meaningful to the learners. Objectives reflect the needs of the learners including
functional skills as well as linguistics objectives. The learner’s role is a negotiator
and integrator. The teacher’s role as a facilitator of the communication
process.
It is thought that the definition contains aspects that are common to many other definitions.
In brief, from the opinions above about CLT we can find that most of the researchers have
the general idea that CLT emphasizes communication in a foreign language and improves
the learners’ competence through communicative activities. To make further sense of CLT,
characteristics of CLT should also be referred to.
1.1.2. Characteristics of Communicative Language Teaching
The theory of language in CLT shows that language is used for communication. At the
level of language theory, CLT has characteristics defined by Richards & Rodgers (2001) as
follows:
Language is a system for the expression of meaning.
The primary function of language is to allow interaction and communication
The structure of language reflects its functional and communicative uses
The primary units of language are not merely its grammatical and structural
features, but categories of functional and communicative meaning as exemplified in
discourse.
Therefore, the objective of language teaching is to develop “communicative competence”.
Richards and Rodgers show that CLT aims to “make communicative competence the goal
of language teaching” (Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 155). Hymes (1972) defines
‘Communicative competence’ as “what a speaker needs to know to communicate
effectively in culturally significant settings” [Das, 1985 (Gumperz and Hymes, 1972:vii)]
In Hymes’ sense communicative competence includes not merely the linguistic forms of
the language but also its social rules, the knowledge of when, how, and to whom it is
appropriate to use these forms.
Freeman claims that the most obvious characteristic of the CLT is that “almost everything
that is done is done with a communicative intent” (1986:132). Students use the language a
great deal through communicative activities such as games, role-plays, and problem-
solving tasks which are “often carried out …in small groups” (1986:132). The benefit of
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pair and group work in teaching speaking is that the time allotted is maximized for each
student to learn to negotiate meaning.
Another point to make about CLT is its use of authentic, from life materials (Larsen-
Freeman, 1986), which is one of the good ways to create opportunities for the learners to
be exposed to the real language as this kind of materials contains the language used by
native speakers. Examples of authentic materials in teaching speaking might include
articles from magazines or newspapers, stories, songs, video recordings.
The most familiar feature of CLT is learner-centeredness. Students in learner-centered
approach are seen as being able to play more active and participatory role than in
traditional approaches. In other words, students are communicators; they actively interact
with each other in the classroom activities. They are free to decide what and how they will
say and correction of errors may be absent or infrequent. Furthermore, students are made to
feel secure and unthreatened. This aims to encourage students to participate in the lesson.
Accordingly, the teacher is a facilitator of the learner’s learning, a manager of classroom
activities and a co-communicator to engage in the activities with students.
In short, CLT is identified with the following characteristics:
It makes communicative competence the goal of teaching.
It develops procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that
acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication.
It considers learners and his communicative needs the centre of language
teaching process.
These characteristics will be the principles for teachers to choose appropriate techniques as
well as activities in classroom to improve the student’s communicative competence. Then,
the concepts of communicative activities will be discussed in the next section.
1.2. Communicative Activities
1.2.1. Definition of communicative activities
According to Hammer (1991), communicative activities are those that give students the
desire to communicate, involving them in a various use of the language. Such activities are
crucially important in a language classroom since the students can do their best to use the
language individually, arriving at a degree of language autonomy. In other words,
communicative activities are those that can stimulate communicative competence in the
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learners. Therefore, it is the teacher’s responsibility to find out appropriate activities to
encourage students to use the language. In order to design these activities effectively, the
teacher needs further understanding of them. Accordingly, the following section will
discuss the characteristics and types of communicative activities.
1.2.2. Characteristics of communicative activities
Communicative activities are not limited to conversation. They can be used in listening,
speaking, reading, writing or an integration of two or more skills. Communicative
activities, according to Morrow (1981), must include three features: information gap,
choice and feedback. To be more specific Nolasco & Athur (1993) state that
communicative activities have following characteristics:
- They involve using language for a purpose.
- They create a desire to communicate. This means there must be some kinds of
“gap” which may be information, opinion, affect, or reason that students seek to
bridge.
- They encourage students to be creative and contribute their ideas.
- They focus on the message and students concentrate on “what” they are saying
rather than “how” they are saying it.
- The students work independently of the teacher.
