Helping students and learners to improve their speaking skills could be very challenging, discouraging and slow but the beauty of it is in the patience and passion invested in it.Teaching Speaking also depends on the class or category of people that we are handling. However, in all the cases, there are different efficient techniques that could be adopted. I have being using this methods to teach speaking to adults professionals for more than ten years and it is powerfully efficient and result-oriented.
- You must understand your students. When you are dealing with adult professionals for example, Use Androgogy instead of pedagogy as your teaching technique. Androgody is a teaching system that permits you to deal with your students based on their personalities and feelings. Once you are able to know their personalities and feelings, the barrier of inferiority complex and timidity will be broken.
- One of the element that prevