Teaching English Toolbox
Speaking
Accuracy, fluency, range, sounds - so many things to teach when we teach learners to speak!! Luckily they often have an idea about English when they come to school!!
Look at the words in the image - they all deal with teaching speaking. Talk them out - what do they mean in the context of teaching speaking?
Basic Introductions
You need: a copy of the CEFR (or on the EAQUALS site) descriptors for speaking.
In the example below, you will hear third graders after their second week of English. Their homework was to memorize these sentence starters:
- My name is...
- I live in....
- This is my family....
- ...and whatever else they wanted to say...
They were recorded in class and not allowed to use their notes. As you listen, try to answer the following questions:
- Which CEFR descriptors are addressed here?
- How would you describe their fluency?
- How would you describe their range?
- How accurate were they?
- Should you focus on pronunciation? Why or why not? If so, of what?
- If you were the teacher, after listening to the learners' performances, what language features would you work on with the whole class?
Teaching "Go Fish"!
One part of "task based learning" could be that learners observe native speakers performing a task. In this example, discuss how you could use this to create a basic "task" using the Willis framework. This example was used for a fourth grade class in Switzerland!
This was a fairly decent TBL lesson, but not a CLIL one in the least! As a pre-task, we watched this video without the transcripts and the kids had to write down as much as they could. Then we watched it WITH the transcripts and they added and compared what they had written. Then, in the task, groups of 3 played the game the best they could each time with one child NOT playing but "teaching" and correcting. When they felt ready, we mixed the groups up and they played in different combinations. As a language focus, we looked at the use of "a" and "an" (Do you have "an eight"?).
Criticism: This was meaningful communication because everyone wanted to play and they did pick up on "you're cheating"! However, they didn't really "learn" anything from one another, though they all hopefully really got the "do you have" structure. There was no real "planning" or "report" in the Willis sense, though they did play the game a few weeks later as a "test" (teacher observed and took notes and this counted towards their speaking grades).
Speaking about famous people
This example belongs to a 9-lesson unit on BLM in 2020. In this particular example, learners had to first research a famous person of color, then they had to perform a role play. Here is the frame with which they were provided:
Discuss or think about the following:
- How can you differentiate your instruction in such an activity?
- What is the role of the microphone in teaching speaking skills?
- How do you think the kids got this good in English?
- What other interviews could you imagine doing in an English class?
- See the Text to Speech pages for info and ideas on computer-assisted speaking practice.
- Teaching Speaking from the British Council
- There are not too many role plays in dialogues in the current textbooks - here is a good resource for you: Dialogs for Everyday Use (the pictures are a bit dated, but the language is authentic).
- Describe how speaking should develop according to the CEFR aims for the levels you will be teaching.
- Why should you set your aims at a higher level than what the learners are actually at?
- What are meaningful speaking strategies? How do you teach these?
- What is different about learning to speak in English than in your mother tongue or the local language?
- What is the role of pronunciation? How do you teach it? What do English as a Lingua Franca or the Lingua Franca Core have to do with teaching speaking?
- What is the role of reading out loud?
- How can you test speaking skills? What constructs can you test when you test speaking? What is behind each of these constructs?
- What speaking activities and contexts make sense in the first year of English language teaching? In the upper grades?
- Sketch out a speaking rubric for a presentation or a story retelling. What different rubric types might you use? What criteria might be on them?
- How can you use tools such as Chatbots for teaching speaking?