By Cai, Xiaofen
HMIS Secondary School
文/中学部 蔡晓奋
Speaking is a skill that the students will be judged upon most in real-life situation. However, English test speaking activities are quite different from everyday oral English. One of the characteristics of spoken is spontaneous, which means it is full of false starts, repetitions, incomplete sentences, and short phrases. Another aspect of producing spoken language is the time-constraint. The students must be able to produce unplanned utterances in real time, otherwise people will not have the patience to listen to them.
In order to let students get high mark on speaking tests. We can focus on classroom speaking teaching. First of all, balance accuracy-based with fluency-based practices. For different aims, we should have different accesses. Different levels vary too. As for Grade-7 students, confidence and patience are important to allow students to talk more. As for fluency-based practices, teachers should encourage students to use language more freely and stimulate real language use.
Second, create more personalizing practice. Since we all remember things best if they are relevant and close to our own personal experiences or when we can express our personal opinions. As a teacher, we can help students learn better by personalizing the content and context so that students can talk or write about their own experiences. For example, while teaching Anna’s blog, teachers can have a task for students to introduce themselves to make friends with Anna. Students can do the pair-work to introduce each other to get more chance to practise speaking in class.
What’s more, create more contextualizing practice. People use different language in different contexts. It is important for students to have a chance to experience the language in meaningful context. Teachers can identify a situation in which a target structure is commonly used. For example, when learning The King and the Rice, teachers can set up a situation like this to let students to think more and talk more: If you were the king or the old man ,what will you do at the end of the story？ In this way, it will make students think in a deeper way as well as practising their speaking.
The trick in teaching speaking is to provide a chance for students to speak and make them speak. The most important aspect of preparing students to speak in real life is to give them as many opportunities as possible to practise producing unplanned, spontaneous, and meaningful speech under time pressure.
English
中文版
