How to teach speaking

  
      Are you pleased with your students' speaking capability? Do you think the progress they are making is perfectly satisfactory? If so, congratulations. If not, take your time reading this essay and try to put what you are told into practice. As far as teaching speaking is concerned, all language teachers are expected to acquire a set of highly influential and carefully planned strategies in which help students with their speaking proficiency. In theory, mostly language teachers are well aware of various proposed methods, but they cannot observe them appropriately in practice. Considering the most advantageous class activities, free discussion, idiomatic expressions, and storytelling could be included.   

       What some teachers mostly complain about is that some of students do not involve themselves in class activities. However, they are trying their best to provide them with authentic materials. The truth is these kinds of teachers have not tried to get students participating actively. One of the finest activities in which majority students take interest is free discussion. Students do enjoy having an opportunity to express their opinions about highly controversial subjects. Avoid talking about clichés, as they send students to sleep. You need to ask each and every students for their views, and by getting them challenged, make them speak as long as they can. Do not interrupt them while speaking. Accuracy must be ignored especially at the beginning levels. Correct their mistakes (vocabulary use, Grammar usage, and mispronunciation) kindly after they finished speaking.

       Another way, facilitating oral proficiency of language learners is commonly used idiomatic expressions. Conclusively, mostly learners are enthusiastic about learning them because idiomatic expressions help them sound more native. You need to exemplify in order to let them know how authentically they are used in a context. Without delay, ask students to contextualize them and correct if they use them wrongly. It is more than ok if you are able to provide the class with some films in which native speakers use these expressions in real contexts, because the process is easy to figure out when it is demonstrated visually.   

          In the end, storytelling is considered another helpful activity, addressing student's speaking ability. Moreover, it is figured to foster creative thinking and imagination. Going through it, the teacher may call a few students at the beginning of each and every session in order to tell a story which they have read in advance. In order for it to be more entertaining, amusing anecdotes is suggested. Interestingly enough, students would better be allowed to make stories of their own, as visualization would get their thinking bettered.

       To finalize, the most significant part of language teacher's job is to better student's communication faculties. Teachers are supposed to generously supply the maximum opportunity to students to speak the target language by providing a rich and challenging environment that contains cooperative work, authentic materials and task, and shared knowledge. Communication skill would serve its purpose if learners express themselves without anxiety and embarrassment.

Written by: Majid Ja'fari