This blog post is the eighth in a special series I am dedicating to my coursebook series Boost! during the month of June. Boost! is a six-strand, four-level skills and integrated skills series made for learners aged 10-15.
This may come across as a slightly awkward confession from a writer who has written coursebooks specifically targeting speaking skills, but let's face it: you cannot develop genuine fluency in speaking by relying on a textbook. Reading? Yes, coursebooks can work. Writing? Yes, textbooks make a good match with writing skills.
But speaking? You're kidding, aren't you?
When I sat down to write the Boost! Speaking books, I always had it in the back of my mind that the books can only really demonstrate some things about speaking, provide some models, and hopefully facilitate some things to actually talk about - noticing specific skills and patterns along the way and working speaking into an integrated skills framework.
But if teachers just work from one end of these coursebooks to the other and hope that more communicative and fluent speaking will be an automatic result, there could be some disappointment.
Not necessarily disappointment for the teacher. Disappointment from me, the teacher/author, who figures you didn't use the books in their correct place and go beyond them to create more opportunities for genuine speaking practice!
One of the things learners really need with speaking is more fluency, automaticity, and the ability to listen, think and speak all in one fluid sequence. Coursebooks cannot make this happen. In fact, rigid adherence to coursebook content probably just inhibits it!
One of the things I really like about the Boost! Speaking books are the pictures at the start of each unit, demonstrating a dialogue of some sort. These illustrations have been drawn in a way that really shows what is happening in a conversation.
When I use Boost! Speaking with learners, those pictures at the start of units become the fodder for an activity I refer to as Lights. Cameras. Action!
Basically, before I do anything from the book (I don't even begin with the listening activity), I have the learners tape paper over the written dialogue in their books, leaving only the situational illustration showing.
Then, learners get into pairs or small groups (depending on how many people are shown speaking in the illustration) and they brainstorm together what the conversation could be about, and how it might actually happen with words. But they aren't allowed to write anything down - they just need to think and talk about it.
After that, the pairs or groups take turns getting up in front of the class to "perform" - on the spot - what they think or imagine they see happening in the illustration.
No scripts. No pre-listening or provision of vocabulary.
Just go for it!
It does take most learners a bit of time getting used to, but with patience and encouragement, they get the swing of it and give it their best shot. The results are often hilarious, but they are also often highly creative.
The important thing is that the learners are getting real practice with impromptu, spontaneous conversation. A visual context has been provided for them to get them started, but they can say what they like and take the conversation wherever it leads them. Warts and all: awkward pauses, mistakes, recasts, misunderstandings - all of it.
Yes, as I mentioned, it falls flat in a lot of early tries, and fills many students with terror. The sort of terror, for example, they will experience if they ever have to go out and use unscripted, unmemorized English on the spot in the real world.
Keep at it, however, and the results can be great. Encourage and compliment (not to mention complement here and there, if some conversations really need some external help), focus praise on the idea of just "having a go at it."
There is no greater source of motivation and accomplishment than the feeling that comes with knowing you can get up and just speak English with very little or even no preparation. While it is scary to some learners early on, eventually this can become a very important confirmation of their ability and development.
Beyond all that, these initial explorations of speaking with situational illustrations become a rich source of "noticing" when students then go on to see the dialogue model in the actual book, and then later do some more targeted practice with it. Later in the unit, when they need to create their own dialogues, this initial experience will be one they can both draw on and compare themselves to, hopefully realising where their conversations may have fallen down or could be improved.
In my experience, a lot of learners have already had more than enough practice with careful presentation -> practice -> production style activities - where they aren't required to do a lot of genuine speaking at all. More of the same, or just slight modifications of the same, isn't going to do much at all to loosen the lock that has bound up their oral English skills in a tight little ball of self-doubt.
For spoken fluency, you have to start somewhere. Why not at the start?
:-)
