Right approach to teach Spoken English

Welcome to ESL Printables, the website where English Language teachers exchange resources: worksheets, lesson plans, activities, etc.
Our collection is growing every day with the help of many teachers. If you want to download you have to send your own contributions.

ESL Forum:

Techniques and methods in Language Teaching

Games, activities and teaching ideas

Grammar and Linguistics

Teaching material

Concerning worksheets

Concerning powerpoints

Concerning online exercises

Make suggestions, report errors

Ask for help

Message board

ESL forum > Techniques and methods in Language Teaching > Right approach to teach Spoken English

Right approach to teach Spoken English

miss_ruchi

Right approach to teach Spoken English

Hi,

I am teaching adult students who come for a short term course (say 3-4 months or sometimes even less) to improve/ learn Spoken English.

The students are all mixed levels. Some of them familiar with the language but can�t speak, others do not know the language at all...

I have a dual responsibility in my institute...i teach and design the course contents as well...the difficulty I�m facing is in choosing the right approach....

I�ve read a lot of books and material online and there are many different ideas...thinking of all those i�ve following options

(I�ve divided the course into 4 levels 0,A,B,C)

1/ Start the lesson with a short warm up as in askng about the day or anything related to the topic.

2/ Introduce a short conversation (preset) to introduce the grammar points for the day.

3/ Read the dialogue myself and ask students to copy the pronunciation.

4/ Let them do the dialogue in pairs

5/ Discuss difficult word meanings

6/ Do the related grammar points

7/ Exercises

8/ Speaking Activity

Now I�ve a confusion in point 6. If i�m focusing on conversational English should I just introduce one rule and let them practise a lot or should I give all the rules (For eg:- in future tense) and practise for a short while. Right now I�m trying to mix both these approaches and as a result my lessons are going on for good 4-5 days which I believe is too long.

Pls accept my apologies for such a long note but i really need to know your opinion....thanks

15 Jan 2009

douglas

I use a slightly different method. I work off the concept that if it�s "converstaional", they should be conversing. As a result, I tend to not necessarily focus onany given rules; I plan certain conversational situations and correct/teach the rules as they occur. This can be a rather dificult way to teach because you have to be ready for almost anything. It works for teaching adults because you can tell them, "I need to do a little more preparation before we discuss that, so I don�t confuse all of you." and then I discuss the rule at the beginning of our next lesson together. Don�t get me wrong, I do have a plan of where I am going and what I want to cover in each lesson. I just try to come up with conversational activities that will trigger the topics I want to discuss. Sometimes I do say: "Here�s something I think you might find interesting" or "you may need in the future" and then I bring up the topic I want to discuss. It tends to work for me, but I currently only teach adults and can imagine you have to have a more structured format if teaching children. Key for me is to always remind my self the course is called "conversational", we should be conversing.

Douglas

16 Jan 2009