“FUN ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE SPEAKING SKILL”

Bio Data

The author’s name is Zesi Rusma, she has been a student at Makassar
Muhammadiyah University since 2013, she was born on 3rd of October
1994 in Parepare (South Sulawesi ). She started her elementary school
in 2001 at SDN 14 Parepare, graduated in 2007. Then she continued
her study in Junior High School 2 Parepare and graduated in 2010.
She moved to Sengkang and continued her senior high school at SMA
Negeri 3 Sengkang, and graduated in 2013. A few months later, she
was accepted as English department student of faculty of teacher training and education, At
Makassar Muhammadiyah University.

Introduction

The main goal of teaching speaking is communicative efficiency. Teaching speaking

means helping learners develop their ability to interact successfully in the target language. To do
so, one must have communicative competence. Thus, to help students enhance their speaking
skills, the teacher must make some activities to interest the students to speak. As Doan (2011:2)
States in Kayi (2006) studied popular speaking activities and analyzed their advantages. She
recommends the some activities; Discussions, Role-play, Simulations, Information Gap, etc. In
the three volumes of Communication Games by Hadfield (1996a, 1996b, 1996c), a variety of
communicative games and speaking activities provide not only “concentrated practice as a
traditional drill,” but also “opportunities for real communication, albeit within artificially defined
limits” (1996a, p. iii). In addition to the games and activities recommended by Kayi and
Hadfield, language teachers can easily access the rich source of communicative games and
speaking activities on the Internet. In the other sides, Wil (2015) also states that practicing
speaking is one of the most fun and rewarding parts of learning English. Once a person can speak
even a little English, there are loads of ways to improve skills quickly while having tons of fun.
Examples are; Use the technology in Smartphone as a media to speak, Listen to news and songs
in English, or Do interesting Activity in English.
 Those activities can be applied in English Class. Therefore, the Students will be
interested to speak through some activities such as games. A fun activity will not make the
students feel bored. The students will enjoy the speaking activity and this would make them easy
in the process of improving their speaking skill.

Discussion

In fact, language as a means of communication plays a very important role in social

