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【Abstract】One of the difficulties faced by many English learners is taking the knowledge learnt in the classroom and applying it to real world situations.Simply participating in class does not guarantee that a student will be able to cope in real world interactions， especially in casual or informal settings.Many structured teaching materials in classroom have missed out significant elements which reflect the nature of informal communication.Several factors will be discussed here that could affect the quality of spoken language teaching materials in the classroom.These include the structure and content of teaching materials and classroom activities， the types of external resources used in class or recommended as a complementary learning tools， and the way that specific skills are taught.Identifying these areas of weaknessallows students to develop the practical skills to independently bridge the gap between classroom activities and real life interactions.
Structure and Content of Classroom Activities
From the outset， the key structural features of many classroom conversation activities do not accurately imitate the pattern of real life conversation.In terms of the common formulation of Question-Answer sequence teaching materials， Sinclair and Coulthard （1975）talk about “adjacency pairs” that have the tendency to determine or restrict the range of the “second pair part”（p.37）.This means that students are taught a list of set answers， rather than the skills to create new， appropriate answers to each question.Similarly， Richards and Schmidt（1983）claim that the material structure of the questions are treated as “information questions” with short replies such as ‘Yes， I can’ or ‘No， I can’t’（p.113）.This leads to the English leaners finding it difficult to give appropriate or alternative replies in informal interactions.The interactions occurring in the daily life are unexpected， random and spontaneous which create the difficulties for students to simply apply the knowledge from text books or classroom.It must be acknowledged that no set materials can reflect the variety and complexity of real communication， which is by nature spontaneous， interactive and dynamic.
Kraut，Fish， Root
Structure and Content of Classroom Activities
From the outset， the key structural features of many classroom conversation activities do not accurately imitate the pattern of real life conversation.In terms of the common formulation of Question-Answer sequence teaching materials， Sinclair and Coulthard （1975）talk about “adjacency pairs” that have the tendency to determine or restrict the range of the “second pair part”（p.37）.This means that students are taught a list of set answers， rather than the skills to create new， appropriate answers to each question.Similarly， Richards and Schmidt（1983）claim that the material structure of the questions are treated as “information questions” with short replies such as ‘Yes， I can’ or ‘No， I can’t’（p.113）.This leads to the English leaners finding it difficult to give appropriate or alternative replies in informal interactions.The interactions occurring in the daily life are unexpected， random and spontaneous which create the difficulties for students to simply apply the knowledge from text books or classroom.It must be acknowledged that no set materials can reflect the variety and complexity of real communication， which is by nature spontaneous， interactive and dynamic.
Kraut，Fish， Root