Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (30 page)

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
185

This warmer is good for getting a team spirit going right from the beginning of the lesson.

✓

Current affairs:
Noting what’s going on in the world often leads to some interesting discussions in the classroom. You can just write a headline on the board, or stick up an image from a newspaper and ask the students what they know about it. Then get their opinions on the story. It works best when you find a humorous story or one with a hint of controversy (but nothing that may offend or hit or a raw nerve).

Talking about communicative activities

This kind of activity has been popular for many years now in TEFL.

Communicative activities
generally involve pairs of students sharing information with each other to complete a task.

Communicative activities come in many different forms but usually involve a Partner A and a Partner B. Each partner needs to ask each other fact or opinion-based questions after receiving initial prompts from you. Sometimes you give them a worksheet which has gaps in it but the gaps are different for each partner. The pair must then hide their own sheet and come up with a question to ask their partner who, as a result, gives them information that they use to fill in a gap. On the other hand the activity may perhaps involve a list of topics or situations to ask a partner about so that the students talk about their own lives.

Communicative activities are practical because they often don’t require any imagination or opinions from the participants. They just provide a context for some solid practice of a particular grammatical structure or some new words.

This type of exercise also accustoms students to working with each other and gets them moving about a bit. As in most cases the students aren’t allowed to see each others’ information, you can get them to sit or stand back to back, for example.

Table 13-1 is an example of a communicative activity designed to practise the phrase ‘How much is/how much are the . . . ?’

186
Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

Table 13-1

Practising ‘how much is/how much are’

Partner A

Partner B

Menu

Menu

Starter

Starter

Spring rolls £2.00

Spring rolls £ . . .

Sesame toast £ . . .

Sesame toast £2.20

Chicken soup £2.50

Chicken soup £ . . .

Main Course

Main Course

Prawn curry £ . . .

Prawn curry £4.50

Roast beef £4.70

Roast beef £ . . .

Vegetarian lasagne £ . . .

Vegetarian lasagne £4.00

Dessert

Dessert

Chocolate cake £3.00

Chocolate cake £ . . .

Summer fruits £ . . .

Summer fruits £3.15

Apple pie £2.95

Apple pie £ . . .

To make use of this activity in which each partner gets prices for half the items on a menu, use these steps:

1. Go through the vocabulary to make sure that students understand the
food items.

If you don’t do this first thing, your students are likely to get distracted from the main aim.

2. Do an example on the board.

Get students to suggest what question needs to be asked and make sure that everyone knows how to ask ‘How much is?’ and ‘How much are?’

3. Divide the class into pairs and give each partner one half of the sheet –

Partner A has the left half and Partner B the right.

You can tell each partner that his menu is top secret so he can’t show his partner.

4. Ask the students to look at the prices and check which ones are missing, then explain that each partner has to ask the other partner for the
prices of these dishes.

Check that they all know what to do.

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
187

5. Set a time limit of about three minutes, get them started and monitor
quietly.

Try not to step in unless a pair is hopelessly lost or silent. Just make a note of any errors to discuss afterwards.

6. Stop the activity when the time is up and have a feedback session.

You can use this very simple activity in various ways. For example, if you delete the names of the dishes instead, you can practise ‘What costs . . .?’.

You can also omit some of the words (such as
apple, curry, chicken
) and practise ‘What kind of . . . is it?’.

Lots of opportunities for communicative activities present themselves in the classroom. Even when students are doing a written exercise by themselves, they can compare their answers and opinions in pairs afterwards and explain their reasons for anything that differs from their partner’s work. By the time you engage in whole class feedback, the students have had an opportunity to speak and an idea of which answers are likely to present a problem.

How About You? Extending Conversations

Once your students are talking to each other in English, there’s no reason to cut them off. In fact, if you can get them to extend their conversations in a more natural way, so much the better.

Communicative activities are rather controlled and often involve repeating the same grammar over and over again, so you need to work your students into more conversational dialogues.

Helping students depart from the script

One of the easiest ways to extend conversations is by teaching students to use phrases that encourage speaking. Try these:

✓

How about you?

✓

Tell me more.

✓

What was it like?

✓

Can you describe it?

188
Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

✓

Why is that?

✓

What do you mean?

✓

What do you think?

✓

What else?

Once the conversation has opened up it’s important to show your interest in what the speaker is saying. You can do this by good body language and expressions that demonstrate interest.

Expressing through body language

Some cultural groups use body language more naturally than others, and individual personalities play a large part too, but students need to be reminded that language is about real communication and that it sometimes goes beyond words. Ask your students to do these things while speaking in pairs or groups:

✓

Turn towards the speaker.

✓

Look him in the eye.

✓

Uncover his face. Don’t have hands, hair and hats obscuring the eyes and mouth.

✓

Smile and nod at intervals.

✓

Avoid putting physical barriers – your bag on the desk or crossed arms and legs – between you and the speaker.