relationship among human beings. English as one of international languages is very important
since it requires as a bridge of communication. In a short period, English displaced other
languages and became one of the leading means of communication worldwide. Its domination
continues to extend. The modern world of media, mass communication, and Internet demands
good knowledge of English, especially of spoken English. Nevertheless, most Russian students
are not able to communicate in English fluently for many reasons. The present study is devoted
to the research of the issue of speaking skills of today's students in Russia and to the existing
methods of enhancing speaking skills of elementary level students. It is also related to
discovering the reasons of unwillingness to communicate and the ways to overcome the language
barrier. In Indonesia, English is one of the compulsory subjects which are taught in junior high
school, senior high school and university as the first foreign language. In learning English, there
are four skills that should be mastered by the students. One of them is speaking. Speaking is the
process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols.
Speaking is a crucial part of foreign language learning and teaching which plays an important
role for human beings. As Clark (1977:23) in Improving Speaking Skill through Information Gap
Technique states, Speaking is a fundamentally an instrument act. A speaker talks in order to have
some effect on his/her listener. She/he asserts things to change their state of knowledge. He ask
them question to get them to provide information. He request things to get them to do things for
him. According to the above statement, speaking is how speakers put their ideas into sentences
and produce it in a proper speech in order to affect a listener. Therefore, the world nowadays
requires that the goal of teaching speaking should improve the students’ communication skills so
that they can express themselves and learn how to use the language.
Speaking is "the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and
non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts" (Chaney, 1998, p. 13). Speaking is a crucial part of
second language learning and teaching. Despite its importance, for many years, teaching
speaking has been undervalued and English language teachers have continued to teach speaking
just as a repetition of drills or memorization of dialogues. However, today's world requires that
the goal of teaching speaking should improve students' communicative skills, because, only in
that way, students can express themselves and learn how to follow the social and cultural rules
appropriate in each communicative circumstance. In order to teach second language learners how
to speak in the best way possible, some speaking activities are provided below, that can be
applied to ESL and EFL classroom settings, together with suggestions for teachers who teach
oral language. The aim of developing speaking skills in English has always presented itself as a
challenge to teachers of all ages, be them newly-qualified or more experienced. The outcome of
such an ambition depends on a number of variables that can or cannot be controlled by the
teacher: the curriculum, the students themselves, the number of classes of English per week, the
number of students in a class, and the methods and materials at hand. Speaking is a
communication skill that enables a person to verbalize thoughts and ideas. There are two
instances when such a skill is required and these are: interactive and semi-interactive. In the first
instance (interactive), this would involve conversations with another person or group of persons
whether face-to-face or over the phone, wherein there is an exchange of communication between
two or more people. In the second instance (semi-interactive), this happens when there is a
speaker and an audience such as in the case of delivering a speech, wherein the speaker usually
does all the talking, while the audience listens and analyzes the message, expressions, and body
language of the speaker.
Speaking is also often regarded as the most important language skill to master, therefore
the goal of English language teaching is to develop students‟ ability in using English as a means
of communication. Students should practice intensively so that they are able to use English
communicatively both in oral and written form. Thus, the success of ELT is, to some extent,
measured from the student’s ability to make conversation which involves producing, receiving,
and processing information. Hornby (1995: 37) defines that speaking as the skill that the students
will be judged upon most in real-life situations. It is an important part of everyday interaction
and most often the first impression of a person is based on his/her ability to speak fluently and
comprehensively. In addition, Bailey and Savage (1994:7) say that speaking in a second or
foreign language has often been viewed as the most demanding of the four skills yet for many
people, speaking is seen as the central skill. The desire to communicate with others, often face to
face and real time, drives us to attempt to speak fluently and correctly. So, those statements
imply that speaking is very important to be learnt by the students in order to communicate well.
Indeed, it is undeniable that speaking skill is the most important thing that the students
should master to complete their English skill in order that they can have a good communication
using English. Therefore, there should be some ways to make the students be easy to improve
their speaking skill, such as having fun activities or giving a new method in teaching speaking
which can make the students enjoy their speaking class.
Now, many linguistics and ESL teachers agree on that students learn to speak in the
second language by "interacting". Communicative language teaching and collaborative learning
serve best for this aim.  Communicative language teaching is based on real-life situations that
require communication. By using this method in ESL classes, students will have the opportunity
of communicating with each other in the target language.  In brief, ESL teachers should create a
classroom environment where students have real-life communication, authentic activities, and
meaningful tasks that promote oral language. This can occur when students collaborate in groups
to achieve a goal or to complete a task. Therefore, there should be the active and fun actvities to
promote speaking.
Teaching speaking in the class of Integrated Skills put the teacher in an awkward
position. They want to build the students' professional ability but not creating chances for them
to speak. The students changed their learning from passivity to becoming active users of
language. The key point is that the students are consciously encouraged to learn the language by
using and participating in activities. They are desperately in need of improving their speaking
ability. And only the teachers' earnest desire to mend their teaching can stem the heavy anxiety
and worry from the students' minds. So, by using varied methods, the students' ability of
speaking along with their active engagement with vocabulary, interest, confidence, thinking
ability, etc, were all improved.
Some activties that can help the students to improve their spakng skills are such as
Discussion. 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. For example, students can become involved in
agree/disagree discussions. In this type of discussions, the teacher can form groups of students,
preferably 4 or 5 in each group, and provide controversial sentences like “people learn best when
they read vs. people learn best when they travel”. Then each group works on their topic for a
given time period, and presents their opinions to the class. It is essential that the speaking should
be equally divided among group members. At the end, the class decides on the winning group
who defended the idea in the best way. This activity fosters critical thinking and quick decision
making, and students learn how to express and justify themselves in polite ways while
disagreeing with the others. For efficient group discussions, it is always better not to form large
groups, because quiet students may avoid contributing in large groups. The group members can
be either assigned by the teacher or the students may determine it by themselves, but groups
should be rearranged in every discussion activity so that students can work with various people
and learn to be open to different ideas. Lastly, in class or group discussions, whatever the aim is,
the students should always be encouraged to ask questions, paraphrase ideas, express support,
check for clarification, and so on.
Moreover, the other activity is Role Play; it is One other way of getting students to speak
is role-playing. 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 what they think or feel. Thus, the teacher can tell the student that "You are David, you go to
the doctor and tell him what happened last night, and…" (Harmer,1984). As (...) in Effectiveness
of role play in enhancing the speaking skills of the learners in a large classroom: An
investigation of tertiary level students states that the students were tested for the third time using
