SPEAKING IN ONE-TO-ONE SETTING
SPEAKING IN ONE-TO-ONE SETTING
Each tip presented by Penny is great food for thought, but I would like to focus on just a few which resonate the most with me. As I believe there are a few differences in approaching speaking in one-to-one classes, here I am sharing my experience and thoughts with you.
1. Don’t do Speaking with new students
Actually, I do the complete opposite. At the very beginning of the first class I intentionally put my new student on the spot and ask them to tell me about themselves in English. I’m not trying to be cruel here. It is just a truly effective way for me to evaluate their speaking proficiency. If the student can speak, they will – that’s an opportunity for them to shine. If they can’t or are reluctant, then I scaffold by, for instance, speaking about myself (modelling) or asking simple questions requiring one-word answers. This usually gives them a sense of success and also shows them my teaching philosophy: if you want to learn to speak English, you have to speak English.
2. ‘Pep’ talk, ‘i-1’ and success-oriented tasks
I usually give ‘pep’ talks before listening, but not speaking. I prefer to make sure beforehand that my students have the language to do the speaking task, so I follow the ‘i-1’ principle here. If I consider the task to be more challenging, I give my students time to think about what they want to say and offer any assistance with the language during the preparation stage. But when it’s speaking time, no L1 is allowed. (Of course, this works with more monologue-like tasks, but later on in these activities I turn them into conversations by asking questions and encouraging my students to ask me some too). In short, I prefer to praise effort. During my students’ speaking I always note down not just their mistakes, but also some good language they use. That’s my ‘evidence’ to show them how success they are.
3. Learn by heart
This is something I have found especially useful with functional language. There are many apps these day which allow to facilitate this process and even make it fun. With higher-level students, I prefer not to use L1-English pairs, but English-category pairs (for functional language). This approach has proven to be quite successful, as the students are able to remember more than one way of saying the same things, which makes them more relaxed and confident when speaking (they know that if they forget one phrase, they will remember another one).
And now after considering Penny’s tips, I have two challenges for myself: use more tasks (I would love to try some dilemmas) and try using chants (I’ve never done it before but the idea sounds too good to discard, especially for teaching prosody).
Each tip presented by Penny is great food for thought, but I would like to focus on just a few which resonate the most with me. As I believe there are a few differences in approaching speaking in one-to-one classes, here I am sharing my experience and thoughts with you.
1. Don’t do Speaking with new students
Actually, I do the complete opposite. At the very beginning of the first class I intentionally put my new student on the spot and ask them to tell me about themselves in English. I’m not trying to be cruel here. It is just a truly effective way for me to evaluate their speaking proficiency. If the student can speak, they will – that’s an opportunity for them to shine. If they can’t or are reluctant, then I scaffold by, for instance, speaking about myself (modelling) or asking simple questions requiring one-word answers. This usually gives them a sense of success and also shows them my teaching philosophy: if you want to learn to speak English, you have to speak English.
2. ‘Pep’ talk, ‘i-1’ and success-oriented tasks
I usually give ‘pep’ talks before listening, but not speaking. I prefer to make sure beforehand that my students have the language to do the speaking task, so I follow the ‘i-1’ principle here. If I consider the task to be more challenging, I give my students time to think about what they want to say and offer any assistance with the language during the preparation stage. But when it’s speaking time, no L1 is allowed. (Of course, this works with more monologue-like tasks, but later on in these activities I turn them into conversations by asking questions and encouraging my students to ask me some too). In short, I prefer to praise effort. During my students’ speaking I always note down not just their mistakes, but also some good language they use. That’s my ‘evidence’ to show them how success they are.
3. Learn by heart
This is something I have found especially useful with functional language. There are many apps these day which allow to facilitate this process and even make it fun. With higher-level students, I prefer not to use L1-English pairs, but English-category pairs (for functional language). This approach has proven to be quite successful, as the students are able to remember more than one way of saying the same things, which makes them more relaxed and confident when speaking (they know that if they forget one phrase, they will remember another one).
And now after considering Penny’s tips, I have two challenges for myself: use more tasks (I would love to try some dilemmas) and try using chants (I’ve never done it before but the idea sounds too good to discard, especially for teaching prosody).
I totally agree with Julia Blinova in the first point. I guess when being in one-to one setting, this is an effective way to examine the pupil's speaking skill. however, this is hard to do and it's ineffective way to use in the classroom because only the fluent students will be willing to participate.
ReplyDeleteChants are fun and help with stress and unstress (schewa too), intonation, rhythm, But they can become a bit mechanical so I use them sparingly. I use songs too (Old Macdonald had a farm) to help with pronunciation (vowel rules). Pronunciation is a critical element of speaking (not aiming for "native speaker" but for intelligibility) ...error correction is tricky...Pronunciation takes time to teach but imo needs to be taught as part of speaking. Do you include it?
ReplyDeleteMarwa Talbi I don't really have much experience teaching groups, but I suppose that even in a group after modelling yourself it is possible to get new students to speak a bit about themselves and get at least some idea about their speaking proficiency.
ReplyDeleteClaudie G Definitely! Making my students comprehensible is one of the main goals of any course I teach. And as you have pointed out, there are ways of making teaching pronunciation fun. In fact, if the student understands why working on sounds, prosody, etc, is important, they are always willing to spend time and effort. In the long run, correct pronunciation affects listening comprehension, i.e. if you know how to pronounce the word, you can recognise it when another person says it.