TeachingEnglish
How you can encourage your students to speak fluently???
Submitted by Wanisa Ali on 1 March, 2009 - 10:09
Hello everybody
To motiviate learners to help them to speak fluently is a big responsible .Moreover, to enable adults to comunicate each other is an other important task.
So, I like to open this subject to be discussed.
Thanks alot.
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I think the best way to motivate students to speak is to have more pair and group works.
Pair work:
*Dramatically increases opportunity for student talking time and student to student interaction.
*Gives students a safe environment to try out ideas before sharing with the group.
*Allows students to share ideas and thoughts.
Group work:
• Like pair-work, it can visibly increase student talking time and student to student interaction.
• Encourages students to cooperate and negotiate in English.
Best regards,
Amir Abbass Ravayee
sometimes, it's quite difficult to ask the students to speak especially in non english speaking country. they tend to use their mother language, though they know that it's their time to pratice their english. so, can you help me giving a suggestion?
Hello everyone!
What age group are we talking about? Adult learners are usually self-motivated and really grateful for the time they are given to talk in pairs or groups. What is really important is the topic of the conversation. The students should be familiar with and concerned about it. As for teenagers, the choice of the topic plays the crucial role in the success of the activity. I'm not sure how much it fits your approach or methodology you follow, but I prefer not just to observe the students talking with a view to further correction, but actively participate in discussion.
Ready for futher discussion
The best way to make people speak is just make a friendly situation.
leslie
I agree with you up to a point that the best way to make people is to create a friendly environment, but I also think that the issue that the students are going to talk about plays a really important role, because if students are not interested in the topic I am almost sure that it is going to be really difficult to activate and have a kind of real life conversational environment
Everything that you´ve mentioned is really interesting but I think that we as teachers we have to be really careful at the moment that we decide to make our students start a conversation, because it´s my belief that apart from all the things that you have mentioned it´s necessary to take into account the kind of group that you´ve got, because what about if you have a mixed class, I mean, a class in which teenage as well as adult learners are working together?
Niranga Abeyakoon
I do IELTS prep. courses in an Arabic collage. The ladies whom I teach are lazy to use English in the class. so I showed them some Don't videos from a web site and discussed the importance of practicing how to liten and respond in English. Then we all agreed to impose a rule; "No Arabic till we leave the class room ". And sometimes while they are responding in English, they slip into their mothr tongue, but now not only me as the teacher, but others also do peer observasion to make everyone speak in English. Try this out, It'll definitely work!!!
I totally agree with your point about allowing students to talk about what interests them Eyra. I have memories of some very difficult lessons where the coursebook in use would ask learners to discuss subjects that our students had no interest in whatsoever - you almost felt they were doing you a favour in taking part!
I think it helps to discuss with our learners the importance of fluency: accuracy is not always the focus of work in the classroom and for some it can be liberating to know mistakes are allowed.
In my experience, engaging the learner to the point that they almost forget the fact that they're speaking English leads to fluency practice. Giving up something of ourselves as teachers, telling our students what we've been up to, what our plans are how we feel about particular issues (nothing too controversial of course) can help build trust and rapport and helps encourage our students to open up.
Before putting students to work on a discussion topic, I always found it useful to have learners work in pairs first to generate ideas. This gave everyone something to take to the discussion and therefore increased confidence.
Peter Travis
Splendid Speaking: http://www.splendid-speaking.com
Flo-Joe: http://www.flo-joe.co.uk
When culture and the students' interests are taken into consideration of the teacher ,then the objectives of the lesson will be easily reached.
I think motivation is really important- you must use English, and only English, you can use easy podcasts, videos and then encourage students , but they must not use their native language. It is difficult to find interesting topics, I know, but the internet can help. movies for adults, fairy tales and games for children, but forget their mother tongue!!!!
after some days, they accept the idea and enjoy it. This is my experience. Julietta40