What this unit is about

There are two important factors that can lead to your students becoming more confident in listening to and speaking English:

• regular exposure to spoken English and hearing the language as it is used for communication
• regular practise in speaking English so that they develop confidence in using the language, becoming familiar with its rhythms and comfortable with pronouncing it.

It is important for your students to have many opportunities to engage in real and meaningful communications in English. One good way of learning a language is by immersion, where it is used in daily life. This is how your students learned their home languages. Since English plays an important role in India, many of them may be learning English this way as well. But even if your students do not have much exposure to English outside of the classroom, they can still make significant progress in learning the language if they get lots of practice listening to and speaking it inside the classroom (Lindsay and Knight, 2006, p. 8).

This unit explores how you can increase the number of interactions in English in your classroom. This way, speaking English will not be something that students are scared of or worried about; instead, it will become an easy and natural way for you to communicate with your students, and for them to communicate with each other. The unit also shows you some ways to help your students practise speaking so that they become more familiar with the rhythm and pronunciation of the language, so that it becomes more natural to them.