The two productive skills are speaking and writing because they require students to produce language.
They are sometimes also known as active skills as opposed to the passive, or receptive skills of listening and reading.
Normally these skills develop after the receptive skills because students need to receive language before they can produce it, but ideally they should be developed simultaneously as they complement each other.
In this unit we’ll look in more detail at speaking skills and what is required to develop them. Please also refer back to the 'Functions' video (module 6) which provides you with a good example of a speaking lesson.
As with reading, when we speak there’s a lot more going on than you might realise.
It’s not just about using grammar and vocabulary accurately; we also use an appropriate register (level of formality), self-correct, hesitate, use stress and intonation and use different interactive strategies to ensure that we’re communicating effectively.
This can be anything from asking opinions, clarifying our meaning, turn-taking and agreeing/disagreeing to keep up interaction.
Even native speakers aren’t actually 100% accurate when they speak because of the necessity to talk in real time.
Unlike when we write, we do not have time to properly organise our thoughts, therefore we often make mistakes, interrupt, flit between topics and correct ourselves or clarify meaning.
This lack of preparation time makes speaking in a foreign language especially difficult.
Already your students may not know the necessary vocabulary to speak about a certain topic and then on top of that they may not have the necessary skills to respond immediately to a task.
That’s why you need to develop these skills in your students to ensure they are able to communicate effectively.
Before you start any speaking skills lesson you need to decide if your main aim is fluency, accuracy or both. This will affect how you conduct the lesson, the kinds of activities you will do and how/whether to correct.
Controlled Practice
Examples of controlled speaking practice are scripted role-plays, repetition and drilling.
Whilst they don’t give practice of fluency or interaction, these exercises can be very useful for working on accuracy, pronunciation and word/sentence stress.
They help build learners’ confidence too and motivate them to produce grammatically correct language. They can also be less overwhelming for shyer students so are a great way to lead into freer practice.
Students often find it difficult to transfer the knowledge they have in their heads to what comes out of their mouths, so controlled practice can be a good mid-way point on the road to spontaneous communication.
Through controlled practice, learners can apply what they know passively to active production to ensure that all that passive knowledge isn’t going to waste.
It can sometimes be embarrassing for students when they don’t know what they’re supposed to say and fear making errors, so if they have the language in front of them, it’s more reassuring.
Controlled practice confines the conversation to the target language so it’s a great way to get students to practice a language point sufficiently so that it sticks in their heads.
All the instructions/prompts elicit a particular response and are fully predictable. If you are focusing on the functional language of polite requests for example, you may wish to have students act out a scripted dialogue on the topic so that they can memorise the useful fixed expressions.
Or for a numbers lesson you could put students in pairs and give them a card each with some questions on it e.g. ‘What’s the population of the UK?’ or ‘How high is Mount Snowdon?’
One of the students will have half the answers the other will have the other half and by asking and answering questions they can complete both sets of questions. In this instance, only the target language is being practised and the responses are 100% predictable.
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Out of the following speaking exercises, which are designed to improve accuracy? Choose all that apply:
A. Word and sentence stress
B. Language for asking for clarification politely
C. Informal language for greeting
D. Language for suggesting and recommending
E. Using conjunctions and past tenses in stories
F. Distinguishing minimal pairs of sounds
G. Using intonation to show doubt
H. Taking part in discussions
I. Getting your partner to agree with you
J. Telling stories
Q. Intonation in tag questions
M. Interrupting politely
Check answer
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Free Practice
Freer practice, on the other hand, is more challenging.
Whilst controlled practice encourages accuracy and builds confidence, free practice improves fluency (the ability to speak at a natural speed without too many hesitations).
The idea is that your students get better at speaking by speaking. In the past, learners often had a good grammatical and theoretical knowledge of the language but were unable to use it.
This is more or less useless in today’s society where people from all over the world must be able to communicate effectively in English.
A variety of communicative activities can be used to encourage fluency (look back at Module 5 for more details) but the important thing is to maximise the amount of time that the students themselves have to speak. It can often be difficult to take a step back from jumping into the conversation/discussion.
As we’ve already discussed, error correction needs to be used tentatively with fluency activities so that the flow is not interrupted too much. Give the students the freedom and more importantly the time they need to undertake the task at hand.
An appropriate lead-in can be key to getting any discussion-based task off to a good start. This can be as simple as focusing on an image or a statement just to get some ideas flowing and can be a good opportunity to pre-teach some essential vocabulary.
Don’t just start with, “Let’s talk about global warming. Ahmed what do you think?” This will catch your students completely off-guard and is not conducive to a lively debate. Although it’s supposed to be ‘free’ speaking, that doesn’t mean there shouldn't be any structure to the activity.
You could give the students role cards, i.e. ‘you’re a member of a green activist group’/‘you work for the logging industry’ etc. Or set a scenario and give the class some information/data to read through first. Simulating real-life activities e.g. ‘A wind-farm is planned to be built 3 miles from your house, you are going to a meeting for local residents to discuss your views…’ is also a great way of getting students to practice language in a natural setting which may actually serve them in the future.
The whole point is to provoke spontaneity and challenge learners to use language that they perhaps haven’t tried out before.
