TeachingEnglish
Teaching speaking for beginners
Submitted by thuteresa on 21 March, 2011 - 08:58
Please help me! I'm going to teach speaking for a group of beginners. This course will last 16 hours within a month. I find it hard to choose an appropriate course book or materials for these learners. I intend to cover one topic per day for them, such as the first day they're going to study the alphabet and numbers, the second day I'll introduce how to tell the time and date. I don't know whether it's good for them or not. Give me some advice.
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Why don't you practise speech acts on the first day like: What's your name? My name's.... How old are you? I'm..., Where are you from? I'm from..., etc. There are quite a few of these specially for beginners. You could give each student half a speech act and have them walk around asking and answering until they find their partner.
Other mingling games like this work well too, where students will have written questions from prompts and they need to ask three or four people in the class, or 'find someone who' activities where they find one person who answers 'yes' or someone with the same answers as them. Repetition will be important at this level so games like this are fun and encourage repetition or drilling of the target language. To finish off, have them report back on what they found out about people in the class. It's a great ice-breaker for a first lesson and it's personalised.
Learning a language is all about being able to communicate and this usually always starts with basic introductions. For example, being able to say hello, your name and where you come from is a common starting place. You could then develop that into something along the lines of asking a stranger for the time after a short introduction, maybe along the lines of 'hello, do you have the time please?'
Teaching speaking English to beginners is a challenging task. And within 16 days, it is my try to teach speaking English.It can be successful only by Task-based teaching.
First Day: Ask studends that how many words they use in daily life. Ask them to make a list of all those words which they know. Ask them speak the words loudly. These words can be names of fruit, parts of body, eatable items, words which they listen while watching television . Share all those words and give some more new words.
Second Day: Using the same vocab ask students to make sentence. Sentence should be spoken only in the given structure. e.g: I like ........., I like Pepsi.
You don't like ......., You don't like campa.
She doesn't like ........., She doesn't maaja.
Ask students to bring one thing they like most. It can be eatables or any other things.
Third Day: Now ask students If they understand about likes and dislikes then whether they are having these things or not. Now ask students to speak students in the given structure. e.g:
I have .........,I have burger.
I don't have ..........., I don't have piza.
In this way you can continue teaching speaking English within English grammar rules.
Language is for speech.The best way to initiate students to oral communication is get them talk about activities (personalisation activities)they like doing. Students must be taught the elementary vocabulary beforehand.Asking personal questions will encourage students to talk.Initially they may make some grammatical mistakes,as they progress step by step try to build good foundation in grammar.We can also create situations in the classroom and encourage them use role play and information gap activities to make students tallk.The basic principle is that students should feel the urge or need to talk.Make sure that students get plenty of opportunity to use the spoken language inside the classroom.It is important that students see that there is a reason for speaking.This can be done by finding out information about friends in the class;to ask for factual information about a topic; to express opinions about a topic; to play a game or tell a story.