Using role plays and simulation activities in teaching speaking

1) Pre-Communicative Activities
Pre-communicative activities need to be given before entering the communicative activities. Through pre-communicative activities, the teacher isolates specific elements of knowledge or skill which compose communicative ability, and provides learners with opportunities to practice them separately or called learning the part-skills of communication. The examples of precommunicative activities are matching, drilling, question and answer practice, pronunciation practice, mentioning words related to a topic, completing a crossword puzzle, completing sentences, grammar exercises, and many others.
2) Communicative Activities
There are many communicative activities that can be used in the classroom which encourage the students to be involved in the activities and able to use the language to communicate. They are, for examples, as follows:
a. Questions and Answers
Questions and answers are simply just questioning and answering activities. Klippel divides these activities into several parts such as warming up activities, interviews, guessing games, jigsaw tasks, and questioning activities. Simple questions and answers activities are often used as warming-up activities. Klippel adds that the purposes of conducting warming up activities are to get to know each other a little at the beginning and to get students into the right mood before starting on some new project or task.
b. Information Gap Activities
Richards states that an important aspect of communication in CLT is information gap that refers to a real communicative in which people normally communicate in order to get information they do not possess. Thronbury also says that in these kinds of tasks there is a knowledge gap among learners and it can be bridged by using the language. So, in order to get the information, the communicators have to communicate. Littlewood labels these activities as functional communication activities that emphasize sharing the information among learners and its processing. The example of information gap activities are exchanging personal information, discovering missing information, identifying differences on pictures, role-plays, and so on.
c. Games
A game is an enjoyable activity with a set of rules or terms against each other. Games can be suitable to help students in mastering the language as well as relaxed in learning the language. There are many games that can be used in speaking class such as spelling games, search games, matching games, etc.
d. Conversation
Dornyei and Thurrell explain that conversation is an activity which provides content for a wide range of communication functions and domains of meaning in which learners practice managing longer sessions of social interaction such as introducing new topics and taking turns. This activity can give more chances for students to express their own personality and experiences in the target language.