Activities to develop speaking skills:
af Marisol González
1. Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills
1.1. Using minimal responses
1.1.1. The beginning student could participate with elementry vocabulry.
2. Painting/photograph
3. Compare 2 similar objects - e.g. maps of same area from different times
4. Guess what/who I am describing
5. Narrating
6. Story endings
7. Tell story/poem onto tape
8. Read aloud from big book, picture book
9. How I made this model, etc
10. What happened - an incident at school
11. Explain something to an alien
12. How I get to school/to my house
13. Draft a piece of writing Reporting News - personal, local, national
14. Sports event Science experiment Report back on group work Questioning
15. Surveys - e.g. dialects Reasoning, persuading, arguing What is the link between these 3 objects? Problem solving
16. List criteria for a good talk/talker/listener Reading and writing conferences Compare accents/dialects Word games
17. Communicative Output Activities
17.1. Prepare carefully Set a goal or outcome Use role cards Brainstorm Keep groups small Give students time to prepare Be present as a resource, not a monitor Allow students to work at their own levels Do topical follow-up Do linguistic follow-up Prepare the students Set a goal or outcome Use small groups instead of whole-class discussion Allow students to participate in their own way
18. Describing
19. Feely bag/box (where students only feel/touch the object without looking at it)
20. Newspaper articles from different papers
21. Draw what/who I am describing
22. Storytelling - single or collaborative
23. Learn a story/poem by heart
24. Make a story from 6 unrelated objects
25. Explaining
26. Rules of games
27. Describe how to brush teeth, how to make toast or other routines.
28. Question box - everyone puts in a question, child picks one out to answer
29. Oral book review Weather Take a message
30. Interviews - visitors, adults in school 20 questions Hunt the object Guess what this object is for - e.g. an unfamiliar kitchen gadget Devise questions for each other on a topic Investigations
31. Debates, discussions - formal/informal Sequencing, ordering, sorting, matching activities Reflection and language study Talk diary
32. Draw people in school, add a speech bubble - what would they say? Word displays, collections, searches
33. Speaking in the language classroom
33.1. Speaking is using background and linguistic knowledge to create an oral message that will be meaningful for the intended audience (Chastain 1988).
34. Planning, predicting, exploring Design a room/area Prepare a presentation
