Teaching Speaking to our ELL

[smantrach]

I think that one of the challenging tasks of an ESL teacher is to get your Level 1 Entering or Level 2 Beginning students to speak and participate in your classroom. I believe that the students will feel comfortable talking once they feel safe in a learning environment where they are not going to be mocked by their classmates for the speech errors or mistakes they make. Also, if they know that their teacher is supportive of their progress even if it’s a slow one, they will start speaking. I think that if we apply in our classroom the appropriate speaking skills, our students can start speaking sooner than we think. Some of these strategies are to provide our students with the appropriate feedback and give them the opportunity to initiate their own conversations. Most of the time, we teachers take the monopole of the conversations and the dialogues in the classroom and don’t let our students initiate them.

[ginawirth]

Teaching speaking can be a challenge for young students no matter what the students' proficiency level. Young students (around age 5,6,7) tend to be quiet rather than be wrong in class. Younger students tend to open up more and let their guard down when they are involved in tasks that seem "playful" in nature. For example, a simple game of having a student select a letter of the alphabet and naming something that begins with that letter can serve as a starting point of speech for a student without them even realizing it! A simple game with easy to understand directions which allows for student creativity and flexibility could prove to be an exciting activity that will allow students to begin to experiment, if even minimally, with their speech and manipulation of language.