earticle

영어

This study explored the designs of speaking activities in high school English textbooks given the important role of textbook materials in developing speaking skills. The criteria for the examination of speaking activities were based on the communicative continuum proposed by Littlewood(2013), which divides speaking activities into five types: non-communicative learning, pre-communicative language practice, communicative language practice, structured communication and authentic communication because it provided a clear guide to how different speaking activities can be used to achieve communicative goals. The work of classifying speaking activities in two levels of the four high school English textbooks chosen for the analysis showed that they presented five types of speaking activities in a balanced and general way but there was a restricted range of formats for the designs of speaking activities. Some features emerged when the distribution of each type was looked at in different textbooks. Those features were discussed in terms of communicative potential along with some suggestions for designing speaking activities.