Designing an extended speaking task
Someone has written to me asking me to write one on football but being the brainwashed TEFLer that I am, I’m going to use this post to try and elicit one from her instead…
The secret to every speaking task is to make sure the person they are speaking to really has to listen. You can easily combine this with help on speaking longer with a list of ten to twenty subtopics or questions on the topic that they have to speak about, e.g. “size” and “shape” for describing an object. Only the person listening has the list, and they tick off things that their partner mentions as they listen. When their partner has completely run out of things to say, they can use the relevant unticked things to ask follow up questions, e.g. “When did you buy it?” from “purchase”.
I love this activity, which I basically stole from the “Anecdote” sections from the Inside Out books, as you can use it for basically any topic (including tying in with grammar points) and it makes up for the question and short answer format of so many other TEFL games and tasks. Examples of my uses include:
A person I admire extended speaking
Your most treasured possession mini presentation
A famous person mini presentation and discussion questions
A childhood memory extended speaking
Talking about a movie extended speaking
Talking about a news story extended speaking
If you want to design your own, you can steal or adapt topics and questions from those ones above, do the same with tasks in Inside Out and some of the ones in Cutting Edge, talk or write about the topic yourself and see what subtopics come up, or brainstorm different questions on the topic for each Wh question word and then rewrite them to take away the question forms.
A more game based task is to get them to speak as long as they can on a topic and then give points for the length of speaking minus a deduction for silence during it, e.g. as a board game with topics on it and move six squares for three minutes, five squares for two and a half minutes etc. This is one I use for IELTS a lot and I have a board game somewhere on the site but can’t find it right now. If anyone really wants a copy, I’ll have another search.
The third idea I often use is giving presentations to the class and getting people to vote on the best idea at the end (to keep them listening, as I said above), e.g. presenting crazy inventions.
Any other ideas, books or links for extended speaking anyone?
January 28th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
I was going to say you’d be a boon to have in the staff room, but I guess you already are in a virtual sense. Cheers!
January 28th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Thanks for these. My classes are relatively large so I get small groups to develop the questionnaires and then slit up to find partners. But if you’re teaching a small group it sure is great to have such extensive ones all fixed up. Thank you!
January 29th, 2010 at 12:43 am
Thanks Anne, that’s a good low paper/ no photocopying variation. My only worry is that the preparation stage will make them overprepared when they speak and therefore not be very realistic speaking practice, but if you had the class preparing several different topics that they passed to groups who had prepared different ones it would be similar to my activity
January 29th, 2010 at 4:13 am
I’ve used variations on the Inside Out Anecdotes framework a lot too. It really works from a teachers point of view as it generates huge amounts of STT and once they’ve learned the basic idea can be repeated for other topics with minimal set up.
It can be marred by lazy, shy or just weaker students who can’t keep up with the task. I have also experimented (not altogther successfully) with adding language input into the task. It seems to work best just letting learners do the task using what they know and picking up odd bits of vocabulary off each other.
Do people feel students can learn new language during speaking tasks or is it more easily absorbed during reading tasks or some kind of separate vocabulary work? I’m starting to feel speaking is so hard for many students (especially in Asia) that adding 10-12 new vocabulary items to the task just detracts from the fluency ir accuracy aims.
February 1st, 2010 at 5:56 am
Two more I’d forgotten about:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/inside-out/your-teacher/
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/inside-out/cultural-monologues/
Not even a thank you from the person I wrote this blog post for, btw. Amazing how often that happens with people who think that emailing is easier than thinking for yourself…
September 13th, 2010 at 8:09 am
One more:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/cutting-edge/module-4/your-life-presentations/