Common oral activities for group work

Students work in small group, do tasks or discuss certain topics, then the teacher makes a change with group arrangement to give them chance to exchange

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their group ideas with members from (an)other group(s). Various rearrangements can be done:

* Three stay- One stray: after a discussion in 4- member groups, one member of each group moves another group to present their group ideas or decision on the issue given. The mover is often the group‟s reporter.

* Three stray- One stay: The teacher may count and label each group member a number, then those who get the same number will work one group and share his/ her group‟s agreement to the new group.

* Pyramid grouping: Students work in small groups (of 2 or 3) on some tasks, then two or three groups are combined to make a new communicative setting.

2.3.2 Role play

Put students in life- like situation, they will take roles to make conversations.

It is necessary to model the conversation of the context, assigning roles to students and give the students time to prepare their roles before the conversation. The teacher should consider the students‟ competence when assigning roles, easier tasks with more simple expressions for the weaker, the other roles requiring more creative and freer language use for more able students. The teacher can support the less competent students by getting them to write down the questions, responses they will need.

2.3.3 Information Gap Activity (IGA)

Information sharing is one of the most typical types of group work activities, it helps to promote individualization of students‟ learning and develop their skills of using the language and other social skills in cooperative tasks. There are often 2 steps to follow in an IGA: Step 1: Cognitive and comprehensive stage, students, receiving materials from the teacher, process the input knowledge and information provided in the materials;

Step 2: Exchanging ideas and information, students work with follow partners, share the knowledge and information they have just perceived, try their

best to make themselves comprehensible to the partners and they then have further discussion on them.

2.3.4 Problem –solving

According to Burne (1990: 58) (Cited in English Now- The magazine of Vietnam‟s English Teacher and trainer net work- Issue 11- Winter 2005) problem- solving has been used to group together a wide range of activities that require students to find “solutions” to problems of different kinds.

Many of these problems involve processes that we commonly use in real life as follows: We frequently hypothesize links between two things (events, actions, people, etc). We detect differences (real or imaginary).We grade things according to criteria (subjective or objective) Clearly, problem solving is believed to be necessary and suited to students of all levels.

2.3.5 Picture card activities

The use of the picture cards inevitably involves the use of group work.

Below are some among the activities that are useful for group work:

Kim’s Game: the students in groups look at the items on the table for about thirty second. Next, the items are covered with a cloth and the groups have to describe and locate the items. Then the group leaders report to the class what the group had discussed

What is my line: The students in groups have to ask questions of another member within a limited time span and discover his /her occupation

Twenty questions: One student is asked to write the name of an object or select a picture of an object and place it face downwards. The others have to question this student and try to guess what the item is.

To sum up, the above activities under the category of group are useful for developing speaking skills among students. They can create out- of- expectation result in the speaking class.

Speaking skills and its related concepts

Group work in a speaking lesson