Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies by Michelle Maxom

Author:Michelle Maxom [Maxom, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Foreign Language Study, English as a Second Language, Language Arts & Disciplines, General
ISBN: 9781119992288
Google: DoODJ2X90CwC
Amazon: 0470745762
Publisher: For Dummies
Published: 2010-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Setting Their Tongues Wagging:

Speaking and Discussion

In This Chapter

▶ Starting the ball rolling

▶ Making the conversation last

▶ Sparking civil discussions

▶ Creating a discussion lesson

Speaking is the most important skill in English language teaching. It’s almost impossible to have true mastery of a language without actually speaking it. So in this chapter, I show you how to get your students chatting, arguing and generally wagging those tongues in English.

Getting Students Talking

In general, to encourage speaking in the early stages of a course and with students who are a little timid, give plenty of guidance on what the conversations should be about. You can give students a list of questions to ask each other or specific topics and lots of language input first. So before the activity gets under way make sure that the class knows the necessary grammar and vocabulary with appropriate examples. In this way students don’t have to think about what to say, only how to say things. Set speaking tasks for pair group work as often as possible. The tasks should have clear aims and involve taking turns, so say ‘Find out what your partner thinks about X and make some notes’, rather than just telling them to discuss X. The advantage is that the students are more aware of the need to get the other person’s view instead of talking about themselves the whole time.

184 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

Warming up

Anyone who speaks a foreign language knows that if you don’t use it, you lose it. It’s easy to get rusty. And if your mind is full of other matters such as your job, the bills or your love life, it’s even harder to get your brain in gear.

This is no less true of your students. In between lessons they may forget what they’ve learnt or they may just be distracted by life. This is where the warmer comes in. The warmer is a very short activity that gets the students acclimatised after the previous lesson. Most warmers are for speaking.

Some of my favourite warm-up activities are:

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Last letter, first letter: This simple game also tests spelling. It works best if the students are in a circle. Basically, one person starts the game by saying a word and the next person has to come up with another word beginning with the last letter of the previous one.

A chain of words my students recently came up with is: apple, elephant, taxi, interesting, girl, little, eggs, sugar, robot, train.

As the students get better at the game and improve in their vocabulary, they develop strategies for catching their classmates out by including lots of words that end with the same letter or with a difficult letter like ‘x’.

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The supermarket game: This very well-known game involves building up a list of items bought at the supermarket. When it’s your turn you have to remember all the items on the list in the right order and then add one more.

To make it more challenging, you can ask students to attach an adjective to their item, usually starting with the same letter.

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