Speaking Activities for the Classroom

480 Pages·2007·1.11 MB·English

Speaking Activities for the Classroom

Copyright 2004

Compiled by
David Holmes

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Contents

Preface :

To The Teacher

Chapter One : Warm-up Activities

Chapter Two : Words, Phrases and Sentences

Chapter Three : Grammar and Speaking

Chapter Four : Interactive Role-Play

Chapter Five : Traveling and Touring

Chapter Six : Finding the Right Words

Chapter Seven : Fables, Tales and Stories

Chapter Eight : Talking Tasks

Chapter Nine : A Bit of Business

Chapter Ten : Pronunciation

Chapter Eleven : How to Improve Your Diction

Chapter Twelve : Sound and Rhythm

Chapter Thirteen : More Pronunciation Practice

Chapter Fourteen : Curriculum Development
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Preface

The materials in this text were compiled over a period of ten years, in
Thailand from 1993 to 2003, while I was teaching at The Faculty of Arts
at Chulalongkorn University and later at the Department of Language at
KMUTT. I started a file of speaking activities because there were too
many tasks and ideas to keep in my head, and I wanted to be able to
access them when I needed them in the future. Eventually, the file grew
thicker and thicker, until it was big enough to become a book.
The speaking activities in this text come from a variety of sources:
A lot of the tasks sprang from my own imagination, stimulating me to
go into the classroom, feeling motivated by the freshness that
accompanies a new inspiration and being eager to share it with my
students. This could be compared to cooking on impulse rather than
following a set recipe. I got many additional ideas from talking to fellow-
teachers about what worked for them in their classes. I even picked up
some good examples from the handouts of various courses that I was
required to teach, all of which taught me a lot of time-proven tricks that
almost always work.
Curiously, when I told my Chula students that I was compiling a
collection of speaking tasks for publication, they responded by getting
involved and suggesting ideas of their own. I would often divide the
class into groups of five students and tell them to make up a dramatic
scene or dialogue or game, or whatever else they wanted to try, and
come back and perform it in the next class. Many of these activities were
effective learning tools and have been included in the book.
For many years, I also facilitated English programs for Arthur Andersen,
SGV Na Thalang, KPMG, Yontrakit Group, Amari Group, and Bank of
Ayuddya, TOT, DEP and TAT, and other organizations, in Thailand,
for which I had to keep creating new materials, so that it has become
second nature for me develop speaking activities for the classroom.
One final thing that I would like to add is that, at KMUTT, I learned a
great deal about student-centered, self-access, task-based learning, and
curriculum development, working with Richard Watson Todd of the
Faculty of Applied Linguistics, so it follows that much of what you see
in this book also illustrates the Theory and Practice of Curriculum
Development as it was being created at that time in the International
Program at KMUTT.

David Holmes
Bangkok, 2003
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To the Teacher

This is a book for teachers and students who wish to create a classroom
environment enjoyable for both students and teachers. With this idea in mind, I
am going to summarize some prefatory comments I made at the opening of a
Task-Based Learning and Curriculum Conference held at KMUTT in the year
2000.

We began with the question, “Who is the most important person in the
classroom?”, and answered, “The student is the most important person,
because the university and the teacher are there to serve the student’s need to
learn, just as the hospital is there to treat the patients, or the police to protect
the security of the citizens.”

Ironically, however, institutions can end up serving the purposes of those who
run them so an imbalance is created that downplays the rights of those to be
served. Teachers should always remember this and try to look at their classes
from the student’s point of view. In short, we need to do what the students
need and not make them do what we need. Unfortunately, until the end of the
twentieth century, classrooms in Thailand, and elsewhere throughout the world,
were teacher- dominated and teacher-centered. This is changing now, which is
why the title of my talk at the conference was, “Good Morning Class, Welcome
to the Twenty-first Century.”

Let’s look at what students of English as a foreign language need. First of all,
they need to develop the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and
writing, but they also need to practice in such skills in a way that makes them :
• Think independently
• Be creative
• Follow their inspiration and interest
• Learn what they want to know
• Learn how to find information
• Learn to do their own research
• Learn to report their findings
• Learn to present their ideas to others
• Learn to communicate conclusions
• Learn to take pride in their achievements
• Learn to develop personal responsibility
• And how to continue to develop said skills,
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in a way that will make them successful in their careers and lives. “Learn” is
something the student does for him/herself, while “Teach” is something the
teacher does to the students. Nowadays in this age of progress the teacher has
to come down from his pedestal at the front of the room to interact with the
individuals in the class, “on the level” to use and English idiom. What should
happen, then, is that they become partners in progress, and the students should
show greater willingness to participate if they feel it is their class rather than the
teacher’s. The teacher should not have sole-ownership of the class. Instead, it
should be a joint-venture in which the teacher helps the students in a
constructive way to learn what they feel they need.

