English Classes Where the Students Interact in English: How Well Can the Teachers Help Them Start Speaking Without Preparation?

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to describe how to organize a junior high school English class where speaking tasks play important roles in having students actively interact in class without written notes. The description is based on the analysis of the 8th grade student speeches derived through two interactive speaking tasks of different cognitive demands, which were performed in class, as post-reading activities. The main-task of a teaching unit should be preceded with a pre-task whose setting or communicative purposes are similar to those of the main-task. Such pre-task helps activate both the schema of the speech context, to which the students can refer in forming their messages in mind, and the vocabulary with which they express their messages while engaging in the main-task.