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This is my first year teaching and I was wondering if some of you have had any troubles
with students who do not want to speak in the target language while being in
class. My students (nine graders) do not feel comfortable speaking in English
(they do understand everything I say), they have received English lessons for
years. They speak in English just when reading or participating in a speaking
activity in which the practice is not as good as normal speech could be. I
think they get embarrassed. What can I do in order to change that? Are
there some activities in order to motivate students to speak English during the
whole class? Suggestions, ideas�
Hello, Laura ! Something that works really well for me is that I dare them use English all the time, like telling them "you �re so used to not using it that you won �t be able to!" and every time a student uses English I write his/her name on the board, every time a name is written it means they have one more sentence for homework. For instance, if you are reviewing comparatives and superlatives, tell them that homework will be some sentences to review that grammar point, but that they �ll have as many sentences as times they use L1 in class. You can be sure they �ll try as hard as they can not to use it! And they enjoy every time you write a student �s name on the bb! Try and see! :-)
Well, I used to be one little brat at school who didn �t want to speak English in class during English subject. But my teacher had her own way to make her students speak English which is by bringing a hammer shaped balloon and she told us to hit our friend sitting next to us with the balloon whenever they didn �t wanna speak English in class. Surprisingly, it worked because: firstly, no one wanted to be hit with the balloon so we tried speaking English as much as we possibly could. Secondly, as students, it was amazingly fun for us to punish our friends by a permission from the teacher haha.. I don �t know if it �s a good method or not but I think your students will think it �s funny (as we found it was funny) but they will still try to avoid getting hit with the balloon by speaking English more in class. I would call it a "good punishment".
Well, I dont agree with using homework as a punishment...the idea with the plastic hammer sounds fun but my classes are hard to control as it is (naughty little devils, God bless them!) I think encouragement is the best thing to do. Praise them even if they say "yes, of course". When I started teaching, light years ago, i had given my students a set of key phrases they could use to agree or disagree and encouraged them to use them as much as possible. Once they had felt confident with them they had started adding on their own in no time at all.
I also gave out awards every week for "Best Talker of the Week", "Best Reader" and so forth. And of course i pretended not to understand them when they were speaking in anything other than English.
One helpfull tool I use with older children is the debate hour, as I call it. I seperate the kids into two groups, give them a topic to prepare and have them debate once a week. The team that impresses me the most gets a trophy. The topics vary: "Which film is best, Harry Potter or Twillight?" You get the idea.
Get them talking on topics that are close to their hearts, singers, actors, movies, computer games until they are comfortable with their abilities.
You could also play games like hangman where the rule is that anyone speaking L1 lose a point. Or play the vicar �s cat. we always have a blast, and it reinforces vocabulary use too.
I would suggest as well doing some activities where it doesn �t matter what they say - I think students don �t want to say the wrong answer in their classes. If you PM me your email address, I �ll send you a handout from a workshop I did with some activities.
