Low prep, high impact: building speaking skills

I do lots of work with my students to practice and build confidence with speaking, and I have tried lots of activities to support them without creating extra workload.

In this post I'd like to share a tried-and-tested lesson plan for revising and consolidating vocabulary, and building speaking skills. This develops the sub-skills required to do speaking well, before putting everything back together - it could take 1 or 2 lessons depending on your classes. Best of all, it uses one resource that will take less than 2 mins to create!

The example I'm using is from a year 9 Spanish group: 


Step 1: Listening as modelling 

I started the lesson by modelling to students what they will be able to produce. I would read the sentences, choosing one of the options, and ask students to write the numbers selected on their mini whiteboards. Eg. If they heard ‘Por la tarde, veo las noticias con mi madre y cada día escucho la música pop porque es guay. Suelo ir de compras con mis amigos pero a mi hermano le gusta bailar porque es barato’ students would write 2, 4, 9, 11. Repeat the activity a few times.

You could also remove the vocab grid from the board, read again and ask students to note key words they heard. 

Step 2: Awareness of phonics/grammar 

This section depends on which language and topic you are teaching – you may wish to draw students’ attention to particular sounds or aspects of grammar. You could do this with choral repetitions, or by asking students to identify a word containing a specific sound. Some examples of phonics awareness questions I asked my students werre ‘in number 6, why are the two cs pronounced differently?’, ‘can you see another example on the board (or think of any other words you know) with these sounds?’, ‘what sound does ‘qu’ make in Spanish?’. It would be my preference to ask these questions as a Think Pair Share, or you could use cold calling etc.  

Step 3: Reading aloud 

Next, I used the grid for a Trapdoor style speaking. Students work in pairs to guess which numbers their partner wrote, by reading the full sentence aloud in target language. If they get it wrong, they start again. This gets students to speak, and consider how to speak, without the additional cognitive load of thinking of what to say. 

If your class needs more support, you could do this as a class first, guessing the teacher’s written numbers, and/or you could highlight the key phonemes that students are more likely to struggle with, as a reminder.  

If your class needs more challenge, you could remove some of the options so students have to remember a bit more. You could do this by making the text colour white or highlighting it in black. 

Step 4: Writing and using vocab productively 

After this, I want students to start thinking more about the meanings of what they are saying (rather than just reading aloud), to activate them for speaking without scaffolding, and deciding what they want to say. I ask students to write an additional option for each box that would make grammatical sense. Writing works as effective preparation for speaking: students are producing the language, but without the time constraints or splitting focus between thinking of the word and the pronunciations. 

Again, there are a few ways you could do this, depending on your class: students could write their options as a whole new paragraph, or they could brainstorm lots of options (Think Pair Share) and just note these. 

Step 5: Speaking spontaneously 

At this point I would expect students to be able to speak more spontaneously on the topic. It is important that students find this motivating rather than daunting to secure their engagement, so this is what works for me, in order to help students improve gradually, and by doing so, increase their confidence. 

  • Tell students they will speak on the topic in pairs for 30 seconds (cover the option boxes but leave at least the sentence starters on the board) 
  • Give 30 seconds thinking time first! This is really important as students can start to plan their answer in their head. 
  • Give 30 seconds per partner to speak. Show a timer. I recommend you tell students who is partner A and B, and tell them which partner starts first. When they aren’t speaking, they should be listening attentively. 
  • Repeat above, with 45 seconds. Repeat again, with 60 seconds, etc. Give thinking time to mentally plan answers before each attempt. 

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

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