Speaking Activities

This entry focuses on speaking resources that are available on the web to ESL learners.

ESL Speaking Lesson
This website is a great place for teachers to turn when they are looking for prompts for communicative activities. There are several communicative worksheets provided that can be printed out and handed to the students. The students then use these to practice having conversations with their classmates--or can even take it home to use for conversation outside the classroom. Several of the worksheets are structured such that the students has to ask a particular question to various people in order fill in their answers in the worksheet. For example, the "Find someone who likes washing dishes" gets the speaker practicing asking questions, listening for responses, and sharing what they do and don't like. This is good practice toward normal conversation. I would say that these worksheets are appropriate for Intermediate learners.

Learn American English
This resource is a good one for independent learners. It covers a range of levels--because some knowledge of English is helpful for navigating, it is probably most appropriate for high beginners and beyond. It is not strictly focused on speaking, but it does include an option that students can use to record their answers to questions. They can then send the audio file to the teacher related to the website, Paul, for feedback. That particular resources is at this link and, because of directions being all in English, would probably be most appropriate for intermediate learners. It would probably be especially useful for learners who do not have access to much authentic input and feedback in their surroundings.

Spoken Skills
I like this site because it addresses the fact that some learners are looking for general English speaking, whereas others are looking for English for specific purposes and want to practice speaking accordingly. It provides fairly structured input ranging from Business English to idioms to minimal pairs. I especially liked this section, a option for students to listen to polite and rude versions of certain phrases. It shows the learners the difference that intonation can make on meaning in American English. After listening, the learner can practice speaking--and can record and play back their own speaking for comparison.

Pronunciation
For a very analytical learner who wants to hone in on pronunciation practice, this website provides very detailed information and demonstrations of how to form the sounds of the English language. It shows in animation the way the mouth and tongue move while forming each sound, and demonstrates each sound alone and in a word. While this website is not for everyone, it can certainly be a perfect resource for either very beginner students who receive plenty of supervision and step-by-step help while navigating around the website, or advanced learners that really want detailed help with specific trouble sounds.

ESL Discussions
This website is a simple one. However, I believe that what it provides could be quite useful to ESL instructors. Here one will find a stockpile of discussion topics with multiple questions provided to help conversations develop on these topics. There are 650 topics to choose from and each topic includes ten questions for student A to ask and ten questions for student B to ask. I believe these questions could be used for pairwork, or could also be helpful in the ESL/EFL classroom for whole class discussion. This certainly helps students develop speaking skills using a communicative approach.