This study was conducted to investigate whether implementing communicative activities, in particular information gap and language games, in Libyan secondary schools affect students' speaking performance. A quasi-experimental, nonequivalent, pre-test-post-test design was conducted on 42 first year Libyan secondary school students in a private Libyan international school in Malaysia. Eight different information gap and language game activities based on communicative language teaching (CLT) principles were implemented for 15-20 minutes during eight sessions. The results from the paired sample t-test indicated that there was a significant difference between the pre-test compared to the posttest. Students' speaking performance improved after implementing the communicative activities in the classroom. However, the results from the independent sample-test illustrate differences in mean scores between male and female students, which are in favour or female students. Nevertheless, the differences between genders were not statistically different.

The importance of English as a foreign language EFL in Libya has increased significantly throughout the years and the language has become essential in all disciplines. However, one of the essential challenges that needs to be explored is the lack of speaking competence of the Libyan students. There has been little research, which adopts an experimental design to determine the causal effects of certain teaching methods, particularly the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach on Libyan students’ English speaking performance. Against this backdrop, this research sets out to assess the effects of selected Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) activities (i.e., Information gap and Language games) on Libyan first-year secondary school students’ English speaking performance. Using a sample of 124 students from a public secondary school in Sabratha, Libya, and adopting the quasi-experimental pre-test, post-test non-equivalent groups design (NEGD), first year classes were randomly assigned as three experimental groups (i.e., Experimental Language Game group (G1), Experimental Language Game and Information Gap group (G2), and Experimental Information Gap group (G3)) and one Control group (G4). Treatments were given to the experimental groups and paired sample t-test results reveal significant differences between the groups’ in the post-test English language speaking scores. While an ANOVA test, comparing the scores between the four groups reveals a substantial difference between Information Gap group and the control group through a post-hoc test. It is therefore concluded that implementing communicative activities based on the principles of CLT in the Libyan English language classroom helps to enhance students’ English speaking performance. Keywords: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), English as a foreign language (EFL); information gap and language games activities; quasi-experiment speaking performance.

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