" each kind of talk. The third issue involved in planning speaking activities is determining the expected level of performance on a speaking task and the criteria that will be used to assess student performance.

When facing with a question, there are four necessary processes speakers must complete to answer questions:

1. They must understand the question

2. They must retrieve the necessary information from long-term memory

3. They must formulate a linguistic code to carry the answer

4. They must use their speech mechanism to produce the answer (White and Lightbown, 1984)

Chastain (1988: 277) mentions that speaking has three components: strategies, characteristics of real communication, and levels of proficiency.

The conclusion is that language students can develop speaking skills in classroom contexts. Their skills will not match those of native speakers nor of speakers who acquired their skills in real-language situations, but they can learn to convert their thoughts into the second language and to express them in ways comprehensible to native speakers.