Theme: assessing spoken production plan: I. Introduction II. Main part

Many of these features of speaking fall into the category of discourse – the organisation and style of a message as it is delivered in different situations.
When teaching speaking in a given context, think about how people actually speak in that situation.
Find recordings of people interacting in restaurants, banks, or wherever your lesson will be set, and think about the functional steps of the interaction as it happens.
You will probably find that most interaction that you listen to is quite formulaic and predictable, so can be used as a structure for the dialogues that you present and practice in class, only with the organisation and ordering of the speech as the focus of the class rather than the specific language used.
Taking an opposite approach, think of situations where the above list of competencies is common.
For example: we often use circumlocution when we are talking about complex, technical subjects, like when we describe a problem we are having with a gas cooker, car engine or plumbing; we may not know the exact name of the part which is not working, but we can still communicate it to a gas fitter, mechanic or plumber.
This is a useful life skill, and one which can be used to harness second-language speaking for language learners.
Again, as with grammar and vocabulary, we can incorporate these target competencies into standard formats of lessons – we can present the feature of speech through an audio or video task, and then ask students to practise applying the feature in a restricted task.
Gapped dialogues, ordering lines in a script, or choosing the best alternative from three different responses in a conversation, for example.
Again, as long as the learners are playing with language they already know, their ‘discourse brains’ will be more engaged and they will have more focus on the competencies they are learning.
Free speaking tasks should be exactly that: student-student interaction which does not have too many limitations.

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  Give students a topic or situation and ask them to script out a typical interaction in that situation.
  
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  Assign roles to different students, so that they can practise speaking to different ‘people’, and see how they flex their ideas when talking to their boss as compared to their 7-year-old daughter.
  

This will open up the features they are learning in application to different types of speech.
Finally, be aware that although your learners have been focusing on these great features of spoken communication, they have not yet had the opportunity to fully apply these until they have spoken totally freely, without a script, or notes to work from (after all, native speakers don’t carry scripts around with them to use in sandwich bars, though they do have an ‘expected script’ in their mind which informs their use of language), by participating in a speaking event with another student or students.
The same dialogue that was used in free practice can be repeated, though with different participants to ensure spontaneity and flexibility with language. Only then can you say that students have truly applied what they are learning by the end of the class.
When teaching grammar or vocabulary to our ESL students, we should be creating and implementing lessons that allow the students to see the concept being used in a real-life context. After the students see the concept being used, we teach the rules and give the students ample guided practice.


How Do I Plan Lessons for my English Students?
In the final stage of the lesson, which is known as the production, the students are asked to use the language they have just practiced in a more open-ended and creative structure. Give the students an opportunity to produce original and meaningful communication. Students are working at this stage in pairs or small groups to use the language that was taught and practiced in order to produce the language either in a spoken or written manner and is generally task-based. The teacher’s role at this point is to manage time, make sure students are on task, offer feedback if requested, and keep a written record of students’ errors. The students should be doing the work and showing you that they have a good grasp on how and when to use the vocabulary or grammar taught in the lesson.
The difference between the practice and production stages can be minimal, depending on the English level. However, remember that practice activities should be guided and generally have a correct answer. Productions, on the other hand, can have many correct answers and mirror real-life, authentic situations.
To plan a good production activity for your PPP lessons, consider the natural context in which this vocabulary or grammar concept would be used. For instance, if I am teaching a lesson on physical description words to a class of beginners, I can have them describe their family members or celebrities in the production. If my lesson is a grammar lesson on the Past Simple, I can ask students to talk about a vacation they went on recently or what they did over the weekend. To properly prepare your students for the production activity, make sure your dialogue mirrors the activity, and the practice activities are well-scaffolded and prepare the students to perform the production successfully. 
If you are stumped on ideas for productions or looking for something new to incorporate into your lessons, consider one of these production activities.
Whereas the speaking that happened in language classes of the past was often highly structured, focusing mainly on getting the correct answer to a set of exercises, more emphasis is now being given to activities that require students to actively communicate with each other.
This shift begins with the way the teacher interacts with students.
“So often as teachers,” Blouwolff says, “our talk with students is evaluative in nature. Teacher asks a question, student gives an answer, and then the teacher says something like, Good job, yes! “
To create a language speaking community, she says, “we really need to quell the desire to give that evaluative answer and try to be more interactive, like, Oh really? Tell me more about that. You’re going to the movies this weekend? Are you going to go to this movie theater? This shows that we’re curious about what our students have to say, so we’re encouraging them to keep talking in the language.”
Along the same lines, discussion activities are also changing to require more active, relevant communication between students.
For example, instead of having students talk about what they did over the weekend, Blouwolff might say, “Talk to your partner about their weekend until you found two things that you both did and two things that were different. And then I might say, having done that, decide who had the more physically active weekend.” In this way, students are not just listing activities for an exercise; they’re having a conversation about something that might be more inherently interesting to them.