How can we assign real—life communication activities in class？

作者简介：吴西（1985—），女，汉族，湖北武汉人，硕士，武汉音乐学院助教，研究方向：教育学。Abstract：Speaking has always been an important part of English teaching.With the real example from teaching experience and practice，this passage discussed about different ways to gather material and assign tasks in the speaking class.

Key words：speaking；real life；communication

As an ESL learner and teacher in the Non-English speaking country，I always heard this complaint：we are learning the“dumb English”.Lacking of native produced speech explores as well as the real-life conversation practice may be the main factors.The insufficient input causes the shortages of vocabulary and structured resources.

At the same time，few practices of real-life conversations impact the development of speaking skills and strategies.Thus in China，students oral ability is obviously worse than other languages abilities.

For my point of view，materials for a speaking class is quite important.The authentic materials for real-life dialogues or speeches might be the best choice.However，gathering the materials would be a very difficult job for the teacher to teach English in the Non-English speaking country.We may spend much time on selecting useful resources from radio programs，TV series，movies and public speeches.Although it is time consuming“homework”for teachers，I believe that both teachers and students will gain many benefits from those activities.We can not only relay on the listening materials from the textbook，because the ranges of topic and the contents are too limited，moreover，sometimes，the language they used are out-of-date and unnatural productions.

What is the real-life communications？We can divide the communication into two parts，one is from the perspective of the teacher-students interaction，the other is from the perspective of students-students interaction.Teachers can make small talk with students in or out of the class.Small and effective talk aims at the filling the information gap.At the beginning，the teacher can start with more common topics，such as weather，hobby，sports，movie，holiday，ect.It is important for the teacher to provide contributions to the conversation at the outset of the stage.Because small talk is a little difficult for learners，as it requires a wide ranges of vocabulary and knowledge.Thus the teacher can elicit the knowledge first and then develop the conversation.

In fact，common topic is achievable for the intermediate or even pre-intermediate level of students.Also，it is teachers job to make the small talk easier for learners.As the practice goes on，the teacher can change topic into some sophisticated ones，such as the latest movie，the fashion trend，big events happened around them，and maybe some social issues in the city.The teacher can not use the same sort of topics for the whole semester because there will be no information gap between the participants.Furthermore，small talk activates students passive vocabulary，thus，we should try to cover the topic as wide as possible.

The effective short dialogue may be useful for long time training and appears more suitable for individuals.For most of classroom study，we can encourage students to talk and try to increase students verbal participants as much as possible.

Group discussion may be the most popular activity.But in many cases，students dont benefit from it as we expected from the discussion.Some of them have nothing to say.Teachers can use some controversial topics and assign students into different roles and then discuss in groups.In this way，first，students may less worry about“releasing own opinions”，because they carry a role which is assigned by the teacher and they may not really support the idea personally.For some students who is shy，they may feel lose identity then will feel more comfortable to focus on the language rather than the contents.

However，we can not find a perfect way to apply for any circumstances，the design of controversial topic only gives students a more specific aspect to develop their idea and help them develeping speaking skills.