the same method and their improvement was observed again. For the fourth role play, the
learners were tested with little preparation to see whether they could interact and communicate in
an unrehearsed situation. That time the students selected a film making situation. When the act
was reviewed and analyzed, the evaluators could see the gradual improvement of the learners. As
the result, the students became more spontaneous and more confident to speak incorporating
effective interaction and communication. They also improved in verbal fluency, using
appropriate vocabulary, adapting different moods, body language and vocal expression to use in
the situation. Futhermore, Simulation also used by the teacher. Simulations are very similar to
role-plays but what makes simulations different than role plays is that they are more elaborate. In
simulations, students can bring 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. Role plays and
simulations have many advantages. First, since they are entertaining, they motivate the students.
Second, as Harmer (1984) suggests, they increase the self-confidence of hesitant students,
because in role play and simulation activities, they will have a different role and do not have to
speak for themselves, which means they do not have to take the same responsibility.
Not only those ways, Information Gap also can be the fun way to teach the students, in
order that they can improve their speaking skill easily. In this activity, students are supposed to
be working in pairs. One student will have the information that other partner does not have and
the partners will share their information. Information gap activities serve many 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.
These activities are effective because everybody has the opportunity to talk extensively in the
target language. The research about information gap technique in improving students’ speaking
skill had been conducted by many researcher previously, one of them was Dewi (2013) who
conducted the research in Mts Al-Mujahirin Riau which entitled “Improving the Speaking
Ability of the Second Year students of MTS Al-Muhajirin Tapung by Using Information Gap
Activities”. The researcher basically focused on the effectiveness of using information gap
technique in improving students’ speaking skill. The result of her research showed that the
information gap technique can improve students’ speaking skill. In her research, she said that the
activities which were offered by information gap technique were relevant to the characteristics of
students with achievement motivation. Meaningful, situations were established using pair work
and group work, both important features of communicative language teaching in the classroom.
The other activities is Brain Storming. On a given topic, students can produce ideas in a limited
time. Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is effective and learners
generate ideas quickly and freely. The good characteristics of brainstorming are that the students
are not criticized for their ideas so students will be open to sharing new ideas.
Futhermore, Story Telling also usually used by the teacher. Students can briefly
summarize a tale or story they heard from somebody beforehand, or they may create their own
stories to tell their classmates. Story telling fosters creative thinking. It also helps students
express ideas in the format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and
setting a story has to have. Students also can tell riddles or jokes. For instance, at the very
beginning of each class session, the teacher may call a few students to tell short riddles or jokes
as an opening. In this way, not only will the teacher address students’ speaking ability, but also
get the attention of the class. Different with Story Completion, this is a very enjoyable, whole-
class, free-speaking activity for which students sit in a circle. For this activity, a teacher starts to
tell a story, but after a few sentences he or she stops narrating. Then, each student starts to
narrate from the point where the previous one stopped. Each student is supposed to add from
four to ten sentences. Students can add new characters, events, descriptions and so on. This also
can help the students to improve the students speaking in English. In a research, the researcher
makes two tests. At the pretest, the students could not achieve the minimum score. The
researcher conducted pretest to find out the students‟ speaking skill before being taught through
Story Completion. After three time treatments, the researcher conducted posttest to find out the
increase of students‟ speaking achievement. Based on the results of the research, the researcher
found that there was a significant increase of students‟ speaking skill after being taught narrative
text through Story Completion technique. It can be seen from the difference of mean in pretest
and also posttest.
The general actvities that is always used is Interview. Students can conduct interviews on
selected topics with various people. It is a good idea that the teacher provides a rubric to students
so that they know what type of questions which they can ask or what path to follow, but students
should prepare their own interview questions. Conducting interviews with people gives students
a chance to practice their speaking ability not only in class but also outside and helps them
becoming socialized. 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. Not
only Interview, but also Reporting is one of the fun way for Speaking Class. Before coming to
class, students are asked to read a newspaper or magazine and, in class, they report to their
friends what they find as the most interesting news. Students can also talk about whether they
have experienced anything worth telling their friends in their daily lives before class.
The most wanted activites is Playing Card. In this game, students should form groups of
four. Each suit will represent a topic. For instance; Diamonds: Earning money. Hearts: Love and
relationships. Spades: An unforgettable memory. Clubs: Best teacher. Each student in a group
will choose a card. Then, each student will write 4-5 questions about that topic to ask the other
people in the group. For example; If the topic "Diamonds: Earning Money" is selected, here are
some possible questions; Is money important in your life? Why?. What is the easiest way of
earning money? What do you think about lottery? Etc. However, the teacher should state at the
very beginning of the activity that students are not allowed to prepare yes-no questions, because
by saying yes or no students get little practice in spoken language production.  Rather, students
ask open-ended questions to each other so that they reply in complete sentences.
Moreover, Picture Narrating and Picture Describing also the other fun activites for
speaking. Picture Narrating activity is based on several sequential pictures. Students are asked to
tell the story-taking place in the sequential pictures by paying attention to the criteria provided
by the teacher as a rubric. Rubrics can include the vocabulary or structures they need to use
while narrating. Another way to make use of pictures in a speaking activity is Picture
Describing. Here, the teacher gives students just one picture and having them describe what it is
in the picture. For this activity students can form groups and each group is given a different
picture. Students discuss the picture with their groups, then a spokesperson 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. As Avi Johnson (2011) in The Use of Picture
Narrating and Teaching Speaking states that students are asked to tell the story taking place in
the sequential pictures by paying attention to the criteria provided by the teacher as a rubric.
Rubrics can include the vocabulary or structures they need to use while narrating. In conclusion,
picture narrating technique can contribute a great deal to students in developing basic interactive
skills necessary for life. The activities make students more active in learning process and at the
same time make their learning more meaningful and fun.
In addition, Find The Difference is also reommended. 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 tennis. Students in pairs discuss the similarities
and/or differences in the pictures.
Various activities is the fun way to help the teacher to improve their speaking skills. In
fact, the students are usually bored in a traditional classroom. The students need a new class
model to interest them to study. By giving various fun activities, it can encourage them to study
more, including in a speaking class. Fun activities will make the students more active than usual.
As the active knowledge, speaking skill needs the activeness of a person to improve this skill.
Through well-prepared communicative output activities such as role plays and discussions etc.
the teacher can encourage students to experiment and innovate with the language, and create a
supportive atmosphere that allows them to make mistakes without fear of embarrassment. This
will contribute to their self-confidence as speakers and to their motivation to learn more. In some
researches, it proves that giving fun activities to students will increase the number of the students
who get more fluently in speaking.

