You want to know how to teach speaking? You’ve come to the right place if you want a basic overview of a few of the principles you need to remember when teaching speaking. Here are 5 things to keep in mind:
Repetition is Key
Be sure to provide plenty of opportunities for your student to practice. Start out with controlled practice, and then move to freer speaking sessions where students can experiment with using the language. Then, follow-up with review in subsequent classes.
Another thing to think about is teaching language in “chunks.” If students can get to the point where these things become automatic, they’ll be well on their way to becoming fluent in English.
See Scott Thornbury: How to Teach Speaking, Chapter 2 for more details on “chunks” or multi-word units. Here are some examples that he mentions:
Collocations (rich and famous)
Idioms (cool as a cucumber)
Phrasal verbs (log out)
Sentence frames (would you like a…)
Discourse markers (by the way)
Context is Necessary
Good lesson plans always begin with activating prior knowledge and finish with personalization. This helps to make the language far more memorable. We can study all the vocabulary and grammar we want, but if we don’t know when to use it, it’s useless to us.
Student Centered is Always Best
“It is lack of genuine speaking opportunities which accounts for many students’ feeling that, however much grammar and vocabulary they know, they are insufficiently prepared for speaking in the world beyond the classroom.”
Help your students feel prepared for the real-world by giving them plenty of opportunities to practice using English in your class. The best way to do this is student centered teaching. See this post for more details about how to make your English classroom more student-centered. You can also check out my top 5 student-centered speaking activities.
Listening + Reading = Also Important
An integrated approach to language teaching reflects the real world because in most cases, students will have to use a combination of skills. Studies have shown that extensive reading aids in written and spoken skills and not just in reading. In my experience, students who watch a lot of English TV or movies are often the best at knowing when to use a certain phrase or idiom as well as just having a natural “feel” for the language which is almost impossible to teach.
In order to assist students, we can use integrated approaches such as the task-based approach or the communicative approach.
Fluency + Accuracy = Keep in Balance
In years gone by, it was all about accuracy when speaking and in places like Korea, it’s still predominant with the use of things like the audio-lingual and grammar-translation approaches in public education. Many teachers revert to this as well simply because it’s easier to pick out errors in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar and then correct them than it is to help students speak more quickly or easily.
However, there has been a radical shift in thinking in the past 10 or 20 years and there is a focus on fluency before grammatical accuracy. It’s how we learn our first language when we’re young. We utter things, fluently, that actually make no grammatical sense but grammatical accuracy comes later.
Similar to the previous point, you can use communicative, task-based approaches that are kind of like throwing students into the deep-end and just expecting them to swim as opposed to guiding them along by the hand, to deeper and deeper water. You could also try some of these activities to work on building fluency:
Even more ideas for ESL Speaking activities and games: 39 No-Prep/Low-Prep ESL Speaking Activities: For Teenagers and Adults
How to Teach Speaking: Scott Thornbury
Finally, you’ll need to get this book: How To Teach Speaking
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