Teaching speaking

Hi everyone, welcome back to my blog!😁

For today's entry I will be covering the second macro skill which is speaking, and this one I think is the most important, in my personal opinion. When you learn a new language you want to be able to communicate in that language, not just understand it and with that comes the challenge of getting the right pronunciation and using actual day to day expression or words and not just what's on the text book.

How can you teach the speaking skill and a way that is successful and entertaining at the same time for all of the students? The most recommended activities are role-plays about a assigned topic but also, the teacher can ask the students to talk to the classmates that they have next to them to discuss anything that the teacher just explained, which is pretty much what we do on every single class. 

I think this is a good way for students to get to know each other and make friends and at the same time they are developing the speaking skill and working on their pronunciation. Let's say the topic is "Animals", the students can talk to each other about what their favorite animal is, if they have ever visited a zoo and what animals have they seen in real life. There are so many things you can talk about in paris or groups about a specific topic.

Students can also create a role-play about a day to day interaction like a job interview, going to the doctor or ordering food at a restaurant. These realistic situations and they will get to learn new vocabulary and real expression that they can use if and they will most certainly find themselves in this situations.

The high light of last Thursday's class was the "Jazz chants". They were created by the NYU professor Carolyn Graham. In a nutshell, a jazz chant is like the name says, a chant that applies real and useful language to practice pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Again, these are day to day expressions and words that will help students sound more natural and almost like a native speaker when interacting with other speaker. 

Graham explained that she got inspiration from listening to the people in strees of New York and she made the connection that the way we speak kind of has the rhythm of the 4 counts of jazz. It has to be repetitive, catchy and easy to follow and you make it about any topic you want depending on what you want to practice: Vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation.

Teacher Orlando told us to create our own jazz chant and with my group, we decided to practice vocabulary about parts of the body, in this case "Hair" and the different types of hair (Adjectives): Curly, wavy, straight.

Here we were practicing and I was surprised when Nathaly decided to add another rhyme😂

And that's it on teaching speaking, you can come up with many different activities starting with talking partners in the classroom which can be considered as the most simple and after a while students can even create their own jazz chant or different songs to learn and remember the info they just learned.

Thank you so much for reading this entry, stay tuned for the final part of this topic: Teaching receptive skills. Bye-bye!👋