Building routines for speaking

Building classroom routines is essential. I think when most of us think of routines, what immediately springs to mind is linked to making the classroom a safe and settled space in terms of behaviour, ie. entry and exit routines, register routines, handing out equipment routines. These are hugely important and make lessons go much more smoothly – and I think we can utilise routines for speaking too.
Over the past few years, I have developed and used a classroom speaking routine that I refer to as the ‘2-minute speaking questions challenge’. I’ve written about this activity before on this blog post – please have a read and see if you may be able to implement this in your classrooms. 
The purpose of this challenge is to develop confidence and accuracy with understanding and (quickly) responding to questions in the target language. It’s been incredibly successful in my school context across a range of prior ability groups, in that all students know several key verbs, can pronounce them accurately, can understand a dozen plus questions in the target language, and know (at minimum) a short answer for each.    
Even more than this, it has been successful in the sense of increasing student motivation to speak. Currently, I run the challenge in probably 3 out of our 4 lessons each fortnight at KS3 (we sometimes do a 2 min vocab quiz, or a longer retrieval starter when I might skip it), and students often request to do it. This even comes from students who can be reticent to have a proper go at other tasks, and who might even say they don’t enjoy learning languages. It seems clear to me that this is due to the fact that this activity is a routine in my classroom.  
This is why the routine works: 
  • It’s expected – students know that it’s going to happen, they know when it happens in the lesson, and they know they have to participate 
  • It’s clear – they know exactly what they need to do and how long they have to do it 
  • They know they can be successful – students have previously experienced success in this activity, and due to the above points, they know they can be successful again 
  • It’s competitive – we log the points scored (number of questions successfully answered in 2 mins as a class), so students work together as a class and compare with other classes. They know that there is a lots of praise on offer for this activity, if they beat another class’ score, their own score, if someone gave a particularly good answer. They also know that if they aren’t listening, their peers might just call them out on it... 
In my opinion having a challenge like this means students speak more and feel more motivated, so it’s a great routine to have in the classroom. However, not every speaking task can be like this – but we can still make speaking routinised. 
In my school we use the EPI methodology, and I definitely see the benefit of tasks being used often enough that students get familiar with the types of activities we do. This removes some of the cognitive load and helps students focus more on the language. When it comes to embedding speaking practice, I think this is particularly effective. It also helps to scaffold more difficult speaking tasks, and allows us as teachers to do more, with less prep. 
For example, after playing sentence bingo, students have heard the sentences modelled many times. After this, I often use the exact same sentences to play mindreaders – where students have to guess the sentence I’m thinking of. This works as a routine because it’s expected that we will do some speaking at this point, it’s clear what they need to do, and it’s been scaffolded well so students know they can experience success. I’m happy because I’ve got more out of just 1 slide, and my students are practicing their speaking skills with no extra prep on my part. 
This also works with building up to more spontaneous extended speaking too. We love trapdoor activities in my classroom, and after this, students can expect that I will get rid of the boxes and they will practice speaking using just the writing frame with blanks. Again, it’s expected, it’s clear, and it’s scaffolded and practiced to the point that students know they can be successful.
I recommend having a range of speaking activities, for each stage of learning, and using them often enough that it can become routinised. This can not only support planning workload, but also increase engagement and motivation. I’ll be sharing my favourite speaking activities in another blog post soon! 
Ultimately, if you want students to do something consistently, you need to make it a norm in your classroom – from behaviour to learning. It needs to be clear, expected, scaffolded, and reinforced with praise.  

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