How to Teach Speaking?

Fluency versus Accuracy

After you have created a good classroom atmosphere to teach speaking, you now have to focus on your goal of teaching. What is the goal of your speaking exercise? Should your exercise help the students to become more fluent or more accurate? This question has to be answered every time before you teach speaking.

Fluency: If you decided to teach fluency, you have to adapt your teaching behaviour. To a certain degree you have to ignore the mistakes students make. Rather you should encourage student to express themselves as often as possible. The more the students can speak the better and the more self-confident they become. Discussions in pairs or in small groups help the students to feel more comfortable, safe and to speak more often. Exercises for improving fluency can be really “open”. For example student could talk about experiences, events or current media topics. If the language level of the class is not really high yet, it is important to give a little help. Expressing an opinion may be an over challenge for beginners. In this case we have to adapt the exercise to the class. By handing out a vocabulary list or an example of the task, students get the necessary help to do the exercise.

Accuracy: If we want to teach accuracy, students need more help and leading. The exercises have to focus on one specific topic. Corrections become really important to achieve your goal. Before we teach accuracy we have to know exactly what we want to teach. Do we want to teach the past simple, vocabulary or the time? We cannot teach them everything at the same time. We have to focus on one thing at the time. If we teach the past simple, student have to know on what they have to focus on too. Everyone has to know what the goal is. To teach accuracy, the exercises need to be really precise. As a teacher we have to check the correctness precisely.

How to Correct Speaking Mistakes?

When it comes to correction we have to know the difference between an error and a slip. An error is a mistake the student cannot correct himself because it is above his current level of language. A slip is a mistake that occurs because a student is tired or is not concentrate enough. He actually would know the correct form but he “forgot” it for the moment. It is important to know this difference to adapt our correction. If there is a slip, we could only tell the student that there is a mistake and let him correct it