Greetings to everyone
Every language teacher knows that speaking is a core skill to develop and practice. However, sometimes it can be challenging to get your teenage students speak in English beyond a couple of phrases. Here are some activities to boost your teenagers’ speaking skills.
Do you remember yourself when you were a teenager? How did you feel? Wasn’t everything just so complicated back then? If so, you know what I mean. That is why it is essential to keep lessons for teens motivating and engaging to reduce stress in their lives.
Planning a speaking activity for teenagers can be a challenge. However, it can also be rewarding. To make things easier, we have already sorted them. And don’t worry if you have got a mixed ability group —there is something on this list for every learner.
Performing stories from sounds
Record a sound story: a series of sounds such as glasses clinking, typing, and so on. Find something that can serve as a screen, e.g. an old sheet, enough clothes line to go from one side of the room to another and a few clothes pegs (optional).
Tell the class you will tell them a ‘sound’ story, with no words. Play your recording. In small groups students discuss what they think happens in the story. Bring the class together and elicit ideas. Form small groups and ask them to script and rehearse their own stories-in-sounds. While they are working, put up your screen, if you have one. From behind a screen at the front of the class (or, if you have no screen, from the back of the class), the groups take turns presenting their stories in-sound to the whole class. After each presentation the audience speculates about what the sounds represented and check their guesses by asking the performers.
- TIP: With higher-level students, include some work on naming the sounds, e.g. clinking, tapping. This activity was taken from Language Activities for Teenagers edited by Seth Lindstromberg. This collection contains 99 different activities for the classroom. All are described with reference to use in teaching English as an additional language to learners aged 11–16.
I Have Never...
All students in the class should start this activity holding five fingers in the air (you can use fewer fingers to do this more quickly). The student who goes first tells the class one thing that they have never done. The students who have done that activity should put a finger down, and tell the class a story about this activity. A student is out of the game when all of their fingers are down.
As you can see, many activities can be made into games by making them competitive. For example, course books usually have grammar exercises. Get your students to work on these in ‘teams’. The teams with most right gets a point and don’t forget to collect points on the board during a lesson, so that points from later games and exercises can be added. The team with the most points at the end is the winner. It is up to you if you want to give prizes, but the joy of winning is enough.
- TIP: mix up teams from one lesson to the next so that the same students are not always the winners!
Games for teenagers is a guide to using games in the classroom with lots of games and activities. Many of these games can be used for students of all ages.
Surveys
Surveys are a great way to get a class talking. They can be adapted in many ways to suit specific teaching situations. They can also be used for just about any level, with the exception of the absolute beginner. Good reading skills and the ability to ask and answer basic questions are the minimum skills required for ESL students surveys.
Teenagers love surveys as well, but you will have to set up the guidelines pretty carefully. For example, mention that students are to only speak 1-1 with a partner and not in a big group. The goal is to have interesting conversations, not finish the activity as quickly as possible. The goal is to have lots of mini-conversations in English with a lot of different people. ESL survey ideas can be found here. It is better to have many kinds of surveys up your sleeve to avoid student boredom and to keep each activity feeling fresh and interesting.
After they are finished, the students sit down, write up their results and then present them to the class.
- TIP: Be sure to elicit some answers from the class about the most interesting things they learned about their classmates. Also be sure to give feedback to your students about how the activity went so the class can improve for next time.
Interview Pop
Another way to practice question formation with your students is Interview Pop. It is designed to be high-quality and enjoyable. It does not need much preparation but will get your students talking and help them to hone their conversational skills without even thinking about it.
Put students in pairs, or you could also carry this one out in a one-one lesson. Students choose one person they want to interview. It can be anybody of their choice, and the person doesn’t necessarily have to be alive still.
- TIP: Tell students to choose someone they know a lot about or who they admire because then they’ll have more material to talk about when the speaking part of the activity comes around.
Give each student a list of ten to fifteen verbs. The lists for both students can be the same or different. See the example below:
- Decide
- Hate
- Love
- Offer
- Prefer
- Move
- Win
- Continue
- Buy
- Wait
- Consider
- Change
Each student has to choose five verbs from their list. They make a different question using one of their five verbs in each question; these questions are made for the person they want to interview. Each question will have a different verb.
For example, let’s say a student chooses Mark Zuckerberg. Here are some examples:
Why did you decide to create Facebook?
Why didn’t you continue to study at Harvard?
What do you love about being famous?
What would you like to change in Facebook?
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?
While the students are making their questions, monitor the class and help students fix the grammar mistakes.
The students then give their partner the questions that they wrote and then assume the role of the person they wanted to interview, while their partner asks them the questions they just made. So this means that each student answers the questions from the perspective of the person they wanted to interview, as their partner asks them the questions. Go around and monitor for mistakes. You could also then ask the students to report to the class the person their partner chose and how they responded to the questions.
If you would like to find out more about encouraging your teenage learners to speak, visit the following websites:
If your students struggle to speak English in the classroom or they are shy to do so, watch Herbert Puchta sharing his ideas for getting students to use the English during the lesson, rather than their own language.
Немає коментарів:
Дописати коментар