LENGUA INGLESA

TEMA 3.2. SPEAKING MORE FREELY

WHAT KIND OF TOPIC WOULD YOU CHOOSE IF YOU WANT YOUR STUDENTS TO
SPEAK?

Cognitive development and language learning

Children as learners:
● When teaching, we have to think of the whole child, and encourage general cognitive
and educational development.
● Choice of topic is important: familiar.
● To encourage cognitive development, we can select a range of types of language
activities.

Language activities types:

1. Listing
2. Ordering and sorting
3. Matching
4. Comparing
5. Predicting and problem-solving
6. Sharing personal experiences
7. Creative work

Examples of each one of the activity types:

1. Think of the names of things they can see or remember in a picture
2. Classify items according to category (big animals, small animals) or put actions in a
sequence.
3. Find pairs of similar things, match pictures to words or numbers.
4. Find what is similar and what is different in two pictures.
5. Say what will happen in a story.
6. Speak about themselves and say what they like and dislike.
7. Do projects on chosen topic or retell stories and make up endings.

These activities:
● will help develop children’s thinking skills.
● help the child work from the most basic use of language to more complex uses.
● can encourage sharing and co-operation.
● could form a graded sequence of speaking activities for pupils working in groups.

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Children as language learners
Learners need:
- to hear clear pronunciation and intonation
- to feel successful when using English
- plenty of opportunities to communicate
- to enjoy their efforts at speaking in English
- to know they have achieved something worthwhile.

The teacher can:

- speak a lot in English and repeat
- react to the meaning of what they are trying to say
- show that what they are saying is more important than your correction
- wait until they finish speaking
- provide activities that are fun and that have a purpose or a goal.

● Set up activities that can be done in pairs or groups.

● They respond to questions and also ask questions.
● They will complete a task on their own (satisfaction).
● The teacher can show them what to do first, practice first with the whole class,
arrange them in groups.

Starting to speak freelyeliciting personal talk

● Children like to talk about themselves, and to hear their classmates doing the same.
● The context is real and meaningful.
● The communication is controlled and more than a language exercise.
● With older students you can do a survey of some kind. They can also prepare a
personal presentation.

Initiations and follow-up moves

The typical interaction pattern in this kind of activities is:
● Initiation (a question from the teacher)
- How many sisters have you got?
● Response (an answer from the child)
- One.
● Follow-up (feedback from the teacher)
- One, very good, so you’ve got one sister.

Speaking games
● You can encourage children to use English by playing a game at the same time.
● The games can be teacher-led:
- “Pass the ball”
- “Guess the mime”

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 “PASS THE BALL”
● We need a tape recorder or CD player, a music cassette or CD and a ball.
● Put on the music.
● The children keep passing the ball.
● When the music stops, the child with the ball has to answer a question or talk about a
picture.
● If a child does not want to answer, he/she can say Pass.
● You can say change and the ball will go in the opposite direction.

Extension ideas
● After playing this game you could play a memory game. The children could:
- Try to remember who said which things for each room.
- Look at the pictures again in pairs, then turn them over and name as many
things as they can.
- Without seeing the pictures again:
➔ list five things in each room;
➔ say what colour those things in that room were;
➔ say where they were.

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 Guess the mime
● Activity that involves movement.
● It is good fun.
● It can be part of a speaking activity.
● We need pictures of people doing things, or slips of paper or cards with instructions
like these: You’re eating spaghetti.
● Once the students get the idea of the game, they can write similar instructions. This
can get incredibly funny.

Guess the mime: another option

● Students try to guess the complaint that another student is miming.
● Explain the situation: You are in a hotel and have a complaint to make. Unfortunately
you can’t speak because you have laryngitis (a very bad sore throat), so you have to
MIME your complaint. The other students try to guess what your complaint is.
● Ask one of the students (not the shyest one!) to draw a card out of the hat or bag and
do the mime, while the others guess. Encourage them not to give up too quickly, but
to go on miming in different ways until the others have got it.
● Repeat until everyone has had a turn.
● If you have a large class, you may wish to have them do this activity in groups, to
ensure that everyone gets a chance to participate actively.
● Ex: My room is too cold

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 Children speaking in groups
When students work in pairs and groups they:
● get more opportunities to speak
● ask and answer questions
● learn a lot from each other
● gain confidence.

Activities:
- Is what I am describing the same as yours?
- Speaking about yourself.
- Guessing game: pretending to be an animal.

SPEAKING PRACTICE ACTIVITIES

AS GOOD AS A NEW COMPARISON
Procedure:
1. Ask students to tell you about 10 adjectives.
2. You write them on the board, in a column.
3. Group students into fours or fives or tell them to form pairs.
4. Each group / pair picks one adjective. They make a comparison (e.g. big – 'as big as
a plane'), orally or write them down.
5. Students read only the last part of the comparison ('as a plane').
6. The others try to guess what adjective they have chosen.

ASK ME LATER
Procedure:
1. Group students in fours or fives.
2. Ask one student in every group to make up a sentence imagining that it is an answer
to a question (e.g. 'At the bus stop' or 'Because it was cold'.). They must keep the
sentence to themselves.
3. Now in their groups each student tells his/her 'answers' and others give possible
questions. They write it on a paper.
4. In their groups they come to a decision which question is the best or the most
appropriate. They read it to the class.
5. Now some other student makes up an answer and the activity goes on until each
student has made up one answer.

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 STORY CIRCLES
Try sitting students in a big circle and giving them each a personalized number (the students
pick a number randomly from scraps of paper with a number on them). Start off by calling a
random number and that student must come up with a word, and before he/she sat down,
she must also shout out the next number. Once we have 3 words, then the 4th student being
called out would have to come up with a story based on the 3 words. They are allowed 10
seconds to think of a word and 30 seconds to come out with a story, if otherwise, then they
would have to carry out some "fun punishment" such as singing out loud, do some dance or
run about shouting some slogans. The teacher can restrict the words to certain topics, or just
let their creative juices run wild by not setting any topics.

Describing Pictures
For this activity, one child (the "describer") is given a piece of paper with a picture on. These
pictures are not of any particular object, but should be strange, involving lots of shapes,
letters and numbers, and they should be hidden from all children apart from the describer.
This child then has to describe the picture to the rest of the class, who have to draw that
picture by following the instructions given. When the description is finished, the child who
most accurately reproduced the picture takes a turn at describing.