Laura's Brainstorm: Speaking in the classroom (16/11)

Speaking in the classroom

a) Activities based on repetition and imitation:

Littlewood introduced these types of activities and considered them as preparatory to introductory activities, intended to prepare learners for communicative activities.
Drills are an example of this type of structure-orientated exercises. They help to assimilate facts about new language and enable pupils to produce the new language for the first time by helping them master the basic structural patterns of the language.
They are usually very controlled and have a fairly limited potential. They should not be used either too frequently or for too long.
In this section we can also include introductory activities as the ones called “ice-breakers” or “warming-ups” which do not normally have a definite objective but are used to tell the students, in an indirect way, it is English class time.

b) Controlled activities:

Controlled activities let students develop confidence and the ability to participate in simple conversations.
The advantage of these types of activities over drills lies on the fact that they offer a well-defined context for practice.

Let us consider some traditional examples:

Question and answer practice is one of the commonest ways of giving language practice in the classroom.
Other techniques are right/wrong statements and corrections. Students are asked to say whether a statement is right or wrong within the context of the text and, if it is wrong, they must give the correct version; or they are asked to correct statements.

Question and answer practice

c) Pair works activities

Pair work activities provide students with a greater amount of meaningful practice. There are various types of pair work activities:

They help to improve speaking skills. For example: “hide and seek”, where students “hide” and object somewhere in a picture. They then take turns to find out where the object has been hidden by asking questions like “Is it on the bookcase?” “Is it under the TV?”

d) Decision-making activities:

They require students to make certain decisions.
They employ the information gap principle, that is, students have to find out what each pair or group has decided.
For instance, they are given a set of numbered places and they write the numbers on a street plan to indicate their positions, which their partners have to guess.

e) Realia:

Maps, menus, radio and TV programmes are another way of getting students to interact using fairly controlled language.
For example, with maps students can practice giving directions.
With menus they can decide what they are going to eat and drink.
With TV programmes they can discuss what they are going to watch.

f) Questionnaires:

With mixed structures, they are effective ways of getting students to draw on all their linguistic resources.
They involve identifying somebody who corresponds to a requirement for the questionnaire. For example, the questionnaire may read: Find someone who…

g) Interactive activities:

Discovering identical pairs: one student has to find which picture, for example, is identical within a group of four.
Discovering missing information: two students have an incomplete table and they have to get missing information from other.

Discovering identical pairs

h) Discovering secrets (guessing games):

These games are accuracy-focussed games whose purpose is to reinforce that has already been taught.
For example “X number of questions” (one player thinks of a famous person or place and the others try to find it out by asking no more than X questions).

i) Social interaction:

Social interaction.
Simulations: children act as themselves.
Role-play: they act as someone else.
For role-play the class is usually divided into small groups who are given situations and roles to act out.

j) Teaching oral English through songs:

Songs are a pleasurable, enjoyable experience which aids relaxation and group dynamics and increases attentiveness and receptiveness in the language classroom
They bring variety to the lesson.
They are highly memorable and help internalise quite long chunks of language.
They are part of everyday life and constitute a natural opportunity for meaningful repetition.
They are personal and thus allow identification with the lyrics.
They provide authentic examples of everyday language.
They allow the target vocabulary, grammar, and patterns to be modelled in context.
They foster the development of grammatical, lexical, and sociocultural competence, as well as of the linguistic skills of speaking and listening.
They contribute to the improvement of pronunciation, of speed, and of fluency.

k) Teaching oral English through songs (Part 2) (22/11)

Exploitation

The learners answer questions (be they multiple choice or comprehension ones) about the text of the song or create their own for other classmates to answer.
Other comprehension-checking activities involve the creation or completion of charts and diagrams about the text, or the invention of titles for each verse and for overall song.
The students are asked to identify deliberately introduced (and plausible) mistakes in terms of vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation.
The children can also be encouraged to manipulate the text of a song, modifying grammatical elements with it (e.g. tenses or parts of speech), changing the final words of some lines with others that rhyme, or partially inventing the song and subsequently comparing it to the original version.
At slightly higher levels, the stylistic features and sociocultural aspects reflected by the song’s background can also be made explicit in order to foster further appreciation of the song and of the country’s history and culture.
A lip syncing talent show can be held, either individually or in teams, with several students being appointed as judges.
And, of course, the students should be urged to sing the song. Recording It and playing it to improve pronunciation can also be a good idea.

Laura's Brainstorm