Characteristic of Successful Speaking Activity

Characteristic of Successful Speaking Activity

To support the teaching learning process of speaking skill, the teachers must know about the characteristics of students and also the characteristics of successful speaking activity. If the teacher knows about the characteristics of each student, the teacher can easily give the material to students. According to Underhil (1987; 120), there are some characteristics of successful speaking activity:

1.   Students talk a lot

As much as possible period of time allotted to the activity occupied by students talk. This is obvious, but often most time is taken up with teacher talks or pauses. It means the students must be active to speak with their friends as mush as possible. It is very clear that the students are busy, but they seldom spent their time to talk with their teacher.

2.   Participation is even

            Classroom discussion is not dominated by a monitory of talkative participants: all get a chance to speak, and contributions are fairly evenly distributed. It means that the classroom discussion is not dominated by one participant only, but all of participants get a same chance to speak.

3.   Motivation is high

Students are eager to speak: because they are interested in the topic and have something new to say about it, or because they want to contribute to achieve an objective task. It means that the students have high motivation to speak English. By having a high motivation, the students will be interested in learning English, especially in speaking. They often try to deliver their own idea confidently.

            4.   Language is of an acceptable level

Students express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of language accuracy. It means that they use the components of speaking which are relevant with the acceptable level of language such as, pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and comprehensible. So, the students often try to speaking English correctly in real communication.

Source :

Underhil nic. 1987. Testing Spoken Language. London: Cambridge University Press.