The underlying problem is that students have no reason to say anything more. We have to recognize that we cannot expect students to produce long turns of speech by simply giving them topics and requiring them to get on with the discussion. We must arouse in the learners a willingness and need to talk by providing them with something they feel they have a need or reason to talk about. Telling students to talk about popularly offered topics like pollution or abortion is not very helpful. This seems to require the students to create talk simply for the sake of talking for a required amount of time.
Students recognize the artificiality of the activity.
The resultant lack of interest and motivation can be attributed to the purposelessness of the language they are being asked to produce. Brown et al. They see one aspect of the problem in the difficulty speakers have in assessing the background knowledge of their listeners. When speakers are required to talk about something they know about and their listeners do not, they make judgments about the uneven distribution of background knowledge their listeners have and tailor the talk so that it presents an appropriate amount of new information. Brown et al.