3 Using textbook lessons to help your students to develop confidence in speaking English
You can also use lessons from the textbook to help your students develop their English speaking skills and pronunciation. A simple way to do this is to read aloud from the textbook and ask your students to repeat after you all together. This helps students learn how to pronounce English and become familiar with its rhythms.
This kind of repetition activity works particularly well with short passages such as dialogues and poetry. It is a simple and short activity that can done in just a few minutes, perhaps at the beginning of a lesson when you are teaching a new text or new vocabulary.
Getting your students to repeat something together is useful in English language teaching because it:
- gives all students a chance to speak – even in large classes, every student gets to practise
- is good for shy students, as it gives them the opportunity to speak along with more confident students before they speak on their own
- allows students to practise their pronunciation and become familiar with the rhythms of English.
Case Study 2: Mrs Balasubramanium uses a poem from the textbook to help her students practise speaking English
Mrs Balasubramanium has recently moved to a government school in a rural area, and her Class IX students find it difficult to speak in English. She wants to help them to develop their confidence and pronunciation and uses lessons from the textbook to do this.
I tried asking my students some simple questions about their lives, but they couldn’t answer me. So I realised that I had to start at the beginning. The best way that I could think of to get them used to practise speaking English was by reading out loud. The easiest texts to use are from lessons from the text book, so I decided to make a start with the very next lesson – a poem from Chapter 8 of the NCERT Class IX textbook Beehive: ‘Trees’, by Joyce Kilmer:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me.
But only God can make a tree.
Before the class, I practised saying the poem out loud so that I felt confident reading it, and could read it out aloud and provide them with a good model. In the class, I read two lines of the poem aloud at a time, with rhythm, and asked the students to repeat them after me like this:
And they repeated this. I just wanted them to hear the poem, to say it with rhythm, and to practise their pronunciation. At this point, I wasn’t concerned about what they understood about the poem.
I then asked the whole class to read the next two lines together. So I read:
And the students followed:
Then I divided my class into two halves. I told one half of the class to read the first two lines aloud; I told the other half of the class to read the second two lines aloud.
At first the students didn’t say the lines together, so I stopped them and asked them to do it again. This time I used my hands to signal when students should start a new line. I felt like I was conducting an orchestra!
I also walked around the classroom to make sure that all of the students were joining in. I encouraged any students who were not participating by saying, ‘Come on, let’s all speak together. Just try it!’
Most of the students seemed to enjoy saying the poem and became quite competitive. Each group wanted to say their line better than the other group! I hope that this will give them confidence to start speaking in English. It might also help them to remember the poem better, and to use some of the language from it in their own speaking and writing.
At first I thought it wasn’t appropriate to do this kind of activity with secondary students, as they really should be more confident and able to speak English. But it is only by practising like this that they can gain that confidence. While this activity did not require them to produce any of their own language, at least they were speaking out loud and practising their pronunciation. I’m now regularly starting our classes with a speaking activity. Once they get more confident with speaking out loud, I will try other speaking activities where they use English to communicate.
Activity 3: Trying out chorusing with a lesson from the textbook
Follow the steps below to try using a repetition activity in your classroom.
- Look through the next part of the textbook that you are going to teach.
- Choose a short text, or part of a text, that you can use for a speaking activity. Any short text will do but poems and dialogues are ideal.
- Practise saying the text on your own before the class. Say it until you feel confident. If you’re not sure about the pronunciation of any words, check with a colleague or friend.
- In class, read the text (or some of the text) aloud to your students. Read line by line (or two lines at a time) and ask your students to repeat after you. Make sure that you read out complete lines of text, or complete sections – not one word at a time. Your students need to practise speaking groups of meaningful words so that they get a sense of the rhythm of the language and begin to make connections between words.
- When you have read the text, and the students have repeated it, divide the class into two or three large groups. Give each group a different part of the text to read.
- Point to each group when it is their time to read.
- If your students don’t repeat together, stop the activity and start again. Use gestures to keep everybody in time.
- Don’t interrupt your students when they are repeating, even if they make a mistake. Let them finish the line or section. You can deal with pronunciation mistakes later.
- Walk around the room and encourage everyone to participate.
 Pause for thought Here are some questions for you to think about after trying this activity. If possible, discuss these questions with a colleague.
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If all your students did not participate, perhaps they need more time to gain the confidence to speak. They will develop this if you do speaking activities regularly. Be sure to praise and encourage them. Don’t call attention to mistakes. Give the shy students more opportunities and encouragement to speak. See Resource 4, ‘Involving all’, for examples of this.
You can keep this kind of activity interesting by asking your students to repeat what they are saying in English in different ways: slowly, quickly, loudly, quietly, in a sad way and so on. Ask different students to read out their texts. You might first ask the whole class, then smaller groups and even individuals. Try to include all of your students. While this can be a fun activity, it could become dull if repeated too many times or applied to every text. Don’t ask students to repeat the same thing too many times or they will get bored.
The purpose of repetition activities is to help students build up confidence to speak and practise their pronunciation. It is not to memorise a poem. By practising reading out a poem, students become familiar with the sounds and rhythms of the English language. However, in order to learn to communicate in English, they need to do more than repeat sentences from a textbook. Students also need to participate in communicative speaking activities that can be applied to real-life situations.
2 Helping students speak more English for everyday classroom activities