Week 8 Class: Creating Creative Speaking Activities

This week's class continues to focus on the skill of speaking, which seems to be a never-ending topic to talk about when it comes to second language teaching and learning.

Marya started her presentation by posing two questions of choice: accuracy and fluency; segmentals and suprasegmentals. Personally i think it is not easy for language teachers to separate these concepts when it comes to real teaching contexts, since the lean toward one or the other depends on what and whom we teach, and that the imbalance is only applicable at a certain point in the teaching, not throughout the curriculum. For instance, if we teach students a grammar point or how to pronounce a new word, it will be tremendously helpful if the focus is on accuracy, since we do not want our students to have an incorrect perception of that grammar point or word pronunciation right from the beginning. Meanwhile, in a speaking activity where the purpose is to get students to talk, fluency should come first and accuracy should be present only when the teacher corrects students' errors afterwards.

The next part of the class that took place in the GLL was about running a google search for speaking activities after a quick wholeclass brainstorm. Again the Internet is a great tool to look for teaching ideas, and we were able to find quite a few resources that can be used for teaching speaking. I myself found a website where music is multipurposefully used in TESL, such as as speaking prompts (have students listen to the song "And i love you" by The Beatles and use it as a prompt to describe their boyfriend/girlfriend or an "old flame"), or materials to practice intonation, etc. In my opinion, apart from achieving the language goal, songs or music, as culturally enriching artifacts, can also be a good way for students to know more about the L2 culture. Also, i liked the activity of each group going over to another group's findings and using what had been found to create a speaking activity. This was undoubtedly a very effective way to share resources among teachers, since the Internet resources are huge and one might not be able to find what others do. My group worked with some very interesting pictures and we created a story-telling activity based on the pictures.

Peer review of Part 1 of the Final Portfolio, the last activity of the class, was useful as always. The break-up of this assignment into two parts did help reduce the workload we will have to do at the end of the semester, which i really like.

After today's class, the biggest thing that lingers in my mind is how to create speaking activities that are fun, inspiring and engaging to students. In my opinion, this requires a lot on the part of teachers, such as of experience, creativity, good observation, the researching and learning spirit, motivation... The list may then go on...