2 Helping students speak more English for everyday classroom activities
When you use English for everyday classroom activities, this creates more opportunities for your students to respond to you using English. There is a real purpose for your students to use the language to communicate. You can help your students to speak more English, both with you and with each other, by suggesting some phrases that they can use and by having them practise these phrases. With practice, students will become more confident and more able to use the language independently.
 Pause for thought Think about the last English class that you taught:
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In many English classes, students don’t speak much English. They may read aloud passages or poems from the textbook, or they may read out something that they have written. These are all useful activities and help students with their pronunciation. They also allow them to get used to saying things in English. However, students also need to practise using English to communicate for real-life purposes, both within the classroom and outside it.
The following activity gives you some ideas to help your students to practise some phrases that they can use for everyday classroom activities, both with you and with other students. This will build their confidence and ability to speak independently.
Activity 2: Helping your students to use more English for everyday classroom activities
This activity helps you find some examples of classroom language that your students can use with you and each other. It then gives you some strategies for helping them to practise the language so that it can become more natural to them.
Part 1: Making a list of everyday English
- Ask your students: ‘What are the questions you ask me most often?’ If your students don’t ask many questions, you can help them to think about the type of questions that they could ask you. Do this in their home language. These might be questions like:
You could also ask them to think about questions that they ask each other when they are doing activities in their English lessons, for example in pair work (see Resource 2 for examples). If your students aren’t used to doing pair work, this will help you to introduce the idea of doing it. See Resource 3, ‘Using pairwork’, for more information.
- Write these questions on the blackboard in the students’ home language.
- Together with your students, think about how you can say these phrases in English.
- Write the English phrases on the blackboard.
- To practise pronunciation, have your students listen and repeat each phrase after you. This helps them build their confidence in saying these expressions in a group.
- Choose a few students from the class to repeat the phrase individually. This allows you to check whether they are becoming confident enough to use these phrases. If you find that your students are hesitant or unclear about the pronunciation, have them repeat the phrases again in a group.
- To check their understanding, say the phrase in the students’ home language and have them say the equivalent phrase in English.
- Get a piece of chart paper. Call on individual students to write down one phrase each on the paper.
- Hang the paper on the classroom walls. Remind your students of the phrases every day and encourage them to use them.
- Once the students are comfortable using these phrases, make a new chart of phrases that you can use in the classroom so that you can increase the amount of English you use.
Part 2: Practising classroom language
In Part 1 you found and displayed some everyday language that students can use in the classroom. In order for your students to become confident in using these phrases regularly, they will need practice. This activity gives you some ideas about how to help your students to practise these phrases in a group, in pairs and individually so that the language becomes more natural for them to use.
- Choose one of the everyday phrases or dialogues that you have displayed on chart paper, for example this dialogue that students could use in a pairwork activity:
- Say one of the phrases (for example ‘Do you know what this word means?’). Tell the students: ‘Repeat after me’, and have them repeat after you as a group. Do this two or three times. This builds their confidence because it allows them to practise the new language in a group which often feels safer.
- Choose a few students from the class to repeat the phrase individually. This allows you to check whether they are becoming confident to use these phrases. If you find that students are hesitant or unclear about the pronunciation, have your students repeat the phrases again in a group.
- Then say the response to that phrase (for example ‘No, I don’t know it either.’). Again, tell the students to repeat the response after you as a group. Repeat this a few times and ask individual students to repeat it. Do this for the entire dialogue.
- Ask a question and tell your students to repeat the response as a group. You ask:
Students reply in chorus:
Continue this for the whole dialogue. This demonstrates how the phrases might be used in communication.
- Divide the class into two halves. One side choruses the question:
The other side choruses the answer.
Continue this for the whole dialogue. Point to each group when it is their time to read. If the students don’t repeat together, stop the activity and start again. You can use gestures to keep everybody in time. If you notice that students are having problems pronouncing any particular words (e.g. ‘either’), have them repeat those words a few times.
- By now the students should have built up their confidence to speak the phrases. Now they can practise them in pairs to make them more confident when speaking on their own. Ask the students to get into pairs. Ask one student to ask the question. The other student replies. Then they switch roles. While working in pairs, students practise the dialogue as if it were a conversation. They are not using language independently, but they are becoming familiar with useful phrases that they will soon be able to use in order to communicate.
As your students work in pairs, walk around the class to see how they are getting on. Praise your students for participating and encourage them to continue the good work. Note if students are having any problems with pronunciation so that you can practise difficult words in a follow-up activity.
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Pause for thought After trying this activity with your students, think about these questions:
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Students may hesitate to use English at first. If they say something in their home language that is on the chart paper, you could say: ‘Could you please try to say that in English?’ and point to the chart paper to remind them of the phrase. Or you could ask the class, ‘Students, can anyone help Vishnu say that in English?’
Once most students seem comfortable using the phrases that you have displayed, you could make another poster of phrases. For example, you could make posters of vocabulary for different lessons from textbook, or for different topics that you discuss. Keep reminding your students to use English as often as possible.
1 English for everyday classroom activities