Classroom Speaking Activities and Teacher’s Role
Teaching Speaking
Reasons for Teaching Speaking
There are many reasons for getting students to speak in the classroom:
- Speaking activities provide rehearsal opportunities.
- Speaking tasks provide feedback for both teacher and students in different situations.
- The more students activate, the more they automate, the more autonomous they become.
- Speaking activities are designed to provoke “speaking-as-a-skill“, where there is a purpose for talking which is not just linguistic.
Speaking Sequences
There are many activities to practice this skill:
- Discussion: When students suddenly want to talk about something in a lesson and discussion occurs spontaneously, the results are often highly gratifying. However, whether spontaneous or planned, it has the great advantage of provoking fluent language use.
- The Portrait Interview: This speaking sequence consists of using portraits to ask and answer questions, which can develop into very involved conversations and interaction. The conversation will depend on the level of the students.
- Role-Play or Simulation: Where students have particular roles and they act as if they were in a real-life situation. They have to speak and act from their new character’s point of view.
- Information-Gap Activities: Where two speakers have different bits of information, and they can only complete the whole picture by sharing that information (example: describe and draw).
- Telling Stories: In this speaking sequence, students tell stories in English.
- Favorite Objects: In this activity, students have to speak about their favorite objects.
- Meeting and Greeting: Students role-play a formal/business social occasion where they meet a number of people and introduce themselves.
- Famous People: Students think of five famous people and then, each one has to imitate them.
- Surveys: Surveys can be used to get students interviewing each other.
- Student Presentations: Individually or in groups, students have to talk about a topic or person.
- Moral Dilemmas: Students are presented with a moral dilemma and asked to come to a decision about how to resolve it.
- Balloon Debate: Students have to imagine that they are in the basket of a balloon which is losing air. Only one person can stay in the balloon and survive. Each one has to argue why he/she should survive, representing famous characters or professions.
Correcting Speaking
There are no hard and fast rules about correcting, but there are some things that teachers should take into account. For example, the teacher shouldn’t interrupt while his/her students are speaking, but he/she can give feedback later. The teacher may note mistakes down and comment on them to the pupil/group. Besides this, reformulation (gentle correction) is a good idea.
The best way of correcting speaking activities is to talk to students about it. Teachers can ask them how and when they would prefer to be corrected.
What Teachers Do During a Speaking Activity
There is nothing wrong with teachers getting involved in the activity and participating, but they shouldn’t dominate. Sometimes, however, teachers will have to intervene in some way if the activity isn’t going smoothly. If a discussion begins to dry up, the teacher will have to decide if the activity should be finished.