Managing Speaking Activities

On managing in-class activities:
Ten useful Tips for managing speaking activities

1- Be integrative to the other skills (namely reading, listening, and writing) with speaking as much as possible. Other skills study can be used to build control of the field, which is an important cycle in the teaching-learning cycle.

2- Contextualize and relate speaking to previous work and experience. Remember Stephan Krashen’s theory of language acquisition and especially the input hypothesis in its claim that knowledge and comprehension of whatever language is built one brick over the other. And that a student’s acquisition is furthered by relying basically on previous experience and knowledge.

3- Make sure that students understood how to interact with your prompts or succinctly your questions.

4- Demonstrate, if in need. Dramatization is the best way to demonstrate for beginner students.

5- Provide students with vocabulary/ transactional language that they might need to accomplish the task.

6- Give clear instructions. That does not mean too much instruction. A few words that are carefully chosen may do well.

7- Set a time limit to the activity, but be flexible!

8- Don’t interrupt or correct. But make notes of commonly made mistake and comment on them at the end of the activity or in another session that you may call ‘remedial work’.

9- Go around, through aisles and give help to those in need of and orient others.

10- Ask for feedback. Students say is invaluable in these new approaches that are essentially humanistic. I mean students-centered.

Prepared by: Nouamane ERRIFKI

Pairing and Grouping students

On managing in-class activities:
Techniques for pairing and grouping students

Motivational, tension-freer, funny, for mixed-ability classes, and above all an outlet from some pesky situations that, the question of with who should I team up? May cause is this bunch of techniques.

a- The ‘wheels’ scenario: Make your students into two sets to form two circles (‘wheels’). One circle faces inwards and the other outwards. The former circle moves around clockwise and the latter anticlockwise, and keep on revolving until the T. whistles to stop. In that stop position, every student gets paired with the one facing him/ her.

b- Find your partner (s): Hand out two sets of cards: an ‘A’ set and a ‘B’ set. Students who get the ‘A’ cards go and fetch, each one, a partner from ‘B’ card holders. Thus, pairs are formed. A mild adaptation can be made to make up groups. Having an ‘A’ card, the student gets off his/ her seat and tries to find three (or whatever number not exceeding five) partners of the ‘B’ cards. Once pairs/ groups are formed, the T. can pick on with his activity.

c- Pick a pair: Get every one of your students to write their own names on a piece of paper. Once finished, you get the pieces of paper and shuffle them, then call on a student to pick two pieces (or more for groups) of paper from the pile. The students picked up become thus pairs or members of one group to accomplish that in-class activity of yours.

d- Numbers: Get one half of your class cards on which numbers are written and get the other half to choose their partners by saying a number aloud. The cards should be handed out at first at random. That’s for pairs formation, as for groups of fours as an instance, get your class divided into four quarters. Hand out numbered cards to three quarters, and make the fourth quarter pick up partners by saying numbers (only three numbers).

e- No need to comment on these techniques: Swap places and Rotate…


Prepared by: Nouamane errifki

On pronunciation

On pronunciation:
Can you say these tongue

twisters without getting
Your toungue tied-up.

If yes, prove it!

1- M- Minnie house makes many marsh mallows for Mickey Mouse to munch on.

2- Sh- - She saw shy sheep.
- She sells seashells on the seashore.

3- B- - Bugs black blood, bugs black blood.
- Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
- Betty botter bought some butter
‘’Oh!’’ she said, ‘‘this butter’s bitter, if I use this bitter butter, it will make butter
Bitter I need a bit of better butter, just to make my batter bitter’’
Betty bought a bit of better butter, now Betty’s batter isn’t bitter.

4- Oo- (As in ‘good’): how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could
Chuck wood?

5- i- (AS in ‘fish’): River Wytham, River Wytham.

6- U- (As in ‘university’): unique New York, unique New York.

7- E- (As in ‘bed’): Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry.

8- OI- (as in ‘boy’): which noise annoys an oyster most, a noisy noise annoys an oyster most.

9- S- : this snail is stale, its tail is stale and this is a stale tale.

10- Fl- : a fly and a flea in a flue were caught, so what did they do?
Said the fly, ‘’let us flee!’’
Said the flea, ‘’let us fly!’’
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

11- r- :- round the ragged rock, the ragged rascal ran.
-Roger rocket ran around the river and rented a raft to ride on.

12- f- : - Phineas Foster fishes for flat flounder.

13- v- : - Veronica Victor vowed to view the vanguard.
- When the very Venetian vet went to Venice, his voyage was viewed with
Vindictive regret by a Venetian vendor named Vemon.

14- ca- (as in ‘can’): canals in the Alps are comparable to a lot of canyon-like canals in
The Capital of Canada.

15- t and th- : The enthusiasm that Teresa Thomas told of took the terribly thin
Thirty-ish Turkish Thespian Thesus Thurber completely by
Surprise.


Prepared by: Nouamane ERRIFKI