problem-solving activity in speaking activities

problem-solving activity in speaking activities

Task 8 is the problem-solving activity in speaking activities. This type of activity tends to be productive because there is a clear objective to be reached or problem to be solved. This task goes well with intermediate level students.

Personally, it would be a successful activity with the students. The reasons can be listed as follows: first of all, there are 11 interesting topics for students to choose freely. Students can control the difficulty level and choose topics based on their own spoken ability, which is good for both good English-spoken students and poor English-spoken students to practice spoken English. Moreover, all 11 topics are related to students’ lives. That is to say, students can express their opinions which are based on their own observation in daily life. Meanwhile, students are willing to communicate with each other about their respective ideas .This is easier for students to improve spoken English.

However, there are still some problems in this activity. For my part, it mainly exists in 3 aspects. First, it does not refer to time limit. Under this condition, students may spend more time on chatting, and this will make time waste and ineffective. Therefore, it can not achieve the teaching aims. Second, it is not clear about students grouping. Once there are too many students in a group, it is hard to make a final decision if every student has different opinions about each item. Third, there lacks of detail information about students’ background information. Problem-solving activities require a higher level of language proficiency. However, there is no information about the students’ level of language proficiency. Therefore, it may not work smoothly if this activity applies to beginning learners.

In order to be more successful in this task, I think we can improve this task in 3 ways. First, we should control discussing time. Personally, this task should be controlled in 10 minutes. More or less, all will affect the quality of teaching. Second, for the students grouping, one group should have 3 or 4 students, which is easy to reach an agreement.