Conclusion

Teaching speaking is a very important part of second language 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. Therefore, it is essential that language
teachers pay great attention to teaching speaking. Rather than leading students to pure
memorization, providing a rich environment where meaningful communication takes place is
desired. In addition, there are a number of factors relating to speaking skills to be considered for
effective English speaking performance. Pronunciation, vocabulary, and collocations are singled
out as important factors to be emphasized in building fluency for EFL speakers. Providing
students with a variety of situations and frequent speaking tasks plays a significant role in the
improvement of students’ fluency when speaking (Tam, 1997). Confidence and competence
usually reinforce English speaking skills. Patil (2008) asserted that building up the learner’s
confidence to eliminate their fear of making errors was a priority that a teacher should consider
in order to make learners feel comfortable with their language use. Confidence and competence
in speaking could be developed from appropriate syllabus design, methods of teaching, and
adequate tasks and materials (Bailey, 2005; Songsiri, 2007). Regarding speaking effectiveness,
Shumin (1997) pointed out a number of elements involved, including listening skills, socio
cultural factors, affective factors, and other linguistic and sociolinguistic competences such as
grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence
enables speakers to use and understand English language structures accurately and
unhesitatingly, which contributes to their fluency, which, in turn, develops confidence in
communication. With this aim, various speaking activities such as those listed above can
contribute a great deal to students in developing basic interactive skills necessary for life. These
activities make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their
learning more meaningful and fun for them. As an example for Role Play, we can say that role
play technique has positive impact in improving learners’ speaking skills as it gives the students
a chance to explore different situations of real life and enables them to speak accurately and
confidently in that situation in the target language. Although during role play in a large class
room, the situation gets chaotic and the performers sometimes forget their dialogues, which
create embarrassment, eventually with the help of little feedback from the teachers, this problem
can be resolved. Teachers may give prompt verbal feedback or written feedback in case of
technical difficulties while recording acts. Providing a variety of activities out of class in
different, more intimate environments helped the students overcome some anxiety. Students
were generally more talkative in class and willing to risk making mistakes than those in previous
classes who did not complete extra oral production activities. Utilizing new technologies enables
beginning-level-language instructors to offer more personal means to practice the language.
Technology and small-group conversations appear to be effective strategies for breaking down
common student hesitations which prevent many adult language learners from fully involving
themselves in the learning process. Even students who are hesitant to speak in class will be
gaining practice outside of class which will build their confidence levels and improve their
performance in future English courses. Students with the fun activities will enjoy the classroom
language and join the process without any fear to make a mistake that is caused by the method or
the activity just bring them fun, such as the game.

References
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Morozova, Yulia (2013). Methods of Enhancing Speaking Skills of Elementary Level Students

Linh, Doan (2011). Guidance for Learnersʼ Improvement of Speaking Skills

Johnson, Avi (2011). The Use of Picture Narrating and Teaching Speaking.
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Mahrum, Mochtar (2014). Improving Speaking Skill Through Information Gap Technique

Islam, Priscilla (2012). Effectiveness of role play in enhancing the speaking skills of the learners
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