Different learning models for speaking

Different researchers have discussed different models for speaking. These are discussed below: 

First, Rivers and Temperley provide three types of speaking activities, such as oral practice, structured interaction, and autonomous interaction. These will give learners opportunities to speak with and without the assistance of the teacher. Littlewood, on the other hand, provides a model that focuses on two types of exercises pre-communicative and communicative. According to him, communicative activities can be structural and quasi-communicative. During these activities, learners are only concerned about the acceptable production of language without being concerned with real contexts. However, communicative activities can be functional communicative and social interaction activities: These are full communication activities where the learners need to use their skills of communicative activities that they have learned before. 

Next, Jeremy Harmer discusses four kinds of speaking activities. These are information gap activities, surveys, discussions, and role-play. Information gap activities will give learners a real purpose for speaking. They will speak to find out information about someone or something. Surveys are important to engage learners to create questionnaires and interview people to learn about specific information. This will help students to talk with many people about the same topic. Discussion, on the other hand, is important to learn to share and negotiate ideas. This will make learners competent in persuasion and backing up opinions. Finally, role plays will give students opportunities to practice conversation useful for diverse social contexts. They will be able to understand how interaction takes place in all those contexts. 

On the other hand, Ur’s model of communication offers three types of activities. These are brainstorming activities, organizing activities, and compound activities. Brainstorming activities involve Students practicing speaking by guessing games and finding connections among concepts. For example, learners can guess about a person, place, or object. They can also analyze relationships between words or objects. Organizing activities are comparisons, categorizing, combining texts, etc. These will help learners practice the sub-skills of speaking. Finally, compound activities may include composing letters, debates, campaigns, surveys, and planning projects. 

Apart from the above, Levelt and Lee provide cognitive models of speaking. Levelt divides the production of speech into four components: conceptualization, utterance formulation, speech articulation, and self-monitoring. In contrast, Lee emphasizes operationalizing classroom communication. Lee discusses five components that are necessary to design communicative tasks: extended discourse, information gap, uncertainty, goal orientation, and real-time processing. 

All the above models are helpful in designing communicative tasks in the classroom. The teacher should adopt the models based on the learners’ needs and level of language proficiency.