BACKGROUND

The English teachers are insisted to be creative to design many communicative activities in the
classroom that urge and motivate students to use the language actively. Communicative continuum
approach formulates how to provide activities for the students to speak English in the classroom, how
to improve the students’ speaking ability by using more than one activities which are integrated in
order to make the students more actively in speaking while they are in learning and teaching process.

Learning language through speaking is obviously more difficult, so the teacher needs skill of methods
to organize the activities in order to make the students more active in learning, surely it is not only
listen to the speech. The teachers will need to give the students activities to practice their speaking
like children speaking in their native language. This means that the students need much practice to
improve their speaking ability.

The main problem is faced by the students especially in South Sulawesi. They are reluctant to speak
English both in the classroom and out of the classroom. Relating to the case above, the writer is
inspired to conduct a learning strategy in the form “Communication Continuum”. This strategy is
expected to be a meaningful effort in improving the students’ speaking ability. The communication
continuum is designed to enable students to express their ideas both in oral and written forms by
using development language skill integrated pattern based on the available curriculum. As the
objectives of the curriculum 1994 in teaching program are as follows:

(1) To enable the students to ask and answer simple questions, (2) to enable the student to speak
in short conversation, (3) to enable the student to explain something, person or place, and
sequences of result in simple ways, (4) to enable the students to express idea, feeling, and
attitude in simple ways.

Communication continuum preserved more than one activities. These activities are integrated in order
to make the students understand the subject that they study. This approach can help the students to
improve their speaking ability because it focuses on the students’ concrete experience and their
environment. This strategy preserved experiental learning (learning by doing), the students learn based
on their experience in the real situation. It means that this strategy make sense of facts and feelings are
integrated with previously acquired of knowledge. “surface learning”, communication continuum has
four stages namely: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization and active
experimentation. The four stages make possible to improve the students’ speaking ability.