Enhancing Discourse Skills Through Speaking Activities

Speaking is far more complex than it might appear on the surface. When a learner takes part in a discussion, debate, or role play, they are not just stringing words together – they are simultaneously managing thoughts, structuring language, following conversational rules, and engaging with other people in real time. This layered complexity is what makes discourse-based speaking activities both powerful and demanding in the language classroom. Understanding the specific demands these activities place on learners – and knowing how to scaffold them – is one of the most important skills a language teacher can develop.

What does “discourse” mean in a speaking context? 🔗

In everyday usage, we often think of speaking as producing sentences. But in language teaching, the focus goes well beyond sentences. Discourse refers to connected, purposeful language – how utterances are linked together to create meaning in real communicative situations. As research in discourse-based ELT points out, language is flexible, and words alone do not convey the full message. Context, relationship between speakers, social norms, and structure all shape meaning. A speaking activity that involves discourse, therefore, asks learners to do much more than recall vocabulary or apply grammar rules – it asks them to communicate in a complete, socially appropriate, and coherent way.

Goh and Burns (2012) capture this well by describing second language speaking competence as involving three interlocking areas: knowledge of language and discourse, core speaking skills, and communication strategies. Each of these maps onto a distinct type of demand that learners face during speaking activities.

The five key demands of discourse-based speaking activities 🔗

When learners participate in any activity that involves extended speaking and interaction – a group discussion, a storytelling task, a role play, a debate – they face demands across five main areas: cognitive, language, discourse, interactional, and involvement.

Cognitive demands 🔗

Speaking in real time requires learners to think fast on their feet – structuring utterances, retrieving vocabulary, and responding appropriately all at once. This real-time processing creates a significant cognitive load, particularly for less proficient speakers. Beyond just producing speech, learners also need to monitor what they are saying, plan what comes next, and evaluate how their message is landing with the listener. This metacognitive dimension – thinking about how you are communicating while you are communicating – adds another layer to the cognitive challenge.

Task complexity is a key factor here. Robinson (2007) defines task complexity as the internal cognitive demands that language tasks place on a learner’s processing. More cognitively complex tasks – such as tasks requiring reasoning, unfamiliar content, or time pressure – can stretch learners in productive ways, but they can also become overwhelming without appropriate preparation.

Language demands 🔗

Spoken language has its own distinct features. As McCarthy (1998) notes, it reflects the demands of face-to-face interaction and the real-time production of talk. Unlike written language, speech relies heavily on utterances rather than full sentences, makes use of discourse markers (words like “well,” “so,” “I mean,” “you know”), and involves ellipsis, informal structures, and formulaic expressions. Learners need to command not just grammar and vocabulary in the abstract, but grammar and vocabulary as they are actually used in spoken interaction.

Goh and Burns (2012) describe this as requiring mastery of sound patterns at both the segmental level (individual sounds, syllable stress) and the suprasegmental level (intonation, rhythm, linking). Learners who are proficient in writing may still sound “bookish” when speaking because they have not yet internalised the forms and patterns specific to oral communication.

Discourse demands 🔗

Discourse demands refer to the ability to organise and structure speech coherently across an extended stretch of talk. This includes knowing how to open and close a conversation, how to sequence ideas logically, how to use cohesive devices to link ideas, and how to manage turn-taking. Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) describe this as oral discourse management – the ability to control rhythm, intonation, and the overall architecture of spoken interaction.

A learner who struggles with discourse structure may produce grammatically correct sentences that are still difficult to follow, because the sentences do not connect in a coherent way. This is one of the key differences between a learner who can “do speaking” in the classroom – participating in drills and short exchanges – and one who can genuinely engage in sustained, meaningful discourse.

Interactional demands 🔗

Speaking is not a solo performance – it involves constant negotiation with another person. Research on social interaction in language learning highlights that communication is an interactive phenomenon, relying on speakers’ ability to infer each other’s intentions and coordinate in successful turn-taking. This means learners must not only produce language but respond to it – asking for clarification, paraphrasing, building on what was said, and repairing breakdowns in communication.

Interactional demands also include adjusting language to suit the social relationship between speakers. The way a student addresses a teacher differs from the way they speak to a peer. Navigating register, politeness conventions, and the cultural norms embedded in spoken interaction can be particularly challenging for learners unfamiliar with the target language culture. As ELT practitioners note, back-channelling (signals like “is it?” or “right” that show a listener is engaged) and strongly interactional expressions are key features of natural conversation that learners need to develop awareness of.

