Page 84 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Listening and Speaking

many levels, through their bodies, minds, emotions, language, and social in-
teraction.’ Drama provides learners with a relevant and meaningful context
which gives them the opportunity to be more spontaneous, develop self-
confidence and reduce potential inhibitions.
An efficient way of incorporating drama in the YLs classroom is through
stories in the form of comics which are commonly found in student books
for YLs. They often include dramatized stories with characters the learners
get to know well as they progress from unit to unit. These stories are based
on dialogues which contain a range of useful communication patterns. One
way of exploiting comics for developing speaking skills is to ask pupils to act
out the dialogues from the comics. Before this can be done, however, learn-
ers need to be familiar with the text and be able to pronounce the words cor-
rectly. This can be achieved by first using ‘choral shadowing’ (Klančar, 2006)
in which learners read the text in the bubbles, listen to the dialogues and im-
itate the voices on the tape, trying to sound exactly like them. Then they act
out the dialogues in pairs or small groups and in the end, they can volunteer
to act the story out before the whole class.

Reflection Point
1. Watch a video in which learners do a role play activity and discuss the ef-
fectiveness of the task from the perspective of developing speaking skills.
2. Discuss why speaking is considered to be the most challenging skill to
teach and learn.
3. Watch a video in which learners take part in a dramatization activity based
on the story ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ and discuss the effectiveness of
using drama for developing speaking skills.
4. Think about the way you were taught speaking in primary school. Which
activities/strategies used by the teachers were effective and which were,
in your opinion, not so effective?

Key Takeaways
• Listening can be made more active and learner-centred by connecting it
to another activity, such as listen and draw, listen and guess, etc.
• Efficient speaking activities provide YLs with opportunities to interact in
contextualised communicative situations, such as information gap tasks,
role plays, drama and others.
• A good speaking task should have a clear purpose and outcome and pro-
vide some kind of challenge for the learner.
• Drama is a powerful tool for developing effective speaking skills as it gives
children a number of opportunities to speak even if their language is still
limited.

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