Developing Classroom Speaking Activities; From Theory to Practice

Jack C Richards

published in Guidelines, (RELC, Singapore), Vol 28, 2, Dec 2006, pp. 3-9

The mastery of speaking skills in English is a priority for many second or foreign language learners. Learners consequently often evaluate their success in language learning as well as the effectiveness of their English course on the basis of how well they feel they have improved in their spoken language proficiency. Oral skills have hardly been neglected in EFL/ESL courses (witness the huge number of conversation and other speaking course books in the market) though how best to approach the teaching of oral skills has long been the focus of methodological debate. Teachers and textbooks make use of a variety of approaches, ranging from direct approaches focusing on specific features of oral interaction (e.g. turn-taking, topic management, questioning strategies ) to indirect approaches which create conditions for oral interaction through group work, task work and other strategies (Richards 1990).

Advances in discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and corpus analysis in recent years have revealed a great deal about the nature of spoken discourse and how it differs from written discourse (McCarthy and Carter 1997). These differences reflect the different purposes for which spoken and written language are used. Jones

(1996,12) comments:

         In speaking and listening we tend to be getting something done, exploring ideas, working out some aspect of the               world, or simply being together. In writing we may be creating a record, committing events or moments to paper.

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