Look again at the speaking activities mentioned in exercise 1.
Role play
Show and tell
Debate
Conversation
Chat
Do you use all of these different types of speaking activities? Why / why not? Yes, I do, but i choose the activities trying to integrate all students, the role play is a good activity, students enjoy thinking and writing their dialogues and the most avanced students can feel better with a long speech and the all enjoy acting out in from the class.
What advice would you give to a teacher who was going to use one of these types of activities for the first time?
Here are some of the potential problems with discussion activities, which we looked at in exercise 2:
Students make lots of mistakes
Not all the students participate
Sometimes students aren't interested in the topic
The students spend a lot of time speaking in their mother tongue
What do you do to solve these problems?
if the students make lot of mistakes, i prefer to not interrumpt then, just in case no body can understand the massage i make the corretions.
if not all the students participate, i ask simple questions about the topic trying to obtain an easy answer.
when the topic isn´t interested for my students, I always try to adadt it to their real life, always the studests feel motivated to participated when you pay your attention individually.
when the students spends a lot of time speaking in spanish, i started to question them in english, if they contnue doing, i give them more vocabulary and an extra help.