- The students determine what they want to write and say. The activity is not
designed to control what the student will.
(Nolasco & Athur: 58)
In other words, communicative activities try to create authentic communication. This is
seen as contrary to monotonous drills which the traditional method heavily relied on and
which carry little communicative functions. Harmer (1991), who holds the same view,
makes a distinction between non-communicative activities and communicative ones in the
following table:
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Non-communicative activities Communicative activities
Also, he affirms that information gap is essential in communication activities because it
provides learners with a purpose and a desire to communicate. A traditional classroom
exchanges in which both the speaker and listener know the answer is not really
communicative.
1.2.3. Types of communicative activities
In the light of the characteristics above different researchers suggests some types of
communicative activities.
Littlewood (1981) distinguishes between functional communication activities and social
interaction activities as major activity types in CLT.
Functional communication activities include such tasks as learners comparing sets of
pictures and noting similarities and differences; working out a likely sequence of events in
a set of pictures; discovering missing features in a map or picture; following directions;
and solving problems from shared clues. The aim of these activities is that:
Learners should use the language they know in order to get meanings across as
effectively as possible. Success is measured primarily according to whether they
cope with the communicative demands of the immediate situation.
(Littlewood, 1981:20)
Social interaction activities include conversation and discussion sessions, dialogues and
role plays, simulations, skits, improvisations, and debates. These activities offer a variety
of social situations and relationships. Success is measured not only in terms of the
functional effectiveness of the language but also in terms of the social acceptability of the
forms that are used. (Littlewood, 1981).
Harmer (1991) sorts communicative activities into oral and written ones. Oral
communicative activities include seven categories: reaching a consensus, discussion,
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No communicative desire
No communicative purpose
Form not content
One language item only
Teacher intervention
Materials control
A communicative desire
A communicative purpose
Content not form
Variety of language
No teacher intervention
No materials control
relaying instructions, communication games, problem solving, talking about you,
simulation and role-play. Written communicative activities also comprise relaying
instructions, writing reports and advertisement, co-operative writing, exchanging letters
and writing journals.
By taking part in communicative activities students can actually do things with language
and make language their own.
1.2.4. Roles of communicative activities in language teaching and learning
Communicative activities really play an important part in language teaching and learning.
Their role in language teaching and learning has been confirmed by many researchers.
Richard & Rodgers (2001) hold that “communicative activities enable learners to attain
communicative objectives of the curriculum and engage them in communication”. In
addition, Krashen (1982) assumes that language is best taught when it is being used to
transmit messages, not when it is taught explicitly. So using communicative activities
provides students with opportunities to convey messages in authentic communication.
Actually, communicative activities are a vital part in language teaching and learning
because they have a lot of advantages.
Firstly, Communicative activities encourage motivation because they ensure that
communication is purposeful rather than artificial. A variety of communicative activities
arouses interest and provides learners with something meaningful to do and give them
freedom to choose the meaning they want to express. They bring their backgrounds and
experiences to class and make their own decisions, creating more interest and excitement
and thus facilitate and stimulate learning process.
Secondly, Communicative activities offer opportunities to develop the practical skills of
listening, speaking, reading and writing as well as to acquire intercultural and interactional
competence in English. It is believed that successful communication is an integrated
accomplishment. Communicative activities can also help develop cognitive ability such as
analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information.
In addition, through communicative activities the students are stimulated to respond
actively and participate with their classmates. Communicative activities are often
conducted with pair work and group work in which students talk to many partners and
interact with them. This brings learners a feeling of security because they feel easier to
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discuss with their classmates than to speak in public or in front of their teacher. Moreover,
when working in group each student must be responsible for the common progress of the
group. All of these promote their cooperation as well as participation in learning process.
Finally, Communicative activities such as working in groups, in pairs or singing etc. create
a relatively safe environment for making mistakes a long with relaxed atmosphere, for
there is little error correction or distract attention. Students are not judged or corrected.
Moreover, students have a lot of fun when they learn with communicative activities. This
reduces their stress and anxiety about their performance.
All in all, communication activities can boost proficiency and greatly improve
communicative competence.
1.3. An overview of speaking in language teaching and learning
1.3.1.The nature of speaking in oral communication
Pattison (1987) states that oral communication must include speaking and listening. It
means that there exist at least two participants: speaker(s) and listener(s) in a conversation.
