Speaking can be a difficult skill to fine tune in class. With multiple students it is hard to focus on one person’s speaking at a time; it is difficult to give precise and accurate feedback in live time; as well as a myriad of other challenges all teachers face. In this blog we are taking it back to basics, and focusing on how you can improve speaking practice in your classroom! 

Use routine to keep speaking regular:

Routine activities where students expect to use their speaking skills will help alleviate nerves. For example, start every class with a question, ‘What did you do on the weekend?’ or ‘What was your favourite part of our last lesson?’. When students are expecting to talk, they will prepare themselves mentally, and get used to talking in front of other students. Start off with basic questions, and then begin to expand them slowly by adding follow up questions, such as: ‘Why?’. This can also work after activities, ‘What did you think of that task?’, ‘Was that task successful or not, why?’. This also allows students a chance to reflect, and discover new language through a desire to communicate their own opinions. 

Help students think about how they are speaking:

Using the muscles in your mouth and throat in different ways hugely affects pronunciation. Help students distinguish between different sounds using physical feeling, demonstrate and explain the physical feeling of pronouncing a word, to help guide students through tricky sounds. Watch this YouTube video focusing on tongue twisters and clarity, and perhaps try some in your classroom!

Asking students to repeat instructions:

We know it’s never useful to assume students understood an assignment. After setting a task, you can ask students to explain what they need to do in their own words to the class, or to each other in small groups. Not only does this make sure that tasks run smoothly, but also allowing students to rephrase language in their own words tests their ability to think of synonyms and other ways of expressing ideas.  

Encouraging Conversation:

It may seem obvious, but it’s important to remember, the more you get your students talking, the more their speaking skills will improve. There are many different formats of speaking activity, so try to mix it up! Have students talking in pairs and small groups (find out more about this in our blog on group work); interact as much with students as you can yourself, try to have students test and examine each other’s speaking skills, or try getting students to record themselves and error correct their recordings. Having students practice their speaking in many different contexts with many different people will help them develop distinct unique memories, helping the target language stick in their brains! There are tonnes of creative ways to get your students talking more, for some inspiration, why not watch this helpful YouTube video: 

Role play: 

Role play can be a very useful tool when students are quiet, know each other well, or aren’t keen on talking about themselves. Playing characters and having opinions or ideas already given to you means that a student doesn’t need to focus on what they are going to say, but instead can focus on how they are going to say it. For a lot of students, nerves are caused by having their ideas or opinions judged by others. When the opinions aren’t their own, they are freed up to talk confidently as much as they like! Role plays can be long or short activities, and used in all language contexts. Check out this blog for some fantastic ideas.

We hope this is helpful, if you have any other ideas, share them in the comments below! If you’d like to continue improving your teaching, and your students’ success, why not consider one of our teacher training short courses. Visit the website to find out more.