TeachingEnglish
Speaking: The hardest skill?
Submitted by e_fl2 on 28 April, 2008 - 17:26
Hey, I just have one question: How do I make my students feel comfortable when speaking. The don't want to speak. give me ideas
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To make your students speak, you can try the following:
Give your students a sensational topic to debate. This will immerse them in the subject and they will try to come out of their hesitation.
Give them confidence and guide them to begin from basic levels of speech. Try to facilitate rather than coach. Expose them to a lot of quality language samples. It can be films with transcript of dialogues, songs with text, or any good audio book on intereting stories. This will help them acquire language in words and word groups which they can use to communicate in a simple way.
Brainstrorm with your colleagues to find out more such strategies. Good luck!
Getting our students to speak has been one of the most challenging tasks we, teachers, usually face. One of the things that I ascertain is having a springboard prior to lesson presentation. Springboards are fun-learning activities related to the lesson set to be taught such as games, role playing, simulations, songs, crafts and among others. You may also utilize positive reinforcement by rewarding your students who get to share ideas or speak in the class. (Rewards may be tangible or intangible). This way you get to motivate them to speak and once they get to see two or more students participate, such will have an induced effect to others who have been reluctant to pitch and take part in.
Would you please specify the age and level of your students? That might help in giving some practical advice..
http://virtualstaffroom.blogspot.com/
Some times really simple things can make a huge difference - give people the right prompt, and they'll want to talk so much that they can't help themselves.
For example:
Characters: two young men who look like tourists; a woman reading a newspaper; a man in dark clothes hiding around the corner
Key words and phrases: for three days; a bloody knife; nobody; bad weather; as fast as lightning
There's a woman lying on the floor in her kitchen. She's lying next to the fridge, which is still open. The only light is coming from the fridge. It looks like there's blood on the floor.
What happened?
To make my students talk free and fluently I tried to put them in their natural environment. We had different lessons such as a 5-oclock tea Lesson, How to get to....? Lesson, an English Speaking Countries Festival Lesson.
For example, we had a How to get to....? Lesson right in the street. As I worked in a village that time it was not difficult. The traffic was not heavy and my students could walk from one street to another according to the directions of their friends.
Before the 5-oclock tea Lesson the students prepared a kind of a concert with poems, songs, riddles and so on. During that lesson we had tea and talked about British customs and traditions.
The atmosphere during these lessons is friendly and our students are willing to express themselves.
I also taught my student to talk with the help of special posters containing the needed phrases, numbers and drawings on some general topics. That type of work was widely used in Russia some years ago and gave good results. The main principle of the work is : to speat all together so that shy students won't be afraid of talking. You should also repeat the same topic for several times within a week.
In my opinion the main thing while teaching our students to talk is the constant praise from the teacher. Most of them are afraid of talking not because of language difficulties but because they are afraid of getting a bad mark, a reproach from a teacher or mockery from their classmates. We should make them feel independent, brave and confident. And this is half victory.
You need to set a culture in the class, where students take up the initiative to come out and speak, without having any kind of fear or emarrassment, if they make mistakes.
Students come from a variety of backgrounds. The beauty lies in your ability to blend the whole class together and make it function as one single unit.