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Hello Iol, thanks for your message. It sounds like you do lots of different speaking activities in your lessons, which is great! I think that teacher-led conversations with the whole class can be very valuable, and the teacher has more control of the group. The problem is that if you have a big group, the students don't get a lot of speaking time. So alternating open-class conversations with short speaking tasks in pairs will allow everybody to get more speaking practice. There are of course many reasons why students don't participate in pairwork, but one thing you can do to make it work is to have a very simple and clear task. Write the task on the board and do an example in the open class. Then ask the students to do the same in pairs. One thing I used to do a lot was simply to write three questions on the board and get students to ask them in their pairs. For example: How do you go to school? How long does it take? Do you go alone? Or: What did you have for breakfast/lunch/dinner yesterday? etc. I usually gave the class no more than 2 or 3 minutes and then opened up the group for feedback. Another thing one can do to make speaking practice more motivating is by designing a task so it includes a reason for speaking. So for example ask about breakfast lunch and dinner yesterday and find out who ate more fruit and vegetables, or sweets or whatever. Or turn the trip to school questions into a survey to find out who has the longest trip to school or how many students go to school alone etc. With careful task design and classroom management you can get most students to at least say something - I think! :)
See you again soon,
Pieter

I've used all of them in some occasions. Normally I use conversation with lower levels, and depending on the level, It is guided (like giving them some samples and asking them to first, read it aloud and then, suggesting another conversation by their own by changing the subject, for example), or I just give them a topic and we start speaking about it. Normally, I cannot let my students to do it by themselves, it often happens only two or three are speaking all the time where as, the rest just keeps on listening and agreeing or disagreeing. So, I normally participate in conversations with my students in order to force them to make contributions.
On the other hand, I also like a lot role plays, but I prefer to do it with upper levels, they've got enough background to role play it properly and they aren't so shy as young students. My experience tells me, if the role play is interesting enough, close situations for them, etc... it is very successful and students enjoy. If we have the opportunity, we also record them with a camera and it's very funny to watch it afterwards, they love it!