How to encourage students to speak?

Here are some suggestions how to encourage learners to speak English in class

• Have you been studying with your students vocabulary that can be used in certain situations and now you want them to use it in their speech?

Don’t just ask you students to make up a dialogue. Guide them. Have some preparation time.

First, give them the situation. For example: “Imagine that you want to discuss with your friend a present for her mother's birthday”.

Ask them:

- How will you start a conversation?

- Have you already had some ideas?

- What sum of money are you going to spend?

- Will you ask your friend to go shopping with you?

- How are you going to end the conversation?

After this preparation time, all students can have different dialogues but they will have some ideas how to build this dialogue.

• Give your students cards with words/expressions written on them. Your students are to use them during their conversations. They are not to use all the cards but at least some of them.

• Have some small prizes to give to students whenever they speak enough English. You chose what the word “enough” means.

You can have lots of things as prizes. These can be sweets, fruit, stationery, books etc.

• At the beginning of the class, tell your students that you will give them, for example, five minutes to speak their L1 at any point in the class. Remember to mark it on the board.

If they have run out of the minutes, you can give to that student an extra exercise for homework. But you can always adapt this punishment to the needs of your class.

• Instead of minutes, you can give your students points. For example, each student gets 20 points. Each word in their L1 is equal to one point.

Don’t forget to mark it on the board.

• 15 minutes before the end of the class, your students brainstorm some topics that are the most difficult for them to speak in English. Then, they chose a victim (a person who spoke the least English) – or this can be done by a teacher. This victim choses one topic from the list of suggested and has to speak about it for a certain amount of time (that can be devoted to this activity). If this student is silent, he can be penalized by doubling the amount of time.

Ways of punishing students for not speaking enough English

• Give extra homework to that particular student;
• This student is the last to leave the classroom;
• This person has to speak at the end of the lesson for a certain amount of time;
• Give him a task to clean the board;

Links:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/getting-teenagers-talking-2?utm_source=twitter-google+&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bc-teachingenglish