My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 1

I’ve written quite a bit about how to develop our students’ speaking skills, and making sure we scaffold and challenge appropriate to their current understanding and abilities. I’ve also discussed how we can make speaking activities a classroom routine, increasing confidence and motivation by making it so students expect to have to speak, and so they are clear on what they need to do.

I thought it would be helpful to write a post explaining my top 10 speaking tasks at the moment as well as how, when, and why I use them. They aren’t listed in any particular order but are roughly in order of when I might use them with my classes if I’m introducing a new topic. (Most of my example slides below come from tasks I’ve done with my lovely year 10 French group throughout last year.) So, without further ado...

1. Repeat if correct (also known as ‘beat the teacher’)

This is great at the start of a topic as it’s repetition based, so ideal for drilling new vocab or a particular phoneme. KS3 classes love it, but it’s also worked well for KS4 classes who like games! It could be done with words or images (I typically use both, although just images if it’s later on in the learning sequence and I want to test vocab retrieval too). The teacher needs to point at a prompt and say it in TL, then point at the students who repeat it, but if it’s not correct they need to stay silent. In terms of mistakes, I often do a mixture of saying the wrong word, or a mispronunciation of the correct word.


2. Mindreaders

This is again near the beginning of the learning sequence, although only when I think students are ready to actually read aloud independently rather than just echoing (LINK). I often add this straight after a listening task like sentence bingo, using the exact same sentences – it's great scaffolding because they’ve just been hearing them modelled correctly, and adds some speaking practice and some fun for no additional prep on my part. With this sort of task, I always do an example one as a whole class, where the class work together to guess my sentence first; this means that at this stage if there is a clear phonics misconception we can address it before they do the task in pairs.



3. Attention à la bombe (21)

Students can get really competitive about reading aloud with this game, and I like it because it means they are thinking more about the game than the fact that they are speaking in the target language.



4. Battleships

With this task students need to create sentences to guess where the Xs are hidden, as a class or in pairs. You can be incredibly versatile with the prompts used in a game like battleships, which means it can be suited to pretty much any lesson. Earlier on in the learning sequence you could use prompts written in the target language, or later on, prompts in English or even with images. The number of columns and rows aren’t fixed either – in the past I’ve used infinitives for each column and ‘past’ and ‘present’ for the rows to add some spoken grammar practice.



5. Spreeder

This is a fantastic speed-reading website – plug in any text and students have to read each word as it appears. I tend to start with 75-100 words per minute depending on the class, and increase the speed gradually – which they are always very enthusiastic about! There is no need to write new texts here; I often use reading texts we have just been working on to liven it up a bit.



For activities 6-10, come back for part 2 tomorrow!

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