Reflection on current practice 

What percentage of time do your students spend speaking in class?

What do you think are the main problems that your students have with speaking? 

How do you try to help your students overcome these problems? 

General Approach from TWB side and its impact on teaching the skill 

Most speaking skills lessons follow the present-practise-produce model (Link to introduction), and this would then give you the teacher to an opportunity to listen to all your students speaking in the final production stage and then provide feedback on their use of the target language. It can be impossible for you to monitor all you students, if it is a large class, and very often, students can be reluctant to use the new target language. Small groups and pair work are one such way around this problem, as is asking your your students to do the speaking task twice.

It is also useful to give your students a few minutes to think through the activity before starting. This gives them time to think about the new T.L. At the end of the activity students can then do a self-review of their own performance prior to you giving feedback. This in turn fits in with TWB's idea of learner diaries and the iterative loop process of language learning.  

Example lesson: telling anecdotes 

Aims To increase awareness and usage of narrative tenses 

Warmer- ask students about what an anecdote is, any stories that they are familiar with 

Lead-in/ Pre-teach. Tell the students an anecdote about yourself or a well-known short story. Explain that there are going to be five factual errors in the story, and that the students must try to guess what they are. Students in pairs try to guess what the mistakes are. After this feedback session you can then ask the students to remember what language you used and build up the dialogue on the board  focussing on the T.L. At this stage as well you could highlight the structure of your anecdote. Encourage the students to ask you comprehension questions about your story. 

Main Activity 

Ask the students to do a similar task with the title for example- first day at school, my favourite day. Allow students a short time to think about what they're going to say. Students can make some short notes if they want to, but you should ask them to avoid using full sentences, as this is a speaking activity not a writing activity. 

You can help students by highlighting the work on the blackboard. Let the students share their anecdotes and encourage students to guess what the non-factual information is if any, by asking similar comprehension questions. Get feedback on this activity but do not over-correct at this stage. Highlight some of the successful uses of the T.L. or interesting stories that you heard.  

When the students have completed the activity, write the following on the board: 

Target Language- How well did I use it? 

Organisation- Did I make mistakes in the structure? Did I include enough/too much/ not enough  information?

Other language Did I make any mistakes in my grammar/ Did I use a correct vocabulary? 

Pronunciation- Was my pronunciation clear? 

Explain that the students are going to repeat the activity with a new partner, but before this, they have the opportunity to discuss their original performance of the task with their current partner, using the self-assessment criteria above. They should then chose one of the areas to focus on to improve for the second time of speaking. Give them a few minutes to think about how they can improve their performance in that aspect. 

Set the task up again, this time with new pairings, and monitor once more. You can repeat this task once more, with a new pairing,  if you feel this would be beneficial to your students.

Briefly obtain some feedback on how well the students did compared to the first and second times. 

Finish with a feedback session of the lesson- making a note of things on the board that were correct/incorrect and ask students to comment on them. It is nice to end this session with a brief bit of praise, especially on correct usage of the T.L. 

Follow up work 

a lot of these activities can be done in the lead in stage of your other lessons and provide an extra opportunity of practice!

- ask students to guess meanings before telling them

- ask them to describe pictures

- ask them to talk together to solve a problem - in English of course!

- do some brainstorming - find out what vocabulary or grammar students already know before reading a text or studying some grammar

- ask them to roleplay practical situations together

- ask them to give a presentaiton to the class on a topic they like

- if 1 makes a mistake, ask another student to correct it and to explain the correction. Follow up work can be done on any aspect of the class that caused your         students problems. Grammar auction

- give the quieter students things to do which will encourage them to say something

- ask students to check each other's answers to an exercise and to work out why they might be different if they don't agree with each other

- play games which involve speaking, eg. 20 Questions, Categories, or Spot the Difference 

Alternatives 

Feedback. Start by saying  that was good but.... before you give the correct version.Confidence is key to speaking, and this type of correction will motivate your learners. When you are correcting errors be selective- tell them what you are going to be looking for before you start the activity. E.g. For the next five minutes I will only correct your past tenses. Vary the focus of the speaking activity between accuracy and fluency.