How can speaking skills be improved rather than just practised? In this webinar, Cambridge English Empower co-author, Adrian Doff, offers solutions and activities to develop students’ speaking skills and improve their natural communication.
Telling stories, discussion, personal experiences, and role-play are just some of the activities teachers use to develop students’ speaking skills. All these activities help with language practice, but how can we actually improve students’ speaking skills?
While freer speaking tasks can help, Doff believes that it is also possible to develop skills in a more focused way. Good speaking skills require not only a good grasp of language, but also fluency – fluency is vital as it helps your students to be able to express themselves clearly and easily, without having to pause too much for thought. In order to hold a successful conversation, ‘functional expressions’ are needed – you can see some examples of these in the slide below.
However, we must also account for natural, real-life expressions that occur around these, when speakers are responding with emotion or hesitating to think. These expressions are used to soften and clarify speech, or to change the subject: ‘Well anyway…’
Using speaking strategies like these is a really important tool for beginners; they ‘oil the wheels’ of conversation, as Doff states, and enable students to sound more fluent and natural.
How can we help students to further develop their fluency? Preparation is key – learners need to be given time to prepare for before a discussion. This ‘thinking time’ can be structured, teaching your students to think before they speak.
Watch the webinar recording below to find out Doff’s suggested activities and strategies to use with your students to develop their speaking skills, plus suggestions on how to structure preparation time for better fluency.