Developing Speaking Skills in the YLs ClassroomBuilding up teaching school materials

Cecilia Maller A.

What is “Speaking Skill”?

Speaking and the art of communications is a productive skill.

Good speaking skills is the act of generating words that can be understood by listeners. A good speaker is clear and informative.

Examples of SSs activities:

Speaking Skills - Asking Questions Many post beginner to lower intermediate

students are quite capable of expressing their ideas reasonably well. However, they often run into problems when asking questions.

This is due to a number of causes: i.e., teachers are the ones that usually ask questions, the inversion of the auxiliary verb and subject can be especially tricky for many students..

This simple example focuses specifically on the question form and helping students gain skill while switching tenses in the question form

Aim: Improving speaking confidence when using question forms

Activity: Intensive auxiliary review followed by student gap question exercises.

Level: Lower-intermediate

Outline:

Focus on auxiliary verb usage by making a number of statements in tenses the students are familiar with. Ask students to identify the auxiliary verb in each case.

Ask a student or students to explain the underlying scheme of the object question form (i.e., ? word Auxiliary Subject Verb). Have students give a number of examples in different tenses.

Split students up into pairs. Distribute worksheet and ask students to ask an appropriate questions for the given answer taking turns.

Follow-up check of questions either by circulating through the student pairs or as a group.

Asking Questions Exercise 1: Ask an appropriate question for the response

A steak, please. Oh, I stayed at home and watched tv. She is reading a book at the moment. We are going to visit France. I usually get up at 7 o'clock. No, he is single. For about 2 years. I was washing up when he arrived.

Now…

Continue with some other examples of activities to develop/improve the speaking skills.

Ask students to each take the second exercise (one for Student A the other for Student B) and complete the gaps by asking their partner for the missing information.

Answer these questionsPLEASE try to use your own words 1. What do teaching kids imply?

2. Why do we need to vary our approaches?

3.Why do they say little kids are like “sponges”?

4. Why do they say correct pronunciation is so important?

5. How can a teacher achieve maximum results in teaching?

6.Which are mixed activities?

7. What do we get if we emphasise oral activities?

8. Why is choral repetition fun for kids?

9. What happens to kids at an early stage in relation to English?

10. What can we do with students in the so called “silent phase”?

Now read the article and create questions to share with the class in……..minutes.

Post reading:

Go to intranet and find Booklet called: “Developing speaking skills and others”

and read pages: 7 to 12 for next class.