Strategies that Encourage Participation To motivate students in EFL contexts, teachers should include many activities and strategies that attract students’ attention and make them interested in the lesson.
The teacher can use the model for teaching young learners by using IPA (Imitating-Practicing control-Autonomy) as the other strategy. Children love imitating.
Method To Teach Speaking Reading Aloud Doing a drill Common characteristics in successful speaking tasks Learning the Dialogues Interviewing someone, or being interviewed Designing speaking tasks Using group work in speaking tasks Songs, Poems, Rhymes and Chants Learning the Dialogues
Learning dialogues by heart is a definite no-no. It is much better and far more useful to substitute the words so that they are true to students and their world.
Student uses his/her own variation, there is an obvious transition from pure imitation to conscious changing, which speeds up remembering and offers varied communicative opportunities.
By imitating, sharing and discussing students benefit – modeling, understanding and picking it up seem to be natural..
10 Rules of Speaking in Young Learner Classes
Although it is a productive skill, the children may not feel ready to produce oral language, so teachers and parents should be patient.
Short practice activities can help students build productive language to use indiscourse.Speaking starts with practicing drills, set phrases (junks and formulaic expressions),repeating models, so it is important to use such activities to make them familiar with repetitive language. However, the language should be used meaningfully in the classroom, not just in isolated chunks.
Children need experience of a range of discourse types to increase their skills, so the tasks designed for in-class use should be varied.
The teachers should take into account the developmental stages in L1, those in L2, and students’ age to design the speaking activities.
Correcting each and every mistake is discouraging and they need help to acquire fluency. Before the speaking, we may teach them the necessary language and the vocabulary items to prepare them for the tasks.
Designing authentic activities, such as role-plays and dialogues based on real lifeconversations, motivates the students, so they willingly take the role of an imaginary person.However, the meaning and purpose of discourse needs to be made comprehensible to the learners.
The teachers should be aware of the problems young learners may have while articulating phonemes. It is important not to ignore the pronunciation, intonation and stress: Using tongue twisters, mirrors, imitating native speakers in movies can be some of the useful activities.
Speaking is not an individual skill; they need to be encouraged to practice in pairs and in groups.
A good speaking activity should involve all students not some of them.
When the class is noisy in a speaking activity, trying to shout over children is not a good idea: Using the lights, symbols or music may help.
