Teaching Productive Skills to the Students: a secondary Level Scenario

2.6.4 Why Activities are Provided 
There are three basic reasons why teachers should provide students with 
activities: 
a. 
Rehearsal: To organize e.g. a role-play for students in a shop or an airport 
offers them an opportunity to rehearse a real-life event and the students get the feeling 
of what is the communication in a foreign language like. 
b. 
Feedback: Having students to present what they know, that means, to use all 
the language they have learnt provides feedback for the teacher as well as for the 
students. The teachers can see what the students are doing well and what is needed to 
be improved. 
c. 
Engagement: 
All speaking activities are highly motivating and the students 
find those interesting to work on and to participate fully. 
2.6.5 Balanced Activities Approach 
 
The goal of teaching speaking skill is communicative efficiency. Learners should 
be able to make themselves understood, using their current proficiency to the fullest. 
They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to faulty pronunciation, 
grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the social and cultural rules that apply in each 
communication situation. 
To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors can 
use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured output, 
and communicative output. 

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16 
 
Language Input: 
It gives learners the material they need to begin producing 
language themselves which comes in the form of teacher talk, listening activities, 
reading passages, and the language heard and read outside of class. Language input 
may be content oriented or form oriented. Content-oriented input focuses on 
information, whether it is a simple weather report or an extended lecture on an 
academic topic. Content-oriented input may also include descriptions of learning 
strategies and examples of their use. Whereas, Form-oriented input focuses on ways 
of using the language: guidance from the teacher or another source on vocabulary, 
pronunciation, and grammar (linguistic competence); appropriate things to say in 
specific contexts (discourse competence); expectations for rate of speech, pause 
length, turn-taking, and other social aspects of language use (sociolinguistic 
competence); and explicit instruction in phrases to use to ask for clarification and repair 
miscommunication (strategic competence). In the presentation part of a lesson, an 
instructor combines content-oriented and form-oriented inputs. 
The amount of input depends on students listening proficiency and on the 
situation. Learners at lower levels, where the level of communication is not high, should 
be given an explanation in mother language rather than in the target language to avoid 
misunderstanding. However, listening proficiency and situation are not the only factors 
that influence the input. J. Harmer adds: “we must also look at the conditions under 
which 
language learning takes place and who the students are.” Harmer also says that 
some methodologies (e.g. Suggestopedia) demands on time, conditions and resources. 
(Harmer, 1991, 38)