(upbeat music)
- [Narrator 1] In this video,
three ITA instructors will offer some various tips
for setting up successful speaking tasks in your classroom.
(upbeat music)
- I have a few tips for you,
if you want to help students feel more comfortable
when they're doing speaking tasks in your class.
The first is, to try doing a short warm up activity
that the students are already familiar with
before you implement a new speaking task.
So have them do a jazz chant or a song,
that you've already taught them before.
And then they can jump into the new activity after that.
The next tip is to let students jot down some notes
before a speaking task.
Even if they don't use those notes during the task,
it really helps some students to have that time
to mentally prepare before they go into something new.
My third tip is, when possible you should always model
the speaking task for the student.
It really helps them follow the directions even better,
and, it can help them feel more comfortable
to see you do something like answering a question
before they do it.
And the last is, to teach conversation fillers
in English for them.
So teach them phrases like, let me think about that.
Or hmm, I'm not sure.
If you teach certain conversation fillers like that,
it will help them in those uncomfortable moments
in a conversation.
And it will help those students
to not revert back to their native language,
during those uncomfortable moments.
- There are several things that you can do to facilitate
communication in your language classroom.
And here are a few general tips about ways
to ensure actual engagement between your learners
when doing speaking exercises.
First and most obvious is to pick content and topics
that are interesting to your learners.
Once you get to know your learners,
you'll figure out the kinds of things
that they like to talk about.
And nobody wants to talk about something they find boring.
So you'll learn about their experience,
and you'll learn to be able to connect to their background.
And that way they'll speak more,
and they'll actually listen to their classmates
and you, the teacher more.
Another thing you want to do is, think about ways
to really engage them in listening and not just speaking.
Sometimes if you have students
that are presenting individually,
or you have groups where individual learners
are taking turns talking,
the students who are not speaking
might tend to spend their time
thinking about what they're going to say,
or maybe resting their eyes, something like that.
So you want to require that they listen,
you can do very simple things, require note-taking.
You can have them survey everyone,
makes sure they jot down what everyone says.
They could fill out a graphic organizer.
Info gap is an example of this.
Orally, you can require third person feedback.
Which just means after a group of speaking,
you're going to ask some of the individual learners
in that group to tell the rest of the class,
some of the things that were said.
And finally, you want to use your pairing
and your grouping thoughtfully.
So, you have to look at what kind of activity
you're going to do in these groups or these pairs.
And if it's something that's more difficult
in terms of language,
if they're going to talk through language material,
that's more advanced,
you want to pair stronger learners with weaker learners
so that the stronger ones can help those weaker ones.
But when we generally talk about conversation or straight,
oral exchange of information,
it's a good idea to try to pair learners together
that are at the same ability level
so that nobody gets overwhelmed or bored
with the person that they're working with.
- And the third and final topic deals with
effectiveness and setting up a speaking test.
I've got three tips for you.
Tip number one would be to consider your environment
or background noises,
and adjust the time or task if needed where possible.
So for example,
if you have a classroom that is cooled off by a fan,
and the fan is very loud,
quite simply turn it off for your speaking task.
That's a minor thing, but actually can make a big impact.
Tip number two, is make sure that your students
are not practicing reading,
when you want them to be practicing speaking.
This is very common.
If you give them a dialogue to practice,
or you allow them to write,
make sure you tell them to not read it.
Put that paper down, so that they are practicing speaking.
The same thing can be said, is if you give them questions,
it's better if you can give them questions
that are not the same.
So they don't anticipate what they're going to be answering.
Creates more authentic or spontaneous speech.
And my third tip for you, would be the idea of trying
to use time to increase students' fluency
and require them to speak for longer times.
What I mean is, you could give them a timer,
or hold up a sign that says, start and stop.
And require them to speak for one or two minutes
and just say, keep going, keep trying to go,
to create that fluency.
That's just an idea.
So those are three tips for you,
to think about creating effective ways
to set up a speaking task.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator 2] So, I hope that some of these tips
will help you in your classroom.
And just remember,
the more enthusiastic you are about a speaking activity,
the more enthusiastic your students will be to join you.