When the speaker starts the massage, the listener decodes and responds to the message in
turns. Nunan (1999) suggests that in functional terms, most interactions can be divided into
interpersonal dialogues that promote social relationships and the second aims to convey
factual information called transactional dialogues. Nevertheless, Brown (1994: 237)
asserts that all these categories are really not separated or mutually exclusive. Everyday
conversations can contain elements of transactional dialogues, and vice versa.
To be more specific, Bygate (1987) assumes that those conversations can be analyzed in
terms of routines which are conventional (and therefore predictable) ways of presenting
information. He provides two kinds of routines: information routines and interactional
ones. (1987:23). Information routines may be described to involve two sub-routines:
expository and evaluation. The former includes description, narration, comparison,
instruction. The latter consists of explanation, prediction, justification, preference and
decision. Interactional routines are telephone conversations, interview conversations,
casual encounters, conversations at parties, lessons, radio or television interviews, which
are structured in characteristic ways. For second language speakers, routines can be of
essential importance to facilitate comprehension. “…by learning prefabricated set
conversational patterns, learners can ‘outperform’ their competence.” (Nunan ,1999:229).
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Consequently, in learning speaking skills, students should be provided with opportunities
to explore the language use in both types of oral communication. For example, they can
study speech acts in a service encounter, turn-taking patterns in a conversation between
friends, opening and closing sequences in telephone conversation.
In most conversations there is the content of discourse (Nunan, 1999). That means that
with exactly the same utterance we can interpret it in different ways with different
audience in different situations. This leads to the fact that interlocutors should have a good
deal of shared knowledge such as background information to support their understandings
of utterances. Thus, the conversations between participants who are familiar with each
other are produced with more assumptions and implications. By contrast, if the addressor
and addressee don’t know each other well, references and meanings have to be made more
explicit in order to get comprehension. Therefore, we as teachers should expose learners to
different kinds of discourse in different interactions. This can be obtained through
authentic materials for teaching speaking a long with numerous classroom activities to
maximize opportunities for students to participate in.
1.3.2. The role of speaking in language teaching and learning
From the teaching point of view, language skills consist of four macro skills: listening,
speaking, reading and writing. Those four skills have a supportive relationship.
Of all the four skills, speaking is of paramount importance, (Ur, 1996). It is fundamental to
human communication. Just think of all the different conversations we have in one day and
compare that with how much written communication we do in one day. It can not be
denied that in our daily lives most of us speak more than we write. Speaking when
compared with writing according to Wilkin (1979; cited in Nambiar 1985), is the essential
form of language and writing is ranked second after it and derived from it. About the role
of speaking, Bygate (1987: vii) points out that “It is the vehicle of social solidarity, of
social ranking, of professional advancement and of business”.
In language teaching and learning, speaking has an important part to play. It is a medium
through which much language is learnt, and which is particularly useful for learning. The
ability to communicate in a second language clearly and efficiently contributes to the
success of the learner in school and success later in every phase of life. (Kayi, 2006).
Bygate (1987), who holds the same view, claims that our learners need to have ability to
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speak confidently to carry their most basic transactions. More than this, speaking is
regarded as the first step to confirm who knows or does not know a language. Ur (1996)
indicated that people who know a language are referred to as “speakers” of that language
as if speaking included all other kinds of knowing. Consequently, a lot of foreign language
learners are primarily interested in learning to speak.
Therefore, having dealt with the importance of oral skills in language teaching and learning
it is essential that language teachers should pay great attention to teaching speaking skills.
Rather than leading students to pure memorization, the teacher should provide a rich
environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and
meaningful tasks that promote oral language.
1.3.3. Characteristics of a successful speaking lesson
As it has been seen, spoken language is the primary objective in language teaching. Giving
a speaking lesson which promotes learners’ ability to express themselves through speech is
important. Therefore, the criteria that can be applied to design a successful English
speaking lesson should be taken into consideration.
1.3.3.1. High learner’s talking time
Talking time is the first factor that can make a speaking lesson successfully. It is obvious
that the amount of learning in a speaking lesson is correlated with the amount of talking by
the learner. Therefore, the more time students engage with in the course of a lesson, the
more language they can obtain. Ur (1996) also considers the lesson time as a container
which should be filled with as much volume of language as possible. So an effective
speaking lesson is very likely to correlate highly with the learner’s talking time. Learners
in class time should get as many speaking opportunities as possible in order that their
speaking time should be maximined.
