Encourage Students to Speak

How to Encourage Students to Speak up in English Do you think that to make your students speak up during English lesson in the classroom is difficult? Yes, some of teachers think so. Here is some ideas to encourage your students speak up during the activities of English class.

Classroom Environment

Ensuring that you maintain a constructive classroom environment will help immensely. It is important that students not feel like they will be laughed at or given negative feedback. Try to provide students with positive criticism as opposed to reinforcing the fact that they have made a mistake or performed poorly. Making mistakes is simply part of the learning process and students that make mistakes will give you a good idea of what you need to focus on because there are probably other students in your class that have the same questions or misunderstandings.

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Activities for All Types of Learners

Planning exercises that appeal to different types of learners is an essential part of getting all your students to participate. Perhaps some students who perform well on tests are quite shy while students who perform poorly on tests are natural performers and enjoy role play activities. Giving a range of activities that target visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners will increase student participation. The more variety there is in your lessons, the more your students will gain from them. Having a combination of worksheets, role-plays, games, listening exercises, etc. will keep students engaged and provide them with plenty of practice.

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Motivation Matters!

In group activities making groups or teams and having races often gets students motivated. Competition will drive students to not only be the best performing group but also work hard to not let down their teammates. These activities should still be conducted in an encouraging and friendly environment so as to not cause your students lots of stress. It is important to have students take turns when working in groups so that all students are required to participate. While working as a group to answer a question is great, there should be a set order that determines which student presents the answer to the class at any given point in the activity. By having students form groups in a variety of ways, you can ensure that students are placed in different groups throughout the course and thus no serious rivalry can take root between groups of students. Sometimes simply the satisfaction of winning is not enough to motive students and then just as you would for motivating students at the individual level, prizes or points may help.

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Individual Level Incentives

At the individual level incentives such as points or, if acceptable on occasion, some sort of prize may lead students to participate more fully in activities. Participation should always be kept in mind when grading students however besides reminding students that they are graded on participation, it can be challenging for both you and them to keep a record of it. A points system where students acquire stickers or stamps throughout the semester by volunteering to answer questions or doing exceptional work in class would be a good idea. Simply tell students that they need maybe ten points to get one hundred percent for their participation grade in a semester and that additional points could be considered extra credit. If a student has a little card to collect these stickers or stamps, it will serve as a visual reminder throughout the term of how well they are doing in reaching the target number and will make calculating a student’s overall participation much easier for you as well. Towards the end of the term it is a good idea to have a lesson where students place their cards on their desks so that you can give students who have not actively participated much throughout the semester special opportunities to raise their score somewhat as opposed to giving very active students too many extra credit points.

3Finding good topics

Every class, of course, is different. In Learning Teaching (2005), Jim Scrivener provides a list of interesting topics (p.402) and others are widely available. While suggesting more ideas here would add little in terms of methodology, here are a few things to think about when deciding on a topic:

• Is it something that everybody in the class can relate to, to some extent? Things like politics or music, while often successful, can isolate the less interested or knowledgeable.
• Are the students capable of dealing with the subject on a meaningful level, or is their English too much of a handicap?
• Is it something they might have talked, read or thought about much before? For example, something like the environment can provide useful material but is unlikely to stimulate much discussion if students are simply regurgitating clichéd arguments translated from their own language.

How would you feel talking about the same thing in front of other people? Maybe a shy student would be more comfortable with a light-hearted discussion on national stereotypes or differences between generations than one on the death penalty or abortion laws.

5Providing the tools

It is quite possible and often necessary for learners to use idioms, functions and vocabulary in a supportive English classroom that they hesitate to use in their first language. This final section looks at ways to equip learners with the necessary tools to turn some of the above ideas into successful speaking lessons, through language input and by turning the students on to the subject. In an ideal lesson, the students should be more than ready to speak by the time the teacher asks them to.

• The language input is very much specific to the exercise or discussion. A general tip is to make sure that the essential grammar, vocabulary or example questions are on the board following the presentation stage so that the focus doesn't return to the teacher during the activity itself. For example, using the Past, Present, Future idea mentioned above, I would always write What happened in…? Who / what was…? Why is… important? Why / when would you like to…? on the board while eliciting and answering these questions.
• Many speaking games are wholly dependant on one grammar item or function. One example of this is the Tag teams lesson plan in the Lesson Share section. Another is the 'interrupting game.' In this activity, one student talks about something in great detail (their day so far, their favourite film…) while the others score points by interrupting politely with questions, no matter how trivial. Again, it is crucial that the questioners have a record of the functional language (Excuse me but… I'm sorry to interrupt but… Could I stop you for a second? and so on.)
• During a livelier debate a way to give people the tools to speak (and use the target language) is to prepare various cards saying I absolutely agree, I'm not so sure, I really don't think so, etc. for each student or team. A point is earned for playing a card and backing it up with a relevant argument.
• Finally, one of the most important steps to a good speaking class is to activate the students' interest in the topic and get them thinking about it. This might mean anything from a five minute warmer to a long reading or listening exercise. There are almost as many possibilities as there are topics, but here are a few ideas:

1. Pictures, especially photos, often generate hundreds of ideas with very little input from the teacher. For example, the 'task' section talked about a debate on the environment. To introduce this, copy of two photos for each pair of students, one of a water park and one of a fishing village. The first task is simply to think of five adjectives for each. Next, a situation is introduced where the village council is going bankrupt and a big water park developer has put in a proposal to build there. The group is split into developers and traditional fishing families (who each have ten minutes to write a presentation and objections to the other team) and councillors (who spend the ten minutes writing questions for both teams.) In this example, the pictures have served the dual purpose of 'activating the schemata' of the students by bringing the situation to life, and of showing the teacher who would suit which role in the final exercise (a student who gives the adjectives 'noisy, smelly and tacky' for the park may not be best for the role of developer.)
2. Realia works in a similar way to pictures. One idea is to bring a number of random objects to the lesson (a coat hanger, a stapler, a pair of glasses, a guitar string…) and give the class one minute to look at them. Afterwards, cover them up and allow one minute to remember what was there. Explain that the students are on a sinking ship, and the things that they remember are the things that will be washed up on a desert island with them. This leads on to two discussions: The first is the best way to use the objects for survival (another good pyramid-style exercise) and second, in pairs, a conversation based around Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, where guests can nominate a book, a record, a person and one or two luxury items to take to a desert island, and explain why.
3. Traditional warmers: A good warmer sets up the whole class, and there are hundreds of ideas in the warmers section of this website, or in Ur and Wright's 'Five-Minute Activities'.

For the above discussion on stupid criminals, pairs or small groups could rank a list of crimes in order of seriousness, or for the 'people who have changed the world' discussion, you could play twenty questions with a hero of your own. Even if it's as simple as a brainstorm on the board, it's crucial that the warmer is lively, involves everybody and pre-empts any serious vocabulary problems that may occur later.