Helping learners with speaking and writing

I think speaking, it’s giving them the skills they need in order to speak and not just practising speaking, for me is key. That can be a quite difficult thing to do with students who haven’t really practised or been a part of a communicative classroom before. So I think it’s really… just providing the opportunities for them to do that. Speaking, I think, one of the things I’ve started doing recently is making much more use of iPhones, which everybody seems to have now, at least in this school they do.

And so recording themselves and finding different ways to kind of find things that they can play back to themselves and various apps as well, which I don’t particularly see any reason why you can’t make use of those in the classroom. They see lots of models and they keep writing and writing, and then you can focus on different letters. For example you can focus on paragraphing and then you can focus on the language they use or you can focus on expressions that you have to use. In order to write well I think you have to have read something that has been written well.

So I do quite a lot of jigsaw writing where the students have to put together texts to see good models for how they write. I also ask my students to write diaries quite a lot. I usually leave it up to them but those who are keen to do it, I think writing a diary or a learning journal is something that you can bring in to class. In class they get situations and then you provide a model. And then they can practise without me watching them all the time. So they are not nervous because I’m not checking on their grammar, the grammatical rules all the time so they can just freely practise.

And then we have to provide them with engaging situations or context.