Characteristic of Good Speaking Class

sometimes spoken language is easy to perform, but in some cases it is difficult (Brown, 2001: 270). In order that they can carry out the successful speaking, they have to fulfill some characteristics of successful speaking activity such as giving much time or opportunity to the students to speak as often as possible. Allocating as much time as possible to students talking can help create the best environment for oral activities. Other characteristics of successful speaking activities include:

1) making sure that student participation is not dominated by a few talkative students

2) making sure that students want to speak because they are interested in the topic

3) making sure that students have something relevant to say

4) making sure that students can be understood by everyone

5) making sure that there aren't frequent interruptions while a student is speaking

Ur (1996: 120) explains some characteristics of successful speaking activities which include learners talk a lot, participant is even, motivation is high, and language is of an acceptable level. Each characteristic is explained as follows:

1) Learners talk a lot

As much as possible of the period of time allocated to the activity is in fact occupied by learners talk. This may be obvious, but often most time is taken up with teacher’s talk or pauses.

2) Participant is even

Classroom discussion is not dominated by a minority of talk active participants. It means that all students get a chance to speak and contributions are fairly evenly distributed.

3) Motivation is high

Learners are eager to speak because they are interested in the topic and have something new to say about it, or they want to contribute to achieve a task objective.

4) Language is of an acceptable level

Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easy comprehensible to teach others and of acceptable level of language accuracy. Speaking is the ability to use the language in ordinary way by speech. It is not only a matter of transferring some messages to other persons but is also communication, which needs more than one person to communicate with. When people speak, they construct ideas in words, express their perception, their feelings and intentions, so that interlocutors grasp meaning of what the speakers mean. If the learners do not have speaking skill, do not understand the English words that are said by the speaker, do not acknowledge the language, they cannot grasp meaning of what the speaker mean. In that condition, they cannot be said successful in learning English, because they do not have a meaningful interaction of English conversation. Due to it, students who want to speak English well need to learn and practice it as much as possible. As proverb says ‘practice makes perfect’. Therefore, students must practice to speak English as often as possible so that they are able to speak English fluently and accurately.