For English students, speaking is the skill that most people want to improve. After years of formal education, they still are not sure how to improve spoken English. Well, I want to introduce you to a new series I’ve been working on that will hopefully provide some answers.
A Focus on Learning to Speaking English
The series focuses on one question, “How can students improve their speaking most effectively?” Of course, I could write several blog posts giving you my opinions or talking about research papers, but I decided to do something a little different (and much more useful and fun).
I wanted to connect with people around the world and hear their opinions. So this series has turned into a set of interviews that will hopefully continue growing into a long list of content that will help English students understand what they need to do to become great speakers.
Because I want to find the best advice for you, my goal is to find and interview certain types of people.
Who I try to interview:
- Great teachers who have seen and helped students become great speakers.
- ESL students who have become great speakers (especially if they have never lived abroad).
- Course developers who have designed courses for speaking better English.
- Any combination of the above.
I will post the first interview next week, so keep an eye out for it!
Know someone I should interview?
If you want to suggest someone for me to interview, or if you have some great advice you want to share with students in an interview, please contact me with the details.
I hope you are excited about this! I’ve had some great conversations already (all about 40 minutes!), and I am sure you will learn a lot from them too.
simonralli June 22, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Hi Nate
Interesting post. I am teaching intermediate students in Brazil, and for me I am focussing on the following areas:
Contractions – would’ve, I’m etc There are many of these that students just don’t seem to get taught early on.
How to ask questions – I think this is underrated and often difficult.
The present perfect – I teach this with as little grammar as possible and try and explain the psychology rather than the grammar
Once these areas are firmed up, and it often does not take long, then I can get students into talking about hypotheticals etc such as would have, could have, should have.
As for focussing on pronunciation, it is a matter of working out what is psychological (Brazilians can be embarrassed to say ‘th’ – they can say it but there is a psychological block. Other letters are hard to say, and then some are almost impossible so I teach “cheats” such as saying a-th rather than trying to put in a glottal stop for 8th.
Simon
@srerobinson (Twitter)
nate.hill June 23, 2012 at 8:43 am
@simonralli @srerobinson Thanks for the great comment, Simon. It sounds like you’re doing you’re students a lot of good!
That’s an interesting point about psychological blocks in regards to pronunciation. In Japan, students struggle with hearing sounds that don’t exist in Japanese. Because they can’t hear the difference, we usually have to work on feeling the difference first. Then, the other problem is that students are taught to speak word by word instead of by logical groups of words in a sentence or phrase. So this takes a lot of practice to un-train, focusing more on how rhythm and stress affect pronunciation.