This is the first in a series of five posts about ways to supplement your coursebooks with extra (and hopefully innovating) speaking activities. They were first inspired when I was asked to create a range of bonus activities to supplement my own Speaking coursebooks for Pearson Longman.
This article begins the series by looking first at a variety of different warm-up activities that focus particularly on speaking and interaction.
1. Warm-up activities
In many contexts, speaking can be a somewhat intimidating endeavor for English language learners. A variety of gentle icebreakers can help to get the students talking and interacting before they start to engage with a lesson proper, and hopefully have them relaxed, keen and ready to get into the lesson.
1.1. Open topic Q&A
Before going anywhere near the book, teachers can begin by talking about something they did prior to the lesson, something they saw on television, read or saw on the news, etc. Basically, the idea is to introduce a simple, relevant, but open topic for the class.
After this lead-in from the teacher, invite the class to ask questions about the information the teacher has introduced. The teacher can then respond. It is often easier for students to use even the limited English at their disposal to probe or check information than to start coming up with their own detailed responses and opinions, though this could be the next step in the process (following the Q&A based on the teacher’s information, the students start to express their own experiences or opinions, and the teacher or other students ask them additional questions about it).
1.2. Opening statements
Before the students open their textbook, write the name of the unit on the whiteboard. Elicit from students what the topic refers to if it is not immediately obvious.
Now ask a random assortment of students to make a sentence/statement using the topic words. For example, if the topic is “Space Travel”, students may come up with statements like “space travel is interesting”, “space travel can be dangerous”, or even “I don’t want to travel in space”.
To scaffold this, a teacher may like to provide input questions that can become a starting point for a statement – for example:
What is …?
How do you feel about …?
Why is … interesting or boring?
Where can you hear people talking about …? Etc.
This will probably work better if students are put into pairs or groups first, with each group responsible for coming up with a relevant and interesting statement about the topic. It can become an informal competition, with the teacher allocating points based on the statements produced, and allocating an “Opening Statements” winner (or winning group).
The important thing is that students not refer to their books as part of this activity. They may be too tempted to take and regurgitate a sentence they initially spot in the unit. The idea here is for students to use their own general background knowledge and language resources to make a simple statement about the topic.
1.3. On the scene
(Note: this activity assumes your coursebooks usually start with some kind of scene or picture at the beginning of a unit). This warm-up activity can coincide with students opening up their books and turning to the unit for the first time. Encourage the learners to talk as much as they can about the scene illustration that accompanies the introduction in any given unit. Try to avoid dry and self-evident descriptions and encourage the students to be a little more creative and thoughtful about it. This can be facilitated by asking the students questions like:
· Which person in the picture do you think is the (friendliest, smartest, best looking, etc.)? Why do you think so?
· What do you think this/that person likes / likes to do in his/her free time?
· Which of these people could become (a Nobel prize winner, the next president, a rock star, etc.)? Why do you think so?
· What do you think was happening before this scene?
· What do you think will happen after/following this scene?
· Imagine yourself in the scene. Tell me what you are doing and why.
A variety of other prompts are possible based on the specific unit and illustration, but it can be useful and fun to get the students thinking “outside the box” from the start and being creative with their spoken opinions.
1.4. Liar! Liar!
Based on the picture(s) for the unit, ask students to come up with 4-5 statements about it. One of these statements should be obviously false, while the others should be reasonably true or feasible.
Students then take turns reading aloud their statements. If the other students in the class think a statement is true, they should say “Yes, that’s true” (though it could be a good idea to introduce a variety of agreeing statements like “You’re right”, “You’ve got that right” or even “You can say that again!”). If they think the statement is false they can point at the student and say “Liar! Liar!” (an even more fun variation here is “Liar! Liar! Hair on Fire!” or something along those lines). The student then confirms whether what he/she said was true or false.
This is a non-taxing activity that can be a lot of fun, but is also very useful in engaging students with the picture scene before the main unit study commences.
1.5. Time machine
This activity is good for ensuring a review of the previous lesson. The students may have been studying the previous unit, or completed part of the current unit. Without looking in their books, students in pairs or groups are invited to pretend they are in the class time machine and they have just returned to the previous lesson. Their job is to explain what they are doing, what they are saying and/or what they are learning at that time in the past. They may also like to report entertaining things that happened last class, or even what people were wearing, where they were sitting, what the weather was like, etc.
In a comical/entertaining twist, students could be asked to insert a variety of false statement in their accounts of the previous lessons. The other students in the class could then apply the “Liar! Liar!” exclamation along the same lines described in 1.4 above.
1.6. Crystal ball
This is the direct opposite of activity 1.5 above in that now students are being asked to predict what will happen in the lesson ahead. Students are invited to gaze into a pretend crystal ball and state what will happen over the next hour (or however many minutes constitute a regular lesson at your school).
Note that this works a lot better if students are not allowed to look in their books before trying this. However, students often skim their books at various times and are likely to have at least some idea of what is coming up (and if they don’t, this could be just the kind of activity to encourage them to do so in future!). Also, doing the activity in groups increases the chance that someone will have an idea of the unit ahead.
Note also that students don’t need to be limited to just talking about what will happen in terms of the lesson content, or even what is necessarily true or real. In a “crazy crystal ball” application, they could end up making humorous predictions about what the teacher will say or do, inventing calamities that interrupt the lesson, etc. While this version is less useful for academic pre-empting of lesson content and skills, it has the useful effect of making the class feel less formal and rigid right from the start. And it is always great to have students laughing and being creative before the main lesson begins.
Got any good ideas oriented around speaking/conversation and warm-ups that you'd like to add here? Please let us know about them in the comments section below!
:-P
