My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 2

This blog is a continuation of My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 1

I wanted to share some helpful activities that I use often with my classes. The activities I've selected help students to practice and develop different sub-skills of speaking, and are listed here with an explanation and an example.

6. Quelquechose/Algo/Etwas

This requires slightly more prep than the other tasks so far since you need a partner A and partner B version of the resource, but worth it since it practices the two new skills of the new GCSE – reading aloud and dictation. There are two similar texts, and students take it in turns to read it to their partner and to write what they heard in the gaps. I also like that the pair who isn’t speaking has a clear and specific role, as I think this is important for engagement in these types of tasks. Students tend to need coaching to not try to mumble or speed through it, so this is done a little later in the learning sequence (when I am happy that students can accurately read the sentence, without wanting to expect them to be more spontaneous yet) and I have a rule that you need to read it through three times each.

7. Trapdoor

This is a little like mindreaders in that students guess your numbers, and I do this as a class first, then in pairs. If they get any of the prompts wrong, they have to start again from the beginning. For lower ability classes there will also be a number of key sounds highlighted as a visual reminder that they need to be careful with the pronunciation. 

I really like using this as a kind of model paragraph structure, or as a scaffold to speaking a bit more spontaneously. After the main task, I show them a version with all the prompts removed and ask them to say a paragraph to their partner (while their partner makes notes on what they said). I emphasise here that they can use the prompts that were on the board if they can remember them and they want to, but they can also use any word that makes sense within the structure of the paragraph. This means that within my example below a student could potentially say ‘en France’ three times – at this stage that would be okay because they are starting to be more independent. However, I don’t generally find this to be the case because we do this task when students have a bit more vocab they can rely on.

8. Jumbled translations

I’ve included an image of a KS4 and KS3 example below, because it can be used at varying levels of complexity and sentence lengths, and therefore look quite different despite being essentially the same skill/activity. Here, students are given all the target language they need, but they have to manipulate it – by correctly selecting and ordering it. I find it works best to tell students who is going to be partner A (odd numbers) and partner B (even numbers) and tell them that they are checking answers and/or pronunciation while it is their partner’s turn to speak.

9. Grid/slalom translations 

Once the grid is made, this activity can be used for lots of different activities and feels like a great use of time to prepare. I do this as a listening, then writing, then speaking – students hear lots of sentences and write the ‘code’, then they can be told a code to write down on a mini whiteboard (as a bit of a warm-up to speaking). After this there are a few ways to exploit this for speaking: as per the example slide, you could give students codes for sentences they need to read out, or get students to read any sentence for their partner to find the code. You could make this as complex as you like depending on the class, ie. aim to read a super long sentence with at least 2 details per column, or even try to talk for as long as you can on the topic without mentioning any of the details on the grid.

10. Keep talking (with prompts)

The aim of this is for students to be able to speak spontaneously to answer a question, and typically, this is a timed challenge: ‘can you keep talking for 30 seconds?’ The prompts are there primarily to remind them of all the things they know how to say, which means that the prompts could be images (I use images from the Noun Project or Flaticon as they are really clear), or could be text, or could even be grammar based reminders such as ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’, ‘time phrases’, ‘opinion’ etc. Although this works well just on the board, with KS3 I’ve also done this as bingo grids (using https://myfreebingocards.com/bingo-card-generator) where they tick off the prompts as they use them and try to make a line within the time limit.

In practice, I give students time to think (30 seconds to plan it out in their heads without writing anything down), then 30 seconds each to practice in pairs before doing it again. After you could increase the time limit, or use a randomiser (or whatever works for you) to select students to have a go in front of the class.

Bonus: 2-minute speaking questions challenge

I'm adding a bonus here to the Top 10! In my opinion the absolute best speaking activity has got to be the 2-minute speaking questions challenge – because it gets every student speaking independently every lesson! As a class students get 2 minutes to answer as many questions as possible (read more here). While I love the above tasks for teaching students how to structure a more extended answer, the 2-minute speaking questions challenge gets students to understand around 10-20 target language questions and give a short answer which must include an accurate verb. In my classroom this is a core routine; students are really engaged and motivated, and it really helps students to feel confident that they can say something.