UNIT 6. Speaking activities

[MNEBOT]

• Look again at the speaking activities mentioned in exercise 1: Role play, show and tell, debate, conversation and chat. Do you use all of these different types of speaking activities? Why / why not?
I try to use as many different activities as possible, specially speaking activities, although it is not always easy. The main problem I always find is that the students give up very easily and turn into their mother tongue as soon as they don’t know a word or can’t find a way to say something. I always tell them they should avoid thinking in their mother tongue, as they will think of very complicated sentences, but that they should try to simplify the idea to a level they can manage. The Role play activity is excellent because they can prepare it beforehand, and since it is not “real”, they can really “adapt” their language to the role they are acting out. Show and tell is also an easy to manage activity, as the students prepare beforehand what they want to say and there is no room for improvisation, not at least during the oral presentation. As for the debate or conversation, even if the students have time to prepare the, it is difficult to make them speak in front of everybody (or even half the class) and also it is difficult to make them listen to each other (and then understand, of course). Therefore, the problems I usually have in this kind of activities are: they avoid speaking and I tend to speak to much trying to help them (and so making just the opposite!).
• Here are some of the potential problems with discussion activities, which we looked at in exercise 2:


What do you do to solve these problems?
For the mistakes, I would only concentrate in the mistakes that are really hindering the communication or in very repetitive mistakes. To help the students to introduce their ideas, I would introduce some key phrases like: From my point of view, I think…; My opinion is…, to help them build correct and simple sentences.
Not all the students are very keen on participating, and I think we should respect that somehow. Anyway, to make them participate I ask them to speak in two occasions at least, so they just need to concentrate on speaking in those two moments. Also, the idea of working in small groups is a good one, as they will feel more confident.
When the students are not interested in the topic I don’t blame them, as the same happened to me when I was a student (and still today as a teacher, with the topics we fins in books). The fact is not that they don’t have things to say, but that when they have to say them in English, then they are not as interested as they are in their mother tongue. I have sometimes tried to agree on a topic with them, but I have not really seen a big difference: some students will always have something to say on anything, and other students will never have anything to say about any topic.

[Admin]

Hi Marta, thanks for writing in. Yes, practising speaking is one of the hardest things to do, as you point out. One problem is often the task. You said that there are always some students who have little to say, even if they chose the topic themselves.
A task like "What is your opinion of the political situation in Syria?" is not going to work, it's too hard, requires too much special knowledge and vocabulary.
On the other hand "Talk to your neighbour about the weekend. Find three things that you both did." You can get a lot of mileage out of talking about every-day things, especially if you give them a reason to talk by asking them to achieve a specific goal (in this case discovering similarities).
Another helpful thing is to repeat tasks. Once they have done the task once, get them to swap partners and repeat the same task. This way they practise the same thing a number of times and will gain confidence. Once they have repeated the task two or three times you can ask them to report in the open class what they discovered. In general students will be happier risking speaking in front of the class if they've had a chance to practise beforehand. Bye! Pieter