Speaking in the classroom

Activities based on repetition and imitation

Littlewood introducd these types of types of activities and considered them as preparatory or introductory activities, intended to prepare learners for communicative activities.

Drills are an example of this type of structure-orientated exercises. They hel to assimilate facts about new language and enable puplis to produce the new language for the girst time by helpung them master the basic structural patterns of the language.

They are usually very controlled and have a fairly limited potential. They shouldn't be used either too freqently ot for too long. 

In the sectio we can also include introductory activities as the ones called "ice-breakers" or "warming-ups" which do not notmally have a definite objective but are used to tell the students, in an indirect way, it is English class time. 

Controlled activities

Controlled activities le students develop confidence and the ability to participate in simple conversations. 

The advantage of these types activities over drills lies on the fact that they offer a well-defined context for practice.

Let us consider some traditional examples.

Question adn answer practice is one of the commonest ways of giving language practice in the classroom.

Other techniques are right/wrong statements and corrections. Students are asked to say wheter a statement is right ot wrong whitin the context of the text and, if it is wrong, they must give the correct version; or they are asked to correct statements. 

A pair work activities

Pair work activities provide students with a greater amount of meaningful practice. There are various types of pair work activities. 

Gapped dialogues. 

In gapped dialogues one of the speakers has to supply the missing utterances

Languaje games

They help to improve speaking skills, i.e. "Hide and seek", where Students "hide" and object somewhere in a picture. They then take turns to find our where the object has been hidden by asking questions like "Is it on the bookcase'"

Decision-making activities

They require students to make certain decisions. Moreover they emply the information gap principle, that is, students have to find our what each pair or group has decided. For instance, they are give a set of numbered places and they write the numbers on a street plan to indicate their positions, which their parternts have to guess. 

REALIA

Maps, menus, radio and TV programmes are another way of getting students to interact using fairly controlled language. For example, with maps students can practice giving directions. With menus they can decide what they are going to eat and drink. With TV programmes they can discuss what they are going to watch. 

Questionnaires

With the mixed structures, they are effective ways of getting STUDENTS to draw on all their linguistic resources. They involve identifying somebody who corresponds to a requirement of the questionnaire. For example, the questionnare may read: Find someone who...

Interactives activities

Discovering identical pairs: one students has to find which picture, for example, is identical within a group of four. Discovering missing information: two studetns have an incomplete table and they have to get missing information from other

Discovering secrrets (guessing games)

These fames are accurancy-focussed games whose purpose is the reinforce what has already been taught. For example "X-number of questions" (one player thinks of a famouse person or place and the others try to find it out by asking no mote than X questions).

Socual interaction

Social interaction, simulations: children act as themselves, role-play: they act as someone else. For role-play the class is usually divided into small groups who are given situations and roles to acto out. 

Teaching oral English through songs 

Songs are a pleasurable, enjoyable experience which aids relaxation and group dynamics and increases attentiveness ande receptiveness in the language classroom. They bring variety to the lesson. They are highly memorable and help internalise quite long chunks of language.  They are personal and thus allow identification with the lyrics. They provide authentic examples of everyday language. They allow the target vocabulary, grammar, and patterns to be modeled in context. THey foster the developmente of grammatica, lexical, and sociocultural competence, as quell as of the linguistic skills of speaking and listening. They contribute to the improvement of pronunciation, if speed and of fluency.  

The learners answer questions about the text of the sonf and create their own for other classmates to answer. Other comprenhension-checking activities involve the creation or completion of charts and diagrams about the text, or the invention of titles for each verse and for the overall song.

The students are asked to identify deliberately introduced (and plausible) mistake in terms of vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation. The children can also be encouraged to manipulate the text of the song, modifying grammatical elements within it (e.g. tenses or parts of the speech), changing the final words of some lines with other that rhyme, or partially inventing the song and subsequently comparing it to the original version

As slightly higher levels, the sylistic features and sociocultural aspects reflected by the song's background can also be made explicit in order to foster further appreciation of the song and of the country's history and culture.

A lip syncing talent show can be held, either individually or in teams, with several students being appointed as judges and of course, the students should be urged to sing a song. Recording it and playing it to improve pronunciation can also be a good indea