A proposal to promoting students' speaking skills through communicative activities. A case study of Mapara Secondary School, Nampula - Mozambique.

1. WELCOME TO THE
PRESENTATION
SÉRGIO ACAPITO

2. TOPIC:
A proposal to Promoting Students’
Speaking Skills through Communicative
Activities.
A case of Mapara Secondary School,
grade 9 stream B, day shift.

3. STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY
Chapter I: Introduction.
Chapter II: Literature Review.
Chapter III: Research Methodology.
Chapter IV: Data Presentation, Analysis and Discussion.
Chapter V: Proposal, Recommendations and Conclusion.

4. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Statement of the problem
At Mapara Secondary School, the bulk of grade 9 students of all courses, dayshift, were not
able to communicate in English, neither in the classroom nor outside the classroom.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
General objective:
Find out the causes that hamper most of grade 9 students, dayshift, at Mapara Secondary
School, from communicating in English.
Specific objectives:
1. To observe and delve the classes in order to get a leeway for probing about the teaching
and learning processes;

5. Cont.
2. To scrutinize the teaching methods and activities that the teachers use;
3. To propose some practical technique, activities and lesson plans to
improve students’ speaking fluency.
Critical questions
1. Why teachers at Mapara Secondary School don’t use communicative
methods that foster students speaking skills in their teaching of English?
2. Why do students at Mapara Secondary School barely communicate in
English during the classes?

6. Hypothesis
 Teachers may still be using traditional methods such as: Grammar
Translation Method, Direct Method, during the lessons.
 Perhaps the students are not motivated enough to cope with the teachers`
teaching methods.
Merit of the study
This research is very crucial in education field because:
1. It is going to benefit positively teachers and trainees who deal with English
as a Second Language;
2. It provides some effective teaching techniques and strategies to overcome;
3. Teachers will experience and find out how some speaking activities such as,
role-plays, dialogues/conversations, oral presentations and discussions are
useful develop their students’ speaking skills/fluency.

7. CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
Thornberry (2005:1) cited by (Junadiai, 2011:8), defines speaking as a speech
production that becomes part of daily activity which involves interaction.
Teaching speaking to students is of a great importance given the fact that it
enables them to develop their communication skills/abilities in English fluently.
Harmer (1991:122) states that “communicative activities are all activities
designed to provoke communication between students and/or between the
teacher and the students”.

8. CONT.
Types of communicative activities:
Role-play: (Jones (1978:21) says that a role-play is a “creative and
entertaining method of learning, which enables students of English to
use authentic language in everyday situations).
Dialogue / Conversation: (Dialogue is a two-way communication
process. That is, what A says helps to shape B’s replay, which in turn
influences A’s answer and so on, (Goncalves 2011:25)).

9. CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Design Method: Quantitative Methodology
Research instruments: Questionnaire and Direct Observation.
Target Population: 116: 60 male [students] and 73 female [students].
Sampling Method: Purposive sampling
Sample: 22 participants: 2 teachers; 20 students: 12 male and 10 female.
Sampling technique: Random sampling.

10. CHAPTER 4: DATA PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS
AND DISCUSSION
Possible reasons that make students not being able to communicate fluently

11. Most used activities by the teachers
25%
50%
25%
Group Work Gap Filling Repetition & other

12. FINDINGS
 Teachers are unaware of teaching speaking skills;
 Teachers are not motivated because English is regarded as
unimportant subject;
 Much use of Grammar Translation Method, Direct Method,
during the lessons.
 Some teachers of English take advantages of GTM and they
do little to change the scenario.

13. CHAPTER 5: PROPOSALS, IMPLEMENTATION,
RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION
Proposals
Receptive skills Lesson Plan model with communicative activities (p.55)
Speaking Activities
Activity 1: Discussion based on the picture
Activity 2: Oral presentation in front of the class
Activity 3: Dialogue
Activity 4: Pictures description
Activity5: At the clinic

14. RECOMMENDATIONS
 To the Ministry of Education
Should ensure that teachers can implement the CLT implementation for all
the classes in order to nurture students’ communicative competence.
 To the Course Designers
design teaching material (course books, textbooks, teaching aids, etc.),
which might be very communicative.
 To the teachers
Should use the speaking activities as a teaching aid to foster students’
communicative competence.

15. CONCLUSION
This research is entitled “A proposal to Promoting speaking skills in ELT, through
Communicative Activities, it was objectively conducted in order to find out the reason
why the students of grade 9, dayshift, at Mapara Secondary School were facing
problem in speaking the target language.
The results show that the teacher relied on the same speaking material provided by
school;
The study found also out that students fail to communicate fluently because they are
not exposed enough to the target language.

16. I am grateful for the attention