Section 5: Teaching Skills

Chapter 31: Teaching Speaking

Speaking is one of the most interesting topics to teach to students, because when you use the right methods or techniques your students will vastly overshadow other students who have not had the same opportunities to practice their speaking. In reality many schools focus on chanting and repetition, so it is a very often occurrence that students will not be able to do much without heavy prompting or guidance. The school you are at will often have their own thoughts or curriculum based on how speaking is taught, so you will have to add that into your approach. In the modern day, testing and bookwork are very heavily emphasized when it comes to teaching English so often speaking will take a backseat to reading, writing, and listening skills. However, even with this viewpoint in the modern day of teaching English you should not let speaking take a full backseat compared to the other English language skills. A student who is able to speak and communicate will easily be able to understand grammar and build their other skills more easily in the future. So, while you are doing lessons always make sure to give the students the opportunity to talk about something different in each class. Every day having introductions in class such as name, feelings, the day, and the weather are a great way to start off the class. Following up with the basic introductions preparing a fun daily question for students as a warm up is a great way to get the class started and the students interested. This is a good chance to ask the kids about what they are doing on the weekend, what they did the previous day, and other things that they will want to talk about and express. This is also a good time to give students who are struggling a chance to use both English and their native language in order to express their thoughts (this is a warm up and to help get the kids engaging with you, so using both their native language and English can help get them into the mood in class and let them relax and produce English). Speaking is a skill that is not being well developed in the modern day, due to the importance of testing results being the main goal of schools that are teaching English abroad; however, making sure that you do not neglect giving your students the chance to equally grow and balance all of their language skills will only cause them difficulties and problems in the future.