This is certainly better than the old way of :
• Memorizing lists of facts
• Making ticks on multiple Choice sheets
• Following orders like cadets
• Showing no independence and
• No ability to think for themselves
• No ability to share in decision-making and
• No experience in sharing responsibility

Instead of looking down on your students from a position of authority, you
should look at your students as the hope of the future. The new generation
does not want to become a bunch of little robots, that are trained to follow
orders and just do as they are told. They will obviously want to participate in
the process life and social change in a constructive way.

Before that can happen, teachers must change from being bureaucratic
dictators to becoming benevolent helpers. The problem is that this will take
courage. I don’t know how many times I have been told :
• Follow the course syllabus exactly.
• Do only exercises in the prescribed text.
• Follow orders with no exception.
• Don’t change anything.
• Don’t do anything different.
• Don’t try to be creative.
• Don’t think for yourself.
• Don’t do anything based on your own experience.
• Follow the department traditions.
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• Follow bureaucratic procedures.
• Don’t break the rules.
• Don’t deviate from the norm.
• Do things the way that we’ve been doing them for the last forty years.
• Remember that we are a highly respected institution and that we are
expected to adhere to traditional standards.

What are teachers to do against being ordered about, in this way, like a bunch
of pre-programmed automatons, within an out-dated system? The answer is to
create a Task-Based Curriculum. The answer is to throw out the rulebook and
start over. We should sit down in our departments and hammer out a new,
task-based curriculum more-suited to the needs of present day society, based
on activities that encourage independent development.

The cornerstones of student-centered learning are as follows :
• Task-based learning means helping the students choose a job that they
want to do and then let them go out and do it, individually, on their own
or within peer-learning a group.
• Student-centered learning means allowing the students the freedom to
work on topics of their own choosing, within reasonable guidelines, in
accordance with the body of knowledge.
• Self-access learning means letting the students go out and find their own
information on their topics from anywhere they can, such as the
Internet, books, journals, magazines, newspapers, interviews, and etc.
• Group Activities means allowing the students to form groups of four or
five in which they will share the responsibility of getting-the-job-done
and of doing the planning, preparation and presentation of their
accumulated information as a team, each with an assigned task to fulfill,
so they can learn from working with others and from the constructive
comments the teacher makes in helping them through the steps of the
process.

In such a process, the teacher is seldom at the front of the room, but usually
mingling with the students, going from group to group, answering questions
and encouraging progress as he/she goes. This way, the teacher has a better
opportunity of talking with each individual student about his/her part of the
job/task and the student benefits from talking with a native speaker in an
informal, up-close manner while getting guidance along the way.

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The sad thing about our conference on curriculum development at KMUTT
was that, although teacher-participants from all over the country were
enthusiastic about having been shown new ways of helping students help them
selves, they said they would be going back to their jobs in schools where the
syllabus was still set in cement, and that they were helpless to do anything to
change it. What are we to do about this? The answer is, “Don’t just survive.
Dare to be alive!”

Teachers are often a very complicated lot to deal with because they can seldom
agree on anything. There will always be those who resist any kind of change
because they already feel comfortable with the way things are, and there will
always be those who take a conservative stance and want to go back to the old
way of doing things where they feel in control. What will probably have to
happen is that as the old generation goes into retirement, the new generation of
teachers will find it easier to catch up with educators in the rest of the world
which, especially through the Internet, is becoming a global village.

A frequently asked question is, “Does curriculum reform mean that the teacher
withdraws into the background and let’s the students do whatever they want?
The answer is, “No, in both cases.” In the first instance, the teacher is
approaching closer to the students rather than losing contact, and in the second
instance, once the students have focused on a task to do, they will have a lot of
questions about how to do it. This means that the students will have a motive
to approach the teacher and ask for assistance. Self-access teaching is not a
walk in the park. On the contrary it keeps everyone busy all of the time,
especially the teacher who will find that, instead of giving the same old lecture
over and over, he will be facing a new challenge every few minutes.

