Getting learners to talk in English is one of the most difficult challenges facing the teacher. Shyness and lack of confidence are just two of the factors that can cause learners to be reluctant to speak in English and make them rely on their mother tongue instead. In this webinar recording, Penny Ur shares tips and suggestions to overcome this challenge.
Penny Ur suggests that in order to get your students speaking in English, the situation in the classroom needs to meet several conditions:
1. Students need to feel comfortable with the people they are speaking to.
A supportive and familiar climate encourages reluctant learners to speak in English instead of using their mother tongue. Use familiar vocabulary to help the speakers be more comfortable with speaking in English; encouraging humorous and original answers might also help students to feel more at ease.
2. The demands of the speaking task should be well within your students’ ability.
Make your students’ goals clear and achievable, so they don’t feel like they are faced with an impossible task. To create confidence, teach your students useful expressions they can fall back on when looking for words. Dialogues learnt by heart can also be helpful – students will still learn something through repetition, and if the dialogues have a mini drama or story in them, they will be more memorable to them.
3. Your students need to know they can succeed
To relax the learners and make their goal seem achievable, introduce or explain the activities in their mother tongue. For shy students, choral chanting of phrases can be helpful – that way, they can say them under the shelter of other students and don’t need to fear embarrassment. Another way to achieve this is conjecturing: letting your students know there is no one right answer to your question, but a variety of them.
4. Your students need to know their speech will be well received
Mistakes happen – be reassuring! You can correct more confident students so they don’t internalise their mistakes. However, you should avoid correcting shyer students as to not make them lose their confidence. Don’t let other students correct them either!
Nodding and smiling while the student speaks, as well as echoing, can make the speaker feel they are saying something worthwhile. If your students are too nervous or shy to talk to you in English, make them do work in pairs. This gives them more practice with speaking, even if they do some of it in mother tongue.
5. The activities should be interesting and fun to do.
The activities you’re using in class should offer your students enough opportunities to express their own ideas, opinions, experiences … Discussions or even simple questions about interesting visual materials can spark the students’ imagination, while game-like activities will help them set aside their shyness.
To find out more about how to prevent your students from relying on L1 too much and specific activities you can use to make talking in class easier, listen to the webinar recording below: