Teaching speaking

TEACHING SPEAKING
Plan:

1. 
   Teaching Speaking to English Students of Different Levels
   
2. 
   Teaching speaking as a set of competencies
   
3. 
   Teaching Speaking Skills: Strategies & Methods
   

One size doesn’t fit all. Nowhere is this more true than in the classroom. Your students likely arrive with various prerequisites and initial English levels, they come from different backgrounds and had varying degrees of exposure to English. Luckily, you can use various strategies and exercises to teach speaking to students of different levels which can be easily combined in heterogeneous classrooms.

Getting Beginners to speak is often not too difficult. Simple exercises and repeating phrases and dialogues are key. However, what if you want your learners to produce English, not merely verbally fill in the blanks or read out sentences from your textbook?
Focus on getting a message across. At this stage in their learning, the vocabulary and grammar knowledge of your students is still quite limited, but that doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. Give your students real-life scenarios (introducing themselves, going shopping) and let them role-play using verbal and non-verbal communication with a focus on communicating and delivering a message, not correctness. Let them make liberal use of visual aids. They might be surprised how much they can communicate with a few words. Take a look at Poodll’s mini lessons for easily implemented speaking activities.
As always, the British Council has a great selection of speaking exercises for the beginner’s level. For more tips on how to teach speaking to beginners, take a look at this video.
Practising speaking with intermediate learners can be difficult. At this stage, students are often aware of their mistakes and perceived shortcomings and might feel shy or inhibited. Much like when teaching beginner students, the goal should be on getting a message across. A communication situation is successful if all parties understand each other, not if they speak with perfect grammar and pronunciation. Help your students let go of the idea of perfection.
Encourage your students to use varied vocabulary. Instead of simple words like “good”, “bad”, or “very”, ensure that they challenge themselves and use appropriate synonyms.
Poodll uses its in-built transcription feature which transcribes and evaluates your students’ speech and supports them with their pronunciation and fluency. Take a look at our interactive transcript player for an easy speech-teaching solution.
TeachIt also has collected a wide selection of intermediate-level speaking resources for teachers. For a video guide on teaching speaking to intermediate learners, click here.
Teaching advanced students is both rewarding and challenging. At this level, students usually have a good command over vocabulary and grammar issues, expanding the topics you can discuss in your classroom as well as the complexity of the material
Debate clubs, roleplays, and even creating short films or podcasts are great ways to teach speaking at this level. If you are in need of inspiration with regard to topics, check out this website.
The challenge of teaching advanced students lies in teaching the finer points of pronunciation and focusing on the correct use of language.
Poodll uses AI to assess and guide your students’ pronunciation, ensure accuracy, and give timely feedback. If your students enjoy learning pronunciation with poetry, this lesson plan provides you with more ideas and exercises. You can also take a look at this free webinar on teaching English to advanced learners.
Strategies and Methods for Teaching Pronunciation
Most of these strategies can be applied to learners of all language levels.
Many students feel shy about their accents which prevents them from speaking. The fact is, that many English learners will retain some sort of accent, no matter how much they practice or how much exposure they have to English. Their accent might even change over their lifetime. Even native speakers have regional accents.
If the accent does not prevent your students from being understood, make a point of embracing it in your classroom. An accent is what makes your students unique.
If you want to support your students in embracing their accents and need some statistics to back you up, check out this British Council video series.
We can’t all speak like the King of England or a BBC presenter. The most important thing for your students is that they are understood.
Linguistic Professor Paul Nation first developed this method that has students speak for four minutes, then three minutes, and finally two minutes about one specific topic. This exercise focuses on fluency, the ability to talk naturally and without too many pauses. It’s great for intermediate and advanced learners.
The implementation is simple:
Introduce a topic and prepare relevant vocabulary
Give students time to prepare
Divide students into groups or pairs
Have one student speak for four minutes without interruption, the others listen
Give them time to rest
Students change partners or groups and give the same speech in three minutes
Rest again
Students change again and have two minutes to give the speech
Students reflect together
Why does this method work? When given four minutes, students generally speak slower and with more pauses as they develop their thoughts. In the following intervals, they will have to get the same information across in a shorter period. They will most likely limit their pauses and increase their speaking speed, especially because they have already practiced talking about the topic. The 4-3-2 method is proven to work and a fun and effective speaking exercise.
Some students might feel shy speaking to their peers or teachers, regardless of their English level. Self-paced exercises are a great way to build up their skills and confidence.
Poodll Solo allows students to record their speaking exercises and uses AI to auto-grade them. Learners receive immediate feedback on their speaking and pronunciation. Practicing with an AI allows them to speak freely without the fear of embarrassment and mistakes. You can use self-graded exercises as complementary to pair work and in-class speaking or on their own.

