There are many activities to promote speaking. As Hayriye Kayi (Pages 1-2) inferred from may linguistics on her article in the internet on Teaching Speaking as A Second Language (TESL) Journal, there are thirteen activities to promote speaking, which are:
Discussion: After a content-based lesson, 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. Before the discussion, it is essential that the purpose of the discussion activity is set by the teacher. In this way, the discussion points are relevant to this purpose, so that students do not spend their time chatting with each other about irrelevant things.
Role Play: The 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 that they think of feel. Thus, the teacher can tell the students that “You are Ely, you should go to the teacher and tell him what happened last morning, and.”
Simulations: A simulation is very similar to role-play but what makes simulations different than role play is that they are more elaborate. In simulations, students can brinng items to the class to create a realistic environment. For instance, if a student is acting as a singer, she brings a microphone to sing and so on.
Information gap: In this activity, the students are supposed to be working in pairs. One student will have the information that order partner does not have and the partner will share their information. Information gap activities serve may 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.
Brain Storming: On a give topic, the students can produce ideas in a limited time. Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is effective and learners generate idea quickly and freely. The good characteristic of brainstorming is that the students are not criticized for their ideas. So, the students will be open to sharing new ideas.
Storytelling: The students can briefly summarize a tale or story they heard from someone beforehand, or they may create their own stories to tell their classmates. Story telling fosters creative thinking. It also helps the students express in the format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and setting story has to have.
Interviews: The students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides a rubric to the students, so that they know what type of question they can ask or what path to follow, but the students should prepare their own interview questions. After interviews, each student can present his or her study to the class. Moreover, students can interview each other and introduce his or her partner to the class.
Story Completion: For this activity, the teacher starts to tell a story, but after a few sentences he or she stops narrating. Then, the students start to narrate from the point where the previous one stopped. Each student is supposed to add form four to ten sentences. The students can add new characters, events, descriptions, and so on.
Reporting: Before coming to class, the students are asked to read a newspaper or magazine and in the classroom, they report to their friends what they find as the most interesting news. The students also talk about whether they have experienced anything worth telling their friends in their daily lives before class.
Playing Cards: In this game, the students should form groups of four. Each suit will represent a topic. For instance, diamonds represent earning money, heart represent love and relationship, spades represent an unforgettable memory, and card represent best teacher. Each student in a group will choose a card. Then, each student will write 4-5 questions about the topic to ask the other people in the group. For example, if the topic “diamond: a hand phone” is selected, here are some possible questions:”is hand phone important for you? Why? ”Or “what is the function of had phone?” etc.
However the teacher should state at the very beginning of the activity that the students are not allowed to prepare yes-no questions, because by saying yes or no the students get little practice in spoken language production. So, the students may ask open-ended question to each other that they replay in complete sentences.
Picture Narrating: This activity is based on several sequential pictures. The students are asked to tell the story taking place in the sequential pictures by playing attention to the criteria provided by the teacher as a rubric. Rubrics can include the vocabulary or structures they need to use while narrating.
Picture Describing: For this activity the students can form groups and each group is given a different picture. The students discuss the picture with their groups, and then a spoken persson for each group describes the picture to the whole class. This activity fosters the creativity and imagination of the learners as well as their public speaking skills.
Find the Differences: For this activity students can work in pairs and each couple is given two different pictures, for example, picture of boys playing football and another picture of girls playing basketball. The students in pairs discuss the similarities and different in the picture.