Начало формы
Out of the following speaking exercises, which are specifically designed to improve fluency? Choose all that apply:
A. Word and sentence stress
B. Language for asking for clarification politely
C. Informal language for greeting
D. Language for suggesting and recommending
E. Using conjunctions and past tenses in stories
F. Distinguishing minimal pairs of sounds
G. Using intonation to show doubt
H. Taking part in discussions
I. Getting your partner to agree with you
J. Telling stories
Q. Intonation in tag questions
M. Interrupting politely
Check answer
Конец формы
Your role in these activities is to introduce the task and then to monitor rather than being a full contributor. Whilst you should avoid taking part too much yourself, that’s not to say you can’t play devil’s advocate every so often to prompt the discussion if it starts to die off.
Another method is to split students into smaller groups which switch round to keep their interest if you feel conversation is dwindling. Hopefully, this won’t happen, but a common cause of students drying up can be if they haven’t had any preparation time.
As we mentioned earlier, speaking in a foreign language is a much slower process and we need more time to think.
If you just throw your class in at the deep end without any thinking time, they may become too flustered to think of the words they need and so not say anything at all.
Step back and give them time to process the task.
In the following stages of a speaking lesson aimed at improving fluency, decide whether the teacher should be taking the lead or monitoring:
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* adapted from Scrivener Learning Teaching p.161
Effective Strategies/Activities
Effective Strategies/Activities for Developing Students’ Speaking Skills
If your students are going to be able to operate effectively, they need to be exposed to a wide variety of different speaking strategies and activities. Your goal is to make these interesting, productive, enjoyable and fun (but not too much fun with young adults and adults).
Here are some of the most practical approaches:
1. Strategies
Help your students with speaking strategies, using strategies like minimal responses, recognising scripts, and clarification and comprehension responses, which they can use to help themselves expand their knowledge of the language and their confidence in using it.
You are helping your students to learn how to speak so that your students can use speaking to learn.
1. Using minimal responses
Language learners who lack confidence in their ability to participate successfully in oral interaction often listen in silence while others do the talking. One way you can encourage such learners to begin to participate is to help them build up a stock of minimal responses that they can use in different types of exchanges.
Such responses can be especially useful for beginners.
Minimal responses are predictable phrases that conversation participants use to indicate understanding, agreement, doubt, and other responses to what another speaker is saying; for example: Oh, I see. Is that so? That’s good. Oh, sorry. I didn’t catch that.
Having a stock of such responses enables a learner to focus on what the other participant is saying, without having to simultaneously plan a response.
2. Recognising scripts
Many communication situations are associated with a predictable set of spoken exchanges - a script. Greetings, apologies, compliments, invitations, and other functions that are influenced by social and cultural norms often follow patterns or scripts. For example:
Can I help you?
Yes, please.
So do the transactional exchanges involved in activities such as obtaining information and making a purchase. In these scripts, the relationship between a speaker's turn and the one that follows it can often be anticipated.
You can help your students develop speaking ability by making them aware of the scripts for different situations so that they can predict what they will hear and what they will need to say in response.
Through interactive activities, you can give your students practice in managing and varying the language that different scripts contain.
3. Using clarification and comprehension responses
Language learners are often too embarrassed or shy to say anything when they do not understand another speaker or when they realise that a conversation partner has not understood them.
You can help your students overcome this reticence by assuring them that misunderstanding and the need for clarification can occur in any type of interaction, whatever the participant’s language skill levels. You can also give students strategies and phrases to use for clarification and comprehension checks. For example:
For clarification check:
- Do you mean...?
- Could you clarify that, please?
- Can you elaborate on that, please?
- Could you be more explicit, please?
- Could you explain what you mean by...?
- Could you give me an example, please?
For comprehension check:
- Sorry, I don’t understand.
- Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.
- Sorry, I’m not sure I’m following you.
- Sorry, I’ve missed your point.
- Sorry, I don’t see what you’re getting at.
By encouraging students to use clarification and comprehension phrases in class and by responding positively when they do, you can create an authentic practice environment within the classroom itself.
As they develop control of various clarification and comprehension strategies, students will gain confidence in their ability to manage the various communication situations that they may encounter outside the classroom.
2. Some activities
Your aim is to get them to talk.
The classroom, of course, is an artificial environment in which to be practising a language. Some students find it a rather scary place because they are constantly being asked to say things in the target language.
They may have little confidence in being able to say it correctly and fear being laughed at.
It is your job to ensure that the students are happy and relaxed in the classroom, and are willing to practise speaking. A lot depends on the activities and tasks that you ask the students to do and the way you structure the practice. There are a number of points to remember:
- Don't make the tasks too complicated or difficult.
- Prepare the students properly so that they know what to do.
- Let them work in pairs or groups rather than having to perform in front of the class.
Here are some tried and tested practical ideas:
A little-known fact
Ask students to share their name, age, and one little known fact about themselves. This little-known fact, e.g. I have a pet snake, can become a regular conversational element in future interactions with partners in the classroom. That is, it gives the learner a reason to talk and respond: I got it for my birthday. It loves eating mice. It is three feet long. No, it doesn’t bite.
