OPERATIONAL keys of the scalesthe f

OPERATIONAL keys of the scales
the first scale in the instrument is titled communicative level of activities. The scale is divided into five degrees of communicativeness (1) Poorly Communicative (2) Limitedly Communicative (3) Moderately Communicative (4) Fairly high communicative and (5) Highly communicative.
Highly communicative activities which lie at the top of the scale refer to free activities which incorporate both listening and speaking skill. Such uncontrolled tasks of role-play (relatively free acting out of specific roles and functions), taking part in games (e.g. board and dice games making words), activity involving specified problem which requires cooperation to solve it, acting in planned drama of paly, skit, story, ect, stimulation or excitement of activities based on real – life actions and experience, authentic interviews where students are directed to get information from each other, free discussion, debate or group discussion or propos which refers to a conversation or speech by teacher, students or visitors or real life topics.
Fairly-high communicative activities are graded as 4 out of 5 on the scale. They refer to semi controlled activities which also incorporate both of listening and speaking skills. This category includes question answer, referencial, activities which prompt responses by referential questions, cued narrative/dialogue where student produce narrative or dialogue that follow cues from miming, cards, pictures, ect, narration/exposition which refer to a presentation of story or an explanation derived from prior stimulus and brainstorming (i.e. free undirected contribution by students and teacher on a given topic).
Moderately communicative activities lie in the middle of scale. They refer to controlled oral/aural activities which include warm up using songs, jokes and games, role play demonstration (i.e. brief illustration of content) dialogue /narrative recitation (i.e. reading a prepared text) reading direcly and aloud from the text, question answer display when students respond to the teacher’s question, drill activities such as repetition and substitution with little meaning attached; and meaningful drill when students respond with meaningful choices as in reference to different information.
Low communicative activities incorporate semi controlled aural activities. This type of activities is related to the listening skill and includes story telling (i.e. a lengthy presentation of a story), information transfer, e.gg student fill out a diagram while listening to description, and wrap-up when a teacher or a student produces summary items.
Very low communicative activities, which lie at the bottom of the scale, refer to controlled aural activities which avoke listening skill and hardly are accompanied by verbal utterances by the learners. This category includes (1) organizational tasks, such as classroom instructions and rules; (2) content explanation tasks: i.e. grammatical, phonological, lexical, ect; (3) setting tasks: like focusing on the topic; (4) dialogue/narrative presentation tasks; for instance listening for passive reception; and finally, (5) dictation tasks: where students write down orally presented text.
The second scale in the instrument is called level of oral fluency promoted by the communicative activities. This scale assumes that highly communicative activities can help learners achieve high level of fluency and poorly communicative activities lead to poor fluency by the learners. It si obvious that the key to achieving fluency is free or highly communicative activities and the barrier to achieving student fluency is too much control by the teachers in the classroom. Nation (1991) also stresses the role of less controlled activities in promoting fluency. Therefore, highly communicative activities lead to learners’ high level of oral fluency and vice-versa.