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Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking: Tips for ESL/EFL Teachers
Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking: Tips for ESL/EFL Teachers
Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking: Tips for ESL/EFL Teachers
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Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking: Tips for ESL/EFL Teachers

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About this ebook

Teaching English as a second or foreign language is full of challenges: How do you hold students' interest? How do you ensure that they get enough practice to really learn?

The Fifty Ways to Teach Them series gives you a variety of drills, games, techniques, methods, and ideas to help your students master English. Most of the ideas can be used for both beginning and advanced classes. Many require little to no preparation or special materials. The ideas can be used with any textbook, or without a textbook at all. These short, practical guides aim to make your teaching life easier, and your students' lives more rewarding and successful.

This book addresses the teaching of speaking, including fluency, pronunciation, self-expression, discussion skills, and presentation skills.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 29, 2012
ISBN9781301026784
Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking: Tips for ESL/EFL Teachers
Author

Janine Sepulveda

Janine Sepulveda is a classroom teacher and teacher trainer with 20+ years experience in the field. She has taught EFL in South Korea, the Netherlands, and Mexico and has conducted teacher-training classes and workshops in the U.S., Mexico, and Chile.She currently teaches online teacher-training courses at the University of Oregon for the U.S. Department of State, which include teachers from more than 100 countries. She holds an M.A. in TESOL from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

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    The tips are practical. They are easy to prepare and handle in a speaking class.

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Fifty Ways to Teach Speaking - Janine Sepulveda

Introduction

This book is for teachers who are new to ESL/EFL, or teachers who are looking for more interactive activities for their English classes. This isn’t an exploration of research and pedagogy, but a list of speaking activities and tips for making activities more effective. Many of the ideas are based on a communicative language teaching approach.

Not all these ways may work for your class exactly as written. However, it is always a good idea to look at an idea and think about how you could adapt it to fit your own context. When you read a tip, think about how you could change it to fit your students’ ages, levels, culture, and interests. Please feel free to adapt the activities in any way you like.

This book is divided into 6 categories:

Ice breakers

Warm-ups/fillers/games

Fluency

Integrated skills

Focused practice activities

Tips to make activities more effective

Drills and memorization are useful in language learning, but students also need opportunities for real and meaningful communication. Most of these tips focus on giving students opportunities to communicate ideas, opinions, or information to others. Some activities focus solely on fluency development. However, there are also activities that focus on specific skills such as stress, intonation and prosody, pronunciation, vocabulary enrichment, and target grammatical structures, among others.

I

Ice Breakers

photo of strawberry inside an ice cube

Building a classroom community is important for successful teaching and learning. When you know your students, and they know each other, students will feel more comfortable and relaxed.

Learning a new language can be stressful. Often students are afraid to make mistakes, which impedes their ability to progress in a new language. Older students may feel like they have become children again, which is not always a comfortable feeling!

Therefore, creating an environment where students feel safe, comfortable, and respected is highly important. They should also feel free to make mistakes, as mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. This will allow them to take risks, try new things, and work on both accuracy and fluency.

The following ice-breakers are designed to help students get to know each other using English in a non-stressful way. The goal of these activities is not perfect English; it is to build classroom connections among students – and have some fun while doing it!

1

The Line-Up

Level: Beginning to Advanced

This activity works well with any level – simply change the topic to accommodate students’ capabilities. However, even a linguistically simple topic can work with more advanced students as they negotiate how to form their line and learn about each other.

You can use this ice-breaker more than once with the same group, on the same day or on different days. Simply choose a new topic. Even adults enjoy this activity!

How it Works

Pick a topic. Ask students to line themselves up according to the topic you give them; for example, date or month of birth, shoe size, favorite flavor of ice cream (alphabetically), etc.

For lower-level students, write some useful language on the board and go over it before they begin, so they can have short conversations instead of just calling out numbers to each other. For example, if they are to line up by birthday, write phrases such as When were you born? September? Oh, me too! What day? OK, my birthday is before/after yours.

2

Two Truths and a Lie

Level: Intermediate to Advanced

This is a fun way for students to share personal information about themselves in a game-like format that keeps everyone engaged.

It is important for the teacher to model this so that the students can understand how it works. Here is my example:

I once met Princess Diana.

I made a commercial for a clothing store in Egypt.

I have lived in 10 countries.

(Make sure your sentences contain information and grammatical structures that your students will understand/know about! I would not use these sentences with all students.)

It is also important to give students enough time to think about their truths and a lie. You may need to help students with specific language needed to write their

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