Sign up for your free Poodll test account here and assign auto-graded exercises to your students.

Combine these strategies and exercises in your classroom to support your students’ speaking skills. However, classroom time is often limited to a few hours a week – not enough to become a proficient speaker. Assign your students these five easy exercises to improve their speaking. Even just five to ten minutes a day will make a notable difference.
Ask students to listen to their favorite English song over and over again. Most likely, they will already know many passages by heart. Have them look up the lyrics online and read them while listening. Eventually, your students will be able to belt out their favorite song in the shower, in the car, or just sitting in front of their laptops. Without making it feel like tedious work, they will have expanded their vocabulary and improved their pronunciation.
Many students feel shy about talking to others in English – especially when they are at the beginning or middle stage of their learning journey. Ask your students to talk to themselves when they are alone.
Let them narrate what they are doing or make up conversations in their head. The key is to really talk out loud. Ideally, your learners would practice in front of a mirror to see how their mouth moves, but even just narrating their clearing or cooking process is a great start.
Tongue Twisters are popular for a reason. They draw attention to difficult-to-pronounce sounds or words and make sure that speakers concentrate when saying them. Your students can either practice alone or with friends and family members, or you can start a friendly tongue twister competition in your classroom.
Check out this extensive collection of evergreen and unusual tongue twisters or point your students to videos like this where they can listen to the twisters first before practicing.
Being a ‘good speaker’ requires a range of skills beyond accurate grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, though these are the basic building blocks that enable a message to be understood.
An effective communicator chooses the words they use, and the way in which they speak to different people in different situations, whether that is ordering a sandwich at a snack bar or giving a keynote speech at an academic event.
The skills involved in how we interact with others in different ways are called communicative competencies: teachable skills which frame the language used in interaction in different settings.
Speaking as a language skill involves these competencies much more than it requires accuracy of language, so when we talk about ‘teaching speaking’, we are talking about something different from grammar or vocabulary practice.
Speaking can be used to practice new language (as is common in question-answer tasks or role-plays held after specific language instruction, but this kind of activity may not teach the skill of speaking itself.
2. Teaching speaking as a set of competencies
Just as we can instruct, present and practice specific grammar features to students, the component competencies which make up speaking as a pure language skill can also be broken down and presented systematically.
Some useful language sub-skills which can be turned into practice activities are:
Avoiding repetition
Responding appropriately while listening
Turn-taking techniques
Politeness
Circumlocution (talking around unknown words using known language)
Extending ideas
Notice that none of these sub-skills make specific reference to grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation, though obviously these are necessary for students to communicate what they want to say.
In order to bring the focus onto these competencies, it is therefore advisable to lead speaking tasks on topics that are familiar to students, and using language that is within their ability. Taking the strain of new language out of speaking activities allows students to focus on the pure sub-skills listed above.
This is similar to the way in which native speakers are ‘trained’ for public speaking or assertiveness in social situations: as native speakers, they are comfortable with the structure of their own language, but want to develop other skills which go along with that.
3. Discourse and organisation of message
Many of these features of speaking fall into the category of discourse – the organisation and style of a message as it is delivered in different situations.
When teaching speaking in a given context, think about how people actually speak in that situation.
Find recordings of people interacting in restaurants, banks, or wherever your lesson will be set, and think about the functional steps of the interaction as it happens.
You will probably find that most interaction that you listen to is quite formulaic and predictable, so can be used as a structure for the dialogues that you present and practice in class, only with the organisation and ordering of the speech as the focus of the class rather than the specific language used.
Taking an opposite approach, think of situations where the above list of competencies is common
For example: we often use circumlocution when we are talking about complex, technical subjects, like when we describe a problem we are having with a gas cooker, car engine or plumbing; we may not know the exact name of the part which is not working, but we can still communicate it to a gas fitter, mechanic or plumber
This is a useful life skill, and one which can be used to harness second-language speaking for language learners
4. Restricted and free speaking
Again, as with grammar and vocabulary, we can incorporate these target competencies into standard formats of lessons – we can present the feature of speech through an audio or video task, and then ask students to practise applying the feature in a restricted task.
Gapped dialogues, ordering lines in a script, or choosing the best alternative from three different responses in a conversation, for example.
Again, as long as the learners are playing with language they already know, their ‘discourse brains’ will be more engaged and they will have more focus on the competencies they are learning.
Free speaking tasks should be exactly that: student-student interaction which does not have too many limitations.
Give students a topic or situation and ask them to script out a typical interaction in that situation.
Assign roles to different students, so that they can practise speaking to different ‘people’, and see how they flex their ideas when talking to their boss as compared to their 7-year-old daughter.
This will open up the features they are learning in application to different types of speech.
Finally, be aware that although your learners have been focusing on these great features of spoken communication, they have not yet had the opportunity to fully apply these until they have spoken totally freely, without a script, or notes to work from (after all, native speakers don’t carry scripts around with them to use in sandwich bars, though they do have an ‘expected script’ in their mind which informs their use of language), by participating in a speaking event with another student or students.
The same dialogue that was used in free practice can be repeated, though with different participants to ensure spontaneity and flexibility with language. Only then can you say that students have truly applied what they are learning by the end of the class.
Speaking in class can be daunting for any student, but it can be especially challenging for students who are learning English as a second language. Even students who have some level of proficiency in reading and writing in English often struggle with speaking. This can be due to factors such as timidness, fear of making mistakes, or a lack of confidence.
Fortunately, there are a number of strategies that ESL teachers can use to help their students overcome these challenges and become more confident speakers of English. Below, we’ll share some of our top tips for teaching speaking skills to ESL students.
Informal conversations are a great way for students to practice their English speaking without feeling like they’re being “tested.” Strike up a conversation with them about their weekend plans or ask them about their favorite sports team.
Not only will this help them feel more comfortable speaking, but it will also give you a chance to get to know them better as individuals. You can then tailor your lessons to your students’ interests which is a great way to keep students engaged and motivated. If you need ideas for questions to ask, check out these fun Ice Breaker Questions.
Using plenty of games and activities is a great way to get students to practice their speaking skills. Students, especially kids, learn best when they are enjoying the class and having fun. There are many speaking games you can play, but here are a few of our favorites: Conversation Cards
This is a great game for practicing speaking and listening skills. Create a set of cards with different conversation topics on them. Next, have each student choose one of the cards at random. Students must then start a conversation about that topic with the person next to them. After a few minutes, have all students stand up, walk around the class and swap their conversation card with someone else. Students should then sit down in a different seat with a different partner and have a new conversation about the topic that is on their card.
The Word Association Game
This is a great game for practicing vocabulary and speaking skills. To play, each student will say a word in English. The next person then has to say a word in English that is associated with the first word. This continues until someone can’t think of a word. This is a great way to help your students expand their vocabulary and practice speaking in English. For more fun variations of this game, check out these Five Fun Word Association Games.