1.3.3.2. High motivation
Various studies have found that motivation is strongly related to achievement in language
learning in the way it decides learners’ success or failure. As for Lightbrown & Spanda
(1999), motivation can be defined in term of two factors: learners’ communicative needs
and their attitudes towards the foreign language community. If learners need to speak the
foreign language, they will, therefore, be motivated to acquire proficiency in it. Similarly,
if learners have favorable attitudes towards the speakers of the language, they will have the
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desire to communicate or contact with them. If learners are highly motivated, they will
willingly participate in classroom activities and volunteer to perform them. They have
desire to share personal experience in relation to the topics as well as a need to achieve
task objectives. Hence, they invest a high level of effort to overcome difficulties so as to
succeed in what they set out to do. They then, therefore, are eager to speak.
1.3.3.3. Even participation
A good speaking lesson must also provide opportunities of speaking evenly to all students
with different levels. Both weaker students and more advanced ones should be provided
with opportunities for communicating. The teacher needs give every learner the chance to
talk at a level adequate to them from the simple to the relatively difficult. The lesson is not
effective if classroom discussion only focuses on some participants who are talkative while
others speak very little or not at all. That means that every student should have a chance to
speak during the class time.
1.3.3.4. An acceptable level of language
In order to help students gain success in speaking the topic chosen should be appropriate
for students so that they can use ideas from their own experience and knowledge to present
the topic. If the topic is completely unfamiliar to the student they will find it difficult to
engage with the task the teacher gives them as they have little knowledge to speak about it.
Besides, the level of the language needed for discussion (whether grammar or vocabulary)
should be lower than that used in intensive language –learning activities in the same class.
It should be easily recalled and produced by the learners, so that they can speak fluently
with the minimum of hesitation. It is a good idea to teach or review essential vocabulary
before the activity starts.
In summary, in this chapter the theoretical basis for the study of the ways for developing
speaking skills has been reviewed. The researcher has stressed the main points in CLT.
Also, major points of communicative activities namely, definitions, characteristics as well
as types of communicative activities are provided. The discussion of nature of speaking,
the role of speaking in language teaching and learning and characteristics of a successful
speaking lesson has set the background for the implications and recommendations of the
study. The detailed description of the methodology, the procedures and the results will be
presented in the next chapters.
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Chapter 2
Methodology
This chapter is devoted to the discussion of two parts: research setting and research
methodology. In the first part, an overview of Thai Phien high school, the teachers of
English, the students, the textbook, the current teaching and learning situations are
mentioned. In the second part, there will be a description of the subjects and procedures for
carrying out the research as well as the method of data analysis.
2.1. Research setting
2.1.1. An overview of Thai phien High school
Thai Phien High school is located in the center of Hai Phong seaport city. Founded in
1960, Thai Phien is one of the oldest as well as biggest schools in Hai Phong. At present,
there are 48 classes with over 2000 students placed into three different grades: grade 10
th
,
11
th
and 12
th
. The teaching staff composes of 120 teachers of 14 compulsory subjects, of
whom one-third is young, creative and well trained whereas the others are experienced and
enthusiastic. In 2007, with the innovation in educational policy, Thai Phien is the only
school in Hai Phong city which has 100 percentages of High school graduated students.
2.1.2. The teachers of English in Thai phien High school
There are thirteen teachers of English currently working in Thai Phien High school. All of
them are female ranking from 35 to 52. Among them, one third studied at Hanoi Foreign
Language Teacher Training College. Another one-third was former teachers of Russian
who graduated from the same college. Over other third who were trained from in-service
training courses has experienced teaching for many years. However, their communication
ability as well as new teaching methods should be improved.
Obviously, the age of the English teacher staff reveals the fact that all of them were trained
in the traditional method- the Grammar-translation one. Few of them have taken retraining
courses to improve their English and their teaching methods. This constrains them from
teaching speaking effectively. Nevertheless, most of them are severe, enthusiastic in
working. Of the 13 teachers, there are two teachers who got M.A degree. At the present
time, each teacher has to teach fifteen periods divided into 5 classes per week excluding
the burden of marking examinations and time for a lot of different school work. More than
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