Page 83 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Developing Speaking

Table 4.2 Continued from the previous page
Types Examples
Role play Role plays give learners great opportunities for practising the FL in real-life situ-
ations. Here are some roles learners can play in the classroom: shopkeeper and
customer in a shop, waiter and guest in a restaurant, flight attendant and pas-
senger on a plane, doctor and patient in hospital, teacher and student at school,
etc. To make the role play more realistic, it is useful to include realia and differ-
ent props, such as creating a simulated shop in one part of the classroom, with a
cashier, paper money, and a variety of empty food boxes and containers.
Class One of the most common speaking production activities in the language class-
conference room is the oral presentation. Learners are asked to present different things, an
animal, a town, a famous person, etc. However, traditional oral presentations may
be modified and made more communicative by creating a meaningful context.
Rather than simply listening to their school mates’ oral presentations, the learn-
ers may be told that they will be taking part in a scientific conference. Here are
some ideas for creating the context for the conference: give the conference a
name (e.g. Save our planet), write a conference programme, appoint a student to
start and conclude the conference, ask the presenter questions, etc.
Project There are a number of benefits of using project-work and discovery-oriented
report tasks with YLs. In such activities, learners usually work together with a common
purpose to achieve a concrete outcome: a poster, a video, a product, etc. They
work together on a task often over several weeks which requires from them
involvement, co-operation and, most importantly, responsibility. As they put
considerable effort in the project-activities, they are usually proud of their own
work and eager to present their results. The teacher my also encourage them to
present the results in creative and innovative ways.

ers are still asked to describe a monster, using the same sentence pattern as
before, only this time, they are required to do so in an information-gap task
in which two learners have slightly different monsters and need to find the
main differences between them. The most important difference between the
two activities is in the fact that in the second task, the learners do not sim-
ply reproduce the given sentence pattern. They are involved in a meaning
negotiation in which they have to cooperate and come to a common under-
standing, making the activity both more meaningful and creative.
Table 4.2 presents some ideas for speaking activities which provide YLs
with opportunities to interact in contextualised communicative situations.
Another powerful tool for developing effective speaking skills is drama as
it gives children a number of opportunities to speak even if their language
is still limited. Just imagine the difference between simply reading a dia-
logue aloud and acting it out, putting themselves in the shoes of the char-
acters (Phillips, 1999). As the author (p. 6) argues, ‘drama involves children at

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