The hot seat
Put a chair with its back facing the board; this is the Hot Seat and a volunteer must sit here. Then write a word on the board (for beginners, tell them the word category or theme – this is likely to be vocabulary they are presently studying). Then students try to prompt the Hot Seater into guessing what the word is by describing it.
Interviews
Ask students to get into twos. Give them a short list of things they might ask about, e.g. favourite sports, favourite food. Each person then interviews his or her partner for a set time while paired up. When the group reconvenes, each person introduces their interviewee’s favourites to the rest of the group.
A few of my favourite things
Whatever you’re talking about, ask your students to share their top three favourite things relating to the topic at hand. If you have time, turn it around: what are their three least favourite things? This information will be even more helpful if you ask them to explain why.
Describing a drawing/map
Student A has a picture that she has to describe to her partner B who will then draw the picture based on A’s instructions. This picture can be one that the student A has been given, or it could be one that she has previously drawn.
Student A then has to describe the drawing to student B. B is not allowed to look at the drawing. She can ask questions in order to be clear about what to draw. Then they can reverse the roles. It is an interesting and challenging activity, and the students really enjoy it.
Twenty questions
The students work in groups and one of them thinks of a well-known character (and writes it on a piece of paper) and the others have to guess who the character is. They can ask questions such as Is it a man? Is he a sportsman? Is he alive? Does he play basketball? And so on.
They cannot ask questions with or, such as: Is she a sportswoman or a politician? These are two separate questions. They can only ask a total of 20 questions; once they get the idea, a total of 10 questions may be enough.
Time for a change
Ask your students to close their eyes while you change five things about yourself. For example, you could take off one shoe, take off your watch, put on different glasses, put on your sweater, and take off your ring.
You then ask them to pose questions to figure out the changes you have made. Students may ask: Did you take off a shoe? Did you put on a sweater? This kind of activity can be fun and, more importantly, it engages students in a way that requires them to think and not just provide mechanical responses.
Find a classmate who
In this exercise, students stand up, circulate about the room and ask questions of other students to find those who can do different activities, e.g. play football, do painting etc. Students then report their findings back to class.
Unit 2: Some vocabulary activities and exercises
Although vocabulary is not regarded as one of the 4 skills per se, it is, of course, an integral part of teaching the 4 skills.
So, we feel it will be useful to give you some activities and exercises to work with when you are specifically presenting new vocabulary items. And this seems to fit well with this Module focussed on speaking.
Here are some practical options for presenting new vocabulary items. These are best carried out in pairs or groups:
Context: Students see the text that contains vocabulary items and deduce the meaning of the item based on the surrounding language.
Miming or gesturing: Students guess the meaning of a vocabulary item based on your or another student’s miming and gesturing.
Substitution drills: These kinds of drills enable students to focus on structure while learning related vocabulary. For example, a dialogue or sentence structure is first taught, then students substitute different content words.
Antonyms/synonyms: Students match items from a list of synonyms or antonyms to the word(s) in a text.
Hangman: The classic vocabulary game where students choose letters to spell out the vocabulary item in a limited number of rounds.
Odd-Man-Out: You list four words for your students to analyse. Students have to determine the relationship between the words and then explain why one word does not belong.
Matching definitions: Students literally match words to a list of definitions.
Gapped dictation: You read a text with some vocabulary missing, and the students have to deduce what the vocabulary item is, based on the context.
Using dictionaries: These can be used for a number of reasons:
- Using the alphabet and placing words in alphabetical order
- Checking the pronunciation of new words
- Positioning the stress correctly
- Distinguishing different uses of the same word
- Distinguishing different meanings of words with the same spelling
- Checking the grammatical role of a word
- Distinguishing British and American spelling or meaning
- Checking on the formality or informality of a new word
Keeping a vocabulary record: Jotting down any new words. You can then use this as a warmer exercise, a few days later, to check whether the word and its meaning and usage have been embedded.
Remember: A warmer is a short activity at the start of your lesson to get your students engaged and participating, and into the ‘English mode’ immediately. A warmer can just be a fun activity but you should always try, as best as you can, to make the warmer related to what they have already been learning; that is, not just using an unrelated warmer just for fun. We will return to warmers when we explore lesson planning.
Using drawings/pictures: These can be used very effectively to teach vocabulary.
Labelling: Working in pairs or small groups, or pairs and then small groups, the students can, for example, label the various parts of a picture of a bicycle, or the parts of the body.
One student alone may not possess all of the vocabulary that is needed, but by working in pairs or small groups they are likely to have a larger group of words. They can then combine with another pair or small group to see if they have a complete list.
When teaching vocabulary/lexical items to students, you should keep in mind that a student’s learning of a word means not only knowing its dictionary meaning, but also understanding its form, different connotations and its correct use.
Rather than simply giving students the meaning of a vocabulary/lexical item, you need to make sure that your students understand the meaning.
To this end, you can help your learners develop effective vocabulary learning strategies. You can also develop student-centred presentation techniques, such as eliciting and effective concept checking, which make vocabulary learning, and teaching, much more engaging.