In conclusion, I would like to add three final points. One is that, far from
becoming a silent partner, the teacher should always be speaking to someone,
with others listening, and it is of the utmost importance that the students have
a role model to follow to help them speak and pronounce words, phrases and
sentences in English. The first place to start learning a language is to hear it
spoken, preferably in an up-close context by a native speaker. The next thing I
want to emphasize is that the task sheets in this book are designed as speaking
activities for the classroom so somebody or everybody should be speaking at all
times. The final point is that, especially in the pronunciation exercises at the
end of the book, it is very important for the students to hear the teacher
pronounce the examples in the text so that they can repeat what they hear,
individually or in groups, in order to get the sounds right and develop a better
accent and sound more like a native speaker.
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Chapter One : Warm-up Activities

This first chapter starts with some lower intermediate classroom activities that
can help the teacher and the students to get to know one-another, in an easy
and relaxed atmosphere.

There are two types of tasks proceeding in series. on alternate pages :

The first type is based on having the students interviewing one-another and
asking questions, so that there is an independent dialogue between class
members, with a minimum of interruption and supervision by the teacher.

The second type is based on easy games and speaking tasks that should not be
seen as threatening to the students and that should help to ease them into
talking in programmed, student-centered exercises.

In the first type of task, after some initial introductions, all the students will be
asked to stand up and walk around the room, in an open, empty space, pushing
their chairs to the side, where necessary, and speaking and getting information
from as many different people in the room as possible. They may also ask the
teacher to answer any of the questions that they find on their handout sheets.
The main strategy of these interview tasks is to have the students find answers
to the various questions, using the various verb tenses, without consciously
realizing that they are also practicing grammar. The teacher should, however,
not just give them the sheets and let stand up and start talking, because they
would certainly use the wrong grammar and verb forms. Therefore, in the first
stage of this exercise, the students should be asked to formulate and jot down
each one of their questions, so they can read them out to the teacher who can
check to see if the verb forms are correct. In other words, only after they have
got the questions straight, is it time to have them stand up and walk and talk.

The second type of task consists of a series of tried, true and tested fun
activities, playing easy games that will almost certainly work for both the
teacher and the students on this level. There is enough variety so that the
teacher can pick and choose which sheets he/she thinks are most appropriate
for the group, depending on interest, skills and ability. The teacher may find
that this chapter is too easy and search further into the book to find more
appropriate materials. In general, the tasks gradually become more difficult, the
text proceeds, chapter by chapter, from lower intermediate to intermediate and
then to upper intermediate and, finally to advanced levels that will really help to
improve students’ comprehension and pronunciation skills.
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Introductions

Since this is a speaking class the teacher should begin by telling his students
something about him or herself, for example, the teacher’s name, his/her place
of birth, qualifications and experience, what he/she as teacher expects students
to do and to get from the class, followed by some guidelines on how student
performance will be evaluated.
Often, classes may begin with everyone standing up and introducing
him/herself. This is a bit abrupt, however, and the activity below works better :

Getting to Know You Interview

Start with an activity to introduce the people in the class to each other as a
warm-up task. Put the students in pairs, in two rows of chairs opposite one
another, and have them interview each other in English, taking-down notes,
following the guideline below. When the interviewing is finished, each student
stands up and introduces his/her partner to the class in no more than two to
three minutes. When the first pair have finished, go to the next pair and so on.

I would like to introduce you to my friend ........... whose nickname is ...........”

Name
Nickname
Birth Date
Place of birth
Family members
Education
Skills
Hobbies
Other interests
Job experience
Sports
Prizes/Awards
Travel experience
What makes this person unique?

As SDS are speaking, the teacher should keep correcting their grammar. For
example, “He was born on the tenth of April in Bangkok.” Or “She graduated
from Chula with a degree in English.” The mistakes will be almost all the same,
so by the time the students near the end of the activity, these mistakes will be
repeated less frequently.
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Twenty Questions for the Teacher

If there are twenty students in the class, get them to put their chairs in a circle.
Then, ask each student to take a sheet of A4 paper and write the numbers from
1-20 down the left-hand margin and write a list of 20 questions to ask the
teacher.Next to the number one (1) each student must write one question as
illustrated below. When the student has written the first question, he/she
passes the sheet to the person on the right, who in turn writes a different
question after the number (2) two, and so on all around the circle, until every
student has written 20 different questions. For example,

1. What is your name?
2. Where do you come from?
3. Do you like football?
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

When the students are finished writing their questions, and their sheets have
gone around the circle, and finally come back to their owners, then, the student
may go around once more and ask the teacher any question that is listed on the
sheet. Nobody should repeat a question that has already been used.
First, the students will ask a question, then, the teacher will answer it. If there
is any grammar mistake in the question, the teacher can correct it, repeating the
question correctly and answering in clear and simple language that everyone
can understand.
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