Thoughts about Teaching Speaking

After wathcing group four's presentation about how to teach speaking, some thoughts came across my mind. Two of the most crucail factors of a successful speaking lesson are the classroom climate and the design of questions.

A lower-pressure environment will elicit students to "open their mouth" more than higher-pressure one. Learners in Taiwan are usually afraid of speak English in the classroom. But why? Because they are under the pressured and unsafe environment! Teachers used to challenge students with difficult questions or ask individual student to speak in public, which results in the "loosing face" phenomenon in which students decrease their self-confidence. However, in group four's presentation, we heard lots of laughter in the classroom and learners talked a lot with their partners during the activities. That's because students diminished their inhibition and felt safe in that situation. There are some ways to reach this goal. Teacher's characteristics and teahcing style, design of activity, cooperative learning can lower the anxiety of learners and then increse their motivation of speaking English.

The second factor relates to the questions teachers designed for students to speak during the activities. A good design of questions precisely guides students how to conduct their discussion and what to discuss. If the instruction of speaking activities is not well-mentioned, students will feel confuced and thus loose their interest on the activity. Take group fours' presentation for example, there is a contrast between two speaking activities, infornation gap and what's your ideal wedding. The former was provided clear instruction by the teacher orally, and students know they have to get the correct information by asking questions to another group. In the latter activity, the process is the same, but the questions made students confuced. In this case, teachers need to spend extra time to explain what is what, which is not efficient enough.

Therefore, a successful and efficient speaking activity relies on the good design of questions and a positive classroom environment.