Strategies to Teaching Speaking

The strategies are :

1.      Setting Clear Lesson Goals

 It is crucial that teacher be clear about what he wants students to learn during each lesson. If teacher cannot quickly and easily state what he wants the students to know and be able to do at the end of a given lesson, the goal of the lesson will be unclear. Clear lesson goalshelp teacher (and students) to focus every other aspect of lesson on what matters most.

2.       Showing & Telling

Teacher should normally start lessons with show and tell. Put simply, telling involves sharing information or knowledge with the students while showing involves modeling how to do something. When teacher has cleared about what he wants students to know and be able to do by the end of the lesson, a teacher needs to tell them what they need to know and show how to do the tasks.

3.      Questioning to Check for Understanding

Research suggests that teachers typically spend a large amount of teaching time asking questions. However, few teachers use questions to check for understanding within a lesson. However, a teacher should always check for understanding before moving onto the next part of their lesson. Techniques such as randomized sampling, student answer-boards and tell-a-friend are helpful.

4.      Summarizing New Learning in a Graphical Way

 Graphic outlines include things such as mind maps, flow-charts and Venn diagrams. Teacher can use them to help students to summarize what they have learned and to understand the interrelationships between the aspects of what teachers have taught them. Discussing a graphical summary is a fantastic way to finish off teacher’s show and tell. Teacher can then refer to it one more time at the end of the lesson.

5.      Plenty of Practice

As said by Killian, practice makes perfect. Practice helps students to retain the knowledge and skills that they have learned while also allowing another opportunity to check for understanding. If teacher wants to harness the potent power of practice, he must ensure that students are practicing the right things. Finally, research shows that students do better when their teacher has them practice the same things over a spaced-out period of time.

6.      Providing Students with Feedback

Feedback is the breakfast of champions, and it is the breakfast served by extraordinary teachers around the world. Put simply, giving feedback involves letting the students know how they have performed on a particular task along with ways that they can improve. Unlike praise, which focuses on the student rather than the task, feedback provides students with a tangible understanding of what they did well, of where they are at, and of how they can improve. 

7.      Being Flexible about How Long it Takes to Learn

 The idea that given enough time, every student can learn is not as revolutionary as it sounds. It is also the central premise behind mastery learning, a technique that has the same effect on student results as socio-economic status and other aspects of home life.

8.      Getting Students Working Together (in productive ways)

Group work is not new and teachers can see it in every classroom. However, productive group work is rare. When working in groups, students tend to rely on the person who seems most willing and able to the task at hand. To increase the productivity of the groups, teachers need to be selective about the tasks they assign to students and the individual role that each group member plays.

9.      Teach Strategies Not just Content

Teachers can increase how well students do in any subject by explicitly teaching them how to use relevant strategies. When teaching children to read, teacher needs to teach them how to attack unknown words, as well as strategies that will deepen their comprehension. When teaching them Mathematics, you need to teach them problem-solving strategies. And, just as with content, you need to tell students about these strategies, to show them how to use them and to give them guided practice before asking them to use them independently.

10.  Nurture Meta-Cognition

Many teachers believe they are encouraging students to use meta-cognition when they are just asking students to use strategies – strategies such as making connections when reading or self-verbalizing when solving problems. Encouraging students to adopt strategies is important, but it is not meta-cognition. Meta-cognition involves thinking about options, choices and results – and it has an even larger effect on student results than teaching strategies. When using meta-cognition the students may think about what strategies they could use before choosing one, and they may  think about how effective their choice was before continuing with or changing their chosen strategy.