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How to teach Speaking

The document outlines various activities to promote speaking skills in the classroom, including discussions, role plays, information gaps, brainstorming, storytelling, interviews, story completion, reporting, picture narrating, picture describing, and finding differences. Each activity is designed to engage students in speaking practice while fostering creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. These activities can be tailored to different levels and contexts to enhance students' speaking abilities effectively.

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María Prados
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3 views

How to teach Speaking

The document outlines various activities to promote speaking skills in the classroom, including discussions, role plays, information gaps, brainstorming, storytelling, interviews, story completion, reporting, picture narrating, picture describing, and finding differences. Each activity is designed to engage students in speaking practice while fostering creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. These activities can be tailored to different levels and contexts to enhance students' speaking abilities effectively.

Uploaded by

María Prados
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4.

Speaking
Here you have di erent activities to promote speaking in class:

- Discussion: After a content-based lesson, a discussion can be held for various


reasons. The students may aim to arrive at a conclusion, share ideas about an event, or
nd solutions in their discussion groups. Example: students can become involved in
agree/disagree discussions. In this type of discussions, the teacher can form groups of
students, preferably 4 or 5 in each group, and provide controversial sentences like
“people learn best when they read vs. people learn best when they travel”. Then each
group works on their topic for a given time period, and presents their opinions to the
class. This activity is preferably aimed at high level students.

- Role play: One other way of getting students to speak is role-playing. Students
pretend they are in various social contexts and have a variety of social roles. In role-
play activities, the teacher gives information to the learners such as who they are and
what they think or feel. Thus, the teacher can tell the student that "You are David, you
go to the doctor and tell him what happened last night, and…” Activity: kitchen role
play.

- Information gap: In this activity, students are supposed to be working in pairs. One
student will have the information that other partner does not have and the partners will
share their information. Information gap activities serve many purposes such as solving
a problem or collecting information. Also, each partner plays an important role
because the task cannot be completed if the partners do not provide the information
the others need. These activities are e ective because everybody has the opportunity
to talk extensively in the target language. Activity: Who’s who.

- Brainstorming: On a given topic, students can produce ideas in a limited time.


Depending on the context, either individual or group brainstorming is e ective and
learners generate ideas quickly and freely. The good characteristics of brainstorming is
that the students are not criticised for their ideas so students will be open to sharing
new ideas.

- Storytelling: Students can brie y summarise a tale or story they heard from somebody
beforehand, or they may create their own stories to tell their classmates. Story telling
fosters creative thinking. It also helps students express ideas in the format of
beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and setting a story has
to have. Students also can tell riddles or jokes. For instance, at the very beginning of
each class session, the teacher may call a few students to tell short riddles or jokes as
an opening. In this way, not only will the teacher address students’ speaking ability, but
also get the attention of the class. Activity: create a comic (writing) and present it orally
(speaking)

- Interviews: Students can conduct interviews on selected topics with various people. It
is a good idea that the teacher provides a rubric to students so that they know what
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type of questions they can ask or what path to follow, but students should prepare their
own interview questions. Conducting interviews with people gives students a chance to
practice the speaking ability not only in class but also outside and helps them
becoming socialised. After interviews, each student can present his or her study to the
class. Moreover, students can interview each other and "introduce" his or her partner to
the class.

- Story completion: This is a very enjoyable, whole-class, free-speaking activity for


which students sit in a circle. For this activity, a teacher starts to tell a story, but after a
few sentences he or she stops narrating. Then, each student starts to narrate from the
point where the previous one stopped. Each student is supposed to add from four to
ten sentences. Students can add new characters, events, descriptions and so on.

- Reporting: Before coming to class, students are asked to read a newspaper or


magazine and, in class, they report to their friends what they nd as the most
interesting news. Students can also talk about whether they have experienced anything
worth telling their friends in their daily lives before class.

- Picture narrating: This activity is based on several sequential pictures. Students are
asked to tell the story taking place in the sequential pictures by paying attention to the
criteria provided by the teacher as a rubric. Rubrics can include the vocabulary or
structures they need to use while narrating.

- Picture describing: Another way to make use of pictures in a speaking activity is to


give students just one picture and having them describe what it is in the picture. For
this activity students can form groups and each group is given a di erent picture.
Students discuss the picture with their groups, then a spokesperson for each group
describes the picture to the whole class. This activity fosters the creativity and
imagination of the learners as well as their public speaking skills.

- Find the di erence: For this activity students can work in pairs and each couple is
given two di erent pictures, for example, picture of boys playing football and another
picture of girls playing tennis. Students in pairs discuss the similarities and/or
di erences in the pictures.
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