2-minute Speaking Questions Challenge - a quick idea to develop oracy and speaking confidence in MFL

Over the last academic year, I was working on developing oracy and speaking skills with my classes. I wanted to implement more opportunities for students to practice speaking in the target language and to build their confidence. 

In my current school context (non-selective state school, high number of SEND/PP/FSM), I felt that our biggest challenges to overcome were: 

• Willingness to speak in TL (motivation) 
• Knowing confidently how to pronounce what they want to say (phonics)
• Understanding what a TL question means, and using this to help with their answers (comprehension)

Therefore, I’ve developed what I refer to as the ‘2-minute Speaking Questions Challenge’ to attempt to tackle these issues and help students to speak confidently in the target language (we teach French and Spanish). This was very successful this year, and students engaged well; we’ve rolled it out across the entire department this year.  

It also links to the demands of the new GCSE – students will need to be able to respond to unseen questions in the TL, read words aloud and pronounce them correctly. However, while these answers will need to be somewhat developed, my focus with KS3 with this activity has been the ‘fluency’ of response more than quality. By fluency, I mean speaking quickly and speaking reasonably accurately. I emphasise accurate verbs as I think this is essential to being easily understood, and mistakes with verbs tend to be ‘major’ mistakes (including according to GCSE mark schemes). 

What I do 

This is a no-prep activity. I show on the board a 2-minute timer and a randomiser with the names of all students in the class (I personally use school synergy as this is the set-up in my school, but you could use another website). For 2 minutes, I ask simple questions in the TL based on what we have been learning, and the randomiser selects a student to answer. We count how many questions the class can answer in the time. That’s it! 

Some examples of questions: Quelle est la date de ton anniversaire ? / Comment es-tu ? / Quel sport fais-tu ? / Qu’est-ce que tu manges au déjeuner ? 

How I introduced the activity 

After a few weeks, students noticeably increased in confidence and were enjoying speaking much more. I very quickly got to the point where none of the suggestions below were really necessary. However, these ideas really helped make it accessible for my students: 

• I gradually increased the number of questions I asked, starting with just one and adding more each lesson while continuing to include the previous ones. 
• I gave planning time before starting the challenge. I told the students the question(s) immediately before and they had 2 mins to prepare an answer on their whiteboards that they could use to help them. 
• I verbally checked their understanding of the questions, and made a quick list of key verbs they may wish to use on the board (ie. estoy/soy/tengo/no tengo). 

Phonics and making mistakes 

When students pronounced something wrong (or got stuck and didn’t know what to say at all), I recast their answer or gave a model answer for students to repeat after me. This really helped them to practice the key sounds, particularly in the verbs, as they were hearing it several times repeatedly. For example, I frequently corrected year 8 with ‘je mange’ and ‘je bois’. Even when I told them they were not allowed to repeat what the 2 people before them had said (to ensure they were listening, and to elicit a variety of vocab), the verbs were still an essential part of their answer and repeated often.  

In fact, students responded very quickly to a questioning glance, and often corrected their own answers, or others corrected them – I thought this was quite encouraging to see. If students were still struggling with a specific sound, I would address this in more detail quickly and immediately after the speaking challenge. I find it important to always frame students’ mistakes in a positive way – ‘I'm glad you made that mistake because now we can all practice it and get a bit more confident with it’, or ‘thank you for having a go even though that was a tricky word to say’. 

Competition 

Including an element of competition really helped with motivation. I put up a piece of paper in my main teaching classroom with a list of my classes on them and wrote how many questions they successfully answered each time. It was hugely motivating to see what their friends had managed to do, and they were extremely competitive.  

Students did end up improving over time (not necessarily getting better each lesson, but this was very clear to see over a half-term for example), and the visual reminder of their progress was encouraging too. To boost this even further, I set up a ‘reward’ at the end of term for the best class – year 7’s prize for example was a lesson with 10 mins early pack up time and some pain au chocolat while listening to a French song. 

To summarise... this activity has a very specific focus – student answers are very short and basic. But, they do understand a bank of key questions in the target language, they know a few ways they could answer the questions, including verbs, and they can happily, accurately and confidently say their answer in the TL. I would say this is an easy win, and more than worth the 2 mins* per lesson or per couple of lessons. *Up to 5 mins per lesson initially, to scaffold the task 

Give it a go and let me know what you think!