Teaching Speaking

Hello teacher and classmates!

It´s nice to have you back for another entry.

This time we´ll talk about speaking. Speaking is everywhere, and it´s an essential part of communication, which makes it crucial for students to learn this productive skill in the most effective possible way.

In our classes, we are always having talks and debates, we share our opinions on different topics, and we are always practicing. And I think that's one of the most important aspects that we as future teachers, or as knowledgeable people on the topic, should take into account. Practice is important. And once again like in Writing, Speaking can be Academic like speeches, or Communicative like in everyday talks.

In the Classroom, we should take into account student´s needs, basically, we communicate because we have needs. We should know our students well, their levels, their interests, and aspects like their age to promote student practice. That takes me to a nice exercise that we watched on a video: "Information Gap", where student A has certain pieces of information, and student B has the rest so they have to communicate by asking questions and answering them.

Tongue twisters are also a great way of practicing, singing along to their favorite song, roleplays, or playing bingo crossing off rows based on the sounds they pronounce. All of these are creative ways of practicing speaking. In campus virtual, we had a demo on Task-based learning and I could notice teachers often start from scratch, brainstorming some ideas, in this case, social problems, to generate talks and explore previous knowledge. Then the teacher presents the task and students are ready with many more ideas in their minds. This makes a lot of sense and now I can see what was going on backstage when my English teacher would start like this.

We also learned about Jazz Chants by Carolyn Graham. She is a professor at NYU and a jazz singer, she came up with this incredible idea after listening to 5:00 Pm conversations in NY streets, Jazz chants are chats that make students remember useful phrases through catchy rhythms and help them pronounce these phrases. Jazz chants are short, useful, repetitive, and simple. We made our own Jazz chant:

That was it for today! Thanks for reading! :)

See you! Bye-bye!

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