Advice for Speaking Lessons

With younger students, speaking activities should be:

  • simplified
  • more controlled/teacher-centered than free/student-centered
  • getting students to listen and practice repeating isolated vocabulary words to repeating sentences and phrases, placing emphasis on word stress and sentence rhythm

With all speaking activities, it is important for teachers to:

  • select material that is appropriate to their level of English
  • create a familiar environment
  • be sensitive toward mistakes
  • provide effective feedback

With guided discussion activities, teachers should remember to:

  • ‘Choose unintimidating topics’ – personal discussions are less intimidating than having to express opinions
  • ‘Model it first’ – sharing a personal experience with students before asking them to share their own personal experiences in front of everyone sets the stage of trust. Showing the class that talking about something personal in public can be fun and that they don’t need to be fearful of it
  • ‘Let them think about it’ – after you told your personal story, tell them to go home and think about a memory or story they have from growing up
  • ‘Share in groups’ – Gradually start to make group sizes a big larger, and have the students all share their memory or story with their group.
  • ‘Share it with the class’ - One person from each group should be in charge of sharing the best story from the group with the rest of the class

When students display more confidence in discussing personal stories, teachers start to implement opinionated topics to discuss, where students can start to express their personal perspectives/viewpoints, but are sure to avoid too much controversy.

For example:

  • “Vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream”
  • “Baseball is more fun than football”
  • “Superman would beat Spiderman in a fight”

These types of discussions can be conducted in numerous styles:

  1. ‘Split the class in half’ – have one side discuss the pros and have the other side discuss the cons
  2. ‘Regroup’ – Keep the same size groups, but change the groups so there are two students from the pros with two students from the cons and have them discuss their opinions
  3. ‘Share with the class’ – assign two students from each group (1 pro, 1 con) to share their arguments with the rest of the class