Showing interest

Another great way to encourage extended conversations in a natural way is to do what native speakers do all the time – you say something to show that you’re really listening. It’s not always a word, sometimes just ‘mmm’ with suitable intonation, but you can teach your students to say:

✓

Really!

✓

Wow!

✓

That’s interesting!

✓

Oh no!

✓

No way!

✓

Cool!

✓

What a shame!

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
189

Following up

In addition to extending conversations generated from communicative activities, you need to write extended discussions into your lesson plan.

Discussions are also communicative, but they don’t usually involve filling in worksheets or facts supplied by the teacher. The idea is to get students talking about personal experience and opinions in a natural way. These conversations mimic what someone may tell a friend about in their own language and this is the way most students eventually aim to use English as bilingual speakers. Conversations allow time to explain or ask how?, where?, why? and when?

Usually this kind of activity follows more controlled practice, so by this time the students have had a chance to try out new vocabulary and grammar and they’re ready to add this knowledge to all the other English they know in a freer way.

After completing the communicative activity on menu prices (see ‘Talking about communicative activities’ earlier in the chapter), the follow-up activity may be:

Discuss in pairs: What is your favourite place to eat for

a) a snack?; b) lunch with friends?; c) a special evening?

Because of the different situations, prices are likely to come into the discussion but they aren’t the sole focus of the conversation.

Follow-up activities like these don’t only follow speaking practice. You can use them to liven up a reading, writing or listening lesson too. The idea is to take the overall theme of the lesson and develop another area of it in an interesting way, which involves sharing opinions.

Another example is follow-up to a reading lesson in which you read a current news story and analysed it for content and detailed vocabulary. Towards the end of the lesson, you may want to move away from that particular text and widen the topic in the following ways:

Tell your classmates about a story in the news that you find interesting.

Who or what is the story about? Is it a local, national or international story?

Do people have different opinions about it? Explain.

190
Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

I find that if you prompt students with some secondary questions, and give them a minute to think about it and make notes, you hear far fewer ‘ums’ and

‘errs’.

Other possibilities for follow-up activities are:

✓

Role-plays:
Students can create an imaginary dialogue between characters in the previous or related activity and act it out.

✓

Interview questions:
In pairs or groups students can agree a set of ten questions they’d use to interview a key character.

✓

Compare and contrast:
Students discuss the similarities and differences between their culture and that of their partner, or that of an English-speaking country in relation to the theme of the lesson.

✓

Debates:
Assign different groups to represent each side of the argument.

In My Opinion – Agreeing, Disagreeing

and Negotiating

The problem with extended speaking activities is that everyone has their own opinion and at times disagreements arise. No problem! Learning to express your opinions in a foreign language is a pretty important skill. In fact if you don’t teach the students how to do this, they may just clam up, resort to their mother tongue or, worse still, shout everyone else down using bad grammar.

Expressing an opinion

The way we differentiate between a fact and an opinion is by tacking on little expressions that alert the hearer to what’s coming. You say things like:

✓

I (don’t) think.

✓

I (don’t) believe.

✓

In my opinion.

✓

How about this.

These expressions are quite straightforward to teach because they go neatly on the front of a sentence and don’t often change tense.

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
191

One of several ways of showing that your expressions are not fact though, is to teach your students some words that show uncertainty such as:

✓

Maybe

✓

Perhaps

✓

Possibly

In the case of
possibly
you need to show the right word order. So you generally say
It may possibly be this
(that’s subject + auxiliary verb + possibly +

main verb) instead of
Perhaps it’s this,
which is easy because you’re simply adding a word to the beginning of a normal sentence.

The beauty of these words and phrases is that students immediately sound more fluent without having to do too much work. Sometimes it isn’t what you say, but how you say it that counts. That’s why, for higher-level students I also teach them how to stall: ‘That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought about that but . . .’.

You’d be surprised how many students have passed their speaking exams by saying very little but saying it elegantly.

Further to this, you can use a number of modal verbs to show that there’s a greater or lesser degree of certainty.
Modal verbs
are auxiliary verbs such as: might, may, could, must and can’t.

You need to teach these words as a grammar lesson though because the students need to know how the modal verb fits into a sentence:

✓ Subject + modal verb (+ not ) + infinitive verb without
to
:
It

might not

be a good idea

✓

The past form is as follows:

Subject + modal verb (+ not )+ have + past participle:

It

might not

have been a good idea
.

Interjecting, rephrasing and summing up

In a conversation you do more than give an opinion then keep quiet.

Sometimes you interrupt to add something important, explain in other words to make the point clearer, bring things to a close and so on. These are skills that effective English speakers possess and which you need to teach your students. Let them know how to do these things in accordance with English-speaking culture and in a polite way.

192
Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

Interjecting

It may seem rude to butt in, but in real life sometimes you need to leave before someone has said their piece or just get them to be quiet! Good classroom management involves giving your students the skills to stop the class show-off hogging the limelight. And if the teacher is rambling on and not making much sense, it’s only fair that the students have the language to politely protest, by using phrases such as: