Speak up or else!

I'm not up to creating awesome titles at the moment, but hopefully it gets the job done in a moderately boring way instead of in an extremely boring way (kind of like the Oscars). Anyways, this week we read about the subject of speaking, which is one of the central focus points in language learning. Both of our texts came from similar yet different points of view and I think that they were able to provide a lot of useful theoretical information as well as plenty of possible activity options.

As Kizuna and I prepare for our presentation tonight we mainly focused on the discussion and conversation activities because they fit both the advanced/proficient speaking level of our class and these activities will hopefully allow us to explore our role as teachers more effectively than say a role play in complaining might. I think our class already has that speaking situation covered... just kidding. I don't think that, I know it! I do think that ideas such as role plays and speeches would be very effective and appropriate speaking activities in an ESL/EFL class though. Speeches may be particularly useful for a class such as business English, since many students in that field might have to refine the art of a speech in their 2nd language in order to speak to a foreign company. We might also think that role plays should be used with younger learners since this might engage their interests more, but I think that most of these activities (even many in the P & B readings) can be adjusted and used in virtually every ESL/EFL setting. For instance a beginning student's ability to give an effective speech may be limited, but it would provide them with a new, even if uncomfortable, way of speaking. Likewise, the role play could be an extremely useful tool for my example of a business English class because they could then project their future goals and situations onto their current classroom experience and this would help to prepare them for a real-life situation. The only thing that I wish these reading would have covered a little more are speaking strategies. We will be discussing some of them in class tonight because I think that many of these strategies are important for our future students to know since they will help to increase their speaking ability.