Involvement demands 🔗

Involvement demands are often overlooked, but they are critical. These refer to the affective and motivational dimension of speaking – the willingness to participate, take risks, and sustain engagement. The inherent cognitive demands of speaking can discourage learners from volunteering responses or participating actively. Anxiety, low confidence, and fear of judgment can cause learners to shut down or produce minimal output even when they have the linguistic resources to do more.

Involvement is also about staying engaged when the topic is difficult, when the task is long, or when interaction partners are not providing enough support. Learners who are more involved tend to take more communicative risks, produce more output, and ultimately develop their speaking skills faster.

How teachers can support learners to meet these demands 🔗

Understanding the demands is only useful if teachers translate that understanding into concrete classroom practice. Burns (2019) argues that many teachers present speaking activities without actually teaching speaking – that is, without explicitly addressing the knowledge, skills, and strategies learners need. The following strategies directly address each category of demand.

Build cognitive capacity through preparation and task repetition 🔗

Explicit pre-task support – activating background knowledge, providing relevant vocabulary, guiding brainstorming – reduces the cognitive load on learners when they perform the task. When learners have the content and language resources ready, more of their cognitive capacity is freed for managing fluency, interaction, and discourse structure. Task repetition is equally powerful: when learners perform the same or similar task more than once, the reduced cognitive burden of content planning allows them to direct more attention to language quality and discourse organisation.

Provide language scaffolding for spoken forms 🔗

Rather than leaving learners to guess what spoken English sounds like, teachers should explicitly introduce features of spoken language: discourse markers, formulaic expressions, ellipsis, and hedging phrases. Teaching should focus learners’ attention on fixed expressions, routines, and discourse markers alongside skills such as speech functions and interaction management. Providing phrase banks, sentence starters, or spoken language frames before a task gives learners the linguistic scaffolding to participate with greater confidence and accuracy.

Teach and model discourse structures explicitly 🔗

Discourse-based teaching involves exposing learners to authentic samples of spoken language – recordings, interviews, real conversations – so they can observe how discourse is actually organised. Teachers can then draw attention to features such as how speakers open topics, signal transitions, and manage disagreement. Role plays and simulations designed around realistic discourse contexts give learners the chance to practise these structures in a controlled setting before engaging in more open-ended interaction. Discourse analysis activities, where students analyse a piece of authentic spoken text before producing their own, can help learners understand the social and contextual factors that shape speech.

Develop interactional skills through structured group tasks 🔗

Studies on learner-learner interaction consistently show that interactive activities have a greater effect on the development of speaking skills than teacher-fronted instruction alone. Group discussions, information-gap tasks, collaborative problem-solving, and debates require learners to negotiate meaning, take turns, and respond to each other – which directly addresses interactional demands. Teachers should monitor these interactions not just for grammar, but for interactional features: Are learners taking equal turns? Are they using back-channelling? Are they clarifying and rephrasing when needed? Explicit modelling of good conversational practice – including how to signal the end of a turn, how to politely interrupt, and how to seek clarification – helps learners build a repertoire of interactional strategies.

Build a low-anxiety environment to increase involvement 🔗

Goh and Burns (2012) stress that the teaching speaking cycle must account for the affective dimension of learning. A classroom where mistakes are treated as natural and expected – rather than as failures – is more likely to generate high levels of learner involvement. Providing learners with some autonomy over topic choice or task format increases motivation. Regular reflection activities, where learners evaluate their own speaking performance, help them develop metacognitive awareness and reduce the anxiety that comes from feeling out of control of the process. Communicative language teaching activities that prioritise meaningful communication over error correction at every turn create the psychological safety learners need to take risks and speak more freely.

Putting it all together: the teaching-speaking cycle 🔗

The teaching-speaking cycle proposed by Goh and Burns (2012) offers a practical framework for addressing all five demands in a sequenced and coherent way. Rather than a one-off activity, it is a cycle of awareness-raising, focused language and skill instruction, task performance, and reflection. The cycle begins by helping learners understand the goals of the speaking task and activating relevant language and content knowledge. Learners then perform the task, receive focused instruction on specific language or discourse features, repeat or revise the task with their new knowledge, and finally reflect on what they have learned. This structured approach moves beyond simply giving students opportunities to speak – it treats speaking as a complex, teachable skill that benefits from the same deliberate attention that reading and writing receive.

When teachers understand the cognitive, language, discourse, interactional, and involvement demands that speaking activities place on learners, they are in a much stronger position to plan activities that genuinely build communicative competence – not just fill time with talking.

What do you think? Of the five demands discussed here – cognitive, language, discourse, interactional, and involvement – which do you find your learners struggle with most, and why? How do you currently scaffold speaking activities in your classroom to address more than one demand at a time?

References

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