Building your students' confidence to speak English

Transcription

1 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish

2 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish Secondary Engish Secondary Engish Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish Contents What this unit is about 3 What you can earn in this unit 3 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish 4 2 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

3 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish What this unit is about What this unit is about Learning to speak is an important aspect of anguage education. It can aso be the most fun. Most students are motivated to improve their speaking because they are aware of the advantages of being abe to speak Engish we, but ack the confidence to speak freey in Engish. In this unit, you wi be introduced to activities that you can do with students to deveop their confidence when speaking Engish and make speaking Engish easier for them. You can do this by: using your knowedge of your students to choose a topic that they wi find interesting giving them the anguage they need to tak about that topic monitoring and giving feedback. In these activities, you wi focus on promoting fuency and not accuracy. When you promote fuency, you focus on the meaning of what students want to say and hep them to earn how to express their own ideas. You wi not focus on whether what they say is accurate. Whie accuracy or grammatica correctness is important, it shoud not be a focus of your teaching a the time. Activities that are particuary usefu for promoting fuency incude teing stories and roe pay (covered in this unit) and interviews and discussions (covered in the unit Supporting speaking in Engish: pair and group work). What you can earn in this unit To prepare simpe speaking activities on topics that interest your cass. To prepare and undertake cass activities such as describing an event or teing a story. To monitor and give feedback to students after a speaking activity that heps them to deveop and buids their confidence. 3 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

4 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish Many of your students wi agree that it is usefu to speak Engish we, and they wi be motivated to earn the anguage. You can support their interest in earning Engish by providing interesting topics for them to tak about in your casses. If students are interested in a topic and have something to say about it, then they are more ikey to speak in cass and participate activey in earning. Activity 1: Choosing topics that your students are interested in How we do you know your students? Which topics do you think your students woud be interested in and ike to tak about? Write them down. How coud you find out which topics they are interested in? Look at the ist of topics you have written. Are these topics in the textbooks that you use to teach Engish? Tabe 1 shows some topics from the NCERT textbooks for secondary Engish. Read the topics and make a note of the ones that you think your cass woud enjoy taking about. Discuss the ist with a coeague if you can. Tabe 1 A ist of topics that your students may be interested in. Accidents Animas (pets, wid animas, desert animas) Beauty Boring or househod chores Chidhood Cimbing Everest Courage Diaries Different paces in India Disabiity Dreams and ambitions Education and schoo Fairs and festivas Faith Friendship and famiy reationships Fears Fying Fying kites Heroes and heroines (for exampe, Einstein, Anne Frank, Neson Mandea) Historica events Hobbies Homes Homework Memory and forgetting things Monsoons Prejudice Quarres Success and hard work Traditiona stories Trave and trips Tsunami Vanity Wedding ceremonies Work and jobs You and your coeagues may disagree about which topics you think your students wi want to tak about, but it is ikey that you fee that some topics wi be of more interest to secondary students than others. If you fee that your students wi not be interested in the topics in the textbook, there are ways that you can reate these topics to students ives and make them more interesting for them. 4 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

5 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish In the case study beow, a teacher wants to get his students speaking as much Engish as possibe. He does this by adapting the textbook topic to make it more reevant to his students ives. Case Study 1: Mr Rangan adapts a textbook topic for discussion Mr Rangan teaches Engish to Cass IX. He is trying to think of ways to get his students to speak more Engish in cass. After each reading in the textbook there are speaking activities. For exampe, in the Cass IX Beehive textbook, there is an activity on page 108 that asks students to prepare a short speech motivating femae athetes to dream big. I tried this activity, but it didn t work out. Some students just read out some of the sentences from the esson in Engish. Others discussed it in Hindi. Many just sat quiety. Most of the time, students don t have much to say about topics from the textbook, and this kind of activity is difficut for them. But I have noticed that they tak to each other before and after cass about their hobbies and interests. I started to think of ways that I coud deveop their speaking skis through making the textbook essons more interesting and reevant for them. We were ooking at the chapter with a passage about the tennis champion Maria Sharapova. I know that most of my students may not have heard of Maria Sharapova or Wimbedon they don t reay know that much about tennis, so they may not fee that the text is reevant to them. But I know that my students are interested in sport, and enjoy taking about it. So I thought that I woud try a speaking activity around the topic of sport. I asked my students to name their favourite sporting heroes. Then I wrote some sentences on the board and I tod them to write down the sentences and compete them: 5 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

6 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish I then asked students to sit in groups of four or five. I asked them to compare their answers and agree on who their greatest sports hero is. I gave them five minutes for this activity. As they discussed the subject, I waked around the room and I istened to the groups. Some of the groups were very animated and disagreed about the choices. I eft them to their discussions. I aways prefer if students speak Engish, and I encourage them to do so. But I didn t mind too much about what anguage they were using for this activity because it is about discussing something and finding consensus. I didn t want to hinder their motivation if they were excitedy discussing the topic in Hindi! One group was not taking at a. I decided to sit down with them and hep them. I ooked at their notebooks and said: Ravi ikes Lione Messi the footba payer, but Santosh prefers Sachin Tendukar. Is Messi better than Tendukar? What do you think? In another group, I noticed that some students were using their home anguages at times, and some were mixing Engish and their home anguages. Where this was the case, I tried to hep them with transations for words or phrases in Engish. For exampe, I tod them that!warning! Manga not supportedच प यनश प was caed championship in Engish. After five minutes I stopped the activity. I asked one student from each group to say who the greatest sports hero is. I then asked the students if they had heard of Maria Sharapova. They hadn t, so I asked if they coud guess what sport she was famous for. The students guessed a few sports. Then I asked them to open their books at page 105 so that we coud start the textbook activity. They were much more interested about reading the text than they usuay are. Now, whenever I think that a topic in the textbook is difficut for students to tak about, I try to reate it to their ives and interests. This heps them to speak in Engish and buid on this knowedge with the textbook activity. Activity 2: Try in the cassroom reating a textbook topic to your students ives In Case Study 1, the teacher tried to make the esson more accessibe by reating it to the students interests. Foow these steps to try this technique in your cassroom: What is the next topic in your textbook? Do you think it is one that your students woud enjoy taking about? If it is, write down some sentences about the topic that they can compete. For exampe, if the topic is wedding ceremonies, you coud write sentences such as: The ast wedding I went to was A good wedding shoud have The best food at a wedding is If the topic is more difficut for them to tak about, then you coud think about a topic that might ony be oosey reated to the esson, but woud be of more interest to your students. For exampe, if the topic is about a hero that your students don t know, then you coud write some statements such as: My hero is I ike this person because This person s greatest achievement is 6 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

7 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish In cass, write the statements on the board, and ask your students to compete them. Give them a time imit of three or four minutes for this. Next, organise your cass into groups of four or five, and te them to show their sentences to each other. Ask them to decide on one response. Aow five minutes for this task. As they discuss this, wak around the room and give hep to students who need it. Encourage everyone to use Engish where possibe. See Resource 1, which wi hep you carry out this activity in Engish. You may fee that taking about something that is it not in the textbook might be a poor use of cass time, but activities ike this can be very beneficia because they encourage students interest in earning Engish and give them opportunities to practise usefu anguage skis. For more ideas about resources beyond the textbook that you can use as discussion points in your casses, see the unit Using resources beyond the textbook. 7 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016

8 Buiding your students' confidence to speak Engish 1 Choosing topics to stimuate your students to speak in Engish 8 of 8 Wednesday 16 March 2016