Forums

I use Empower coursebook for my adult students that is based on speaking activities.I like this book very much.
Generally the adults have already known the basic grammar and have enough vocabulary that should lead them to speak. But the fears and embarrassment have the negative effect on their oral skills. I'm trying not to interrupt or correct the mistakes while the students are speaking or discussing some topic. It's better to correct after discussion and don't tell whose mistakes are considered.
In this coursebook there are a lot of activities for developting speaking and listening skills. Moreover, it consists the pre-unit section that is organized by the sharing pesonal opinion or guessing what the topic is about. Post-task is basically made of speaking activities and discuss in pairs. In some cases, there are communication cards as a role play where the students participate in a live listening. The coursebook allows me to plan the logical structure of the lesson where all post-tasks consist the speaking activities.

We use Succeed in English at our school and I like it very much. There are a lot of activities in the syllabus, we can choose according to the level of the student and there are plenty of communicative activities as well. I had a look at the content page and the speaking activities are varied and offer a lot of possibilities to practice free speaking once the activity the book suggests has finished. It is important they do those first. Some of the topics are - Describe first impressions, talk about the weekend, express opinions and preferences, speculate about the future, express regret, describe and discuss photos and talk about memories. I guess that there are not many suggestions for free speaking activities but teaching methods don’t often do that, right? I mean, they give cues and ideas on how to organize the activities and they tend to be well guided. But then the free activity can be generated by both the teacher and the students…. the students prepare new speaking activities using expressions and useful language the section has offered. Most of the activities are based on pair work but we have to keep in mind that we are dealing with 30 students in the class…bigger groups would make the activity difficult to follow. It is difficult when doing pair work already! I sometimes allow students with a good level to pair together, sometimes I have to pair kids with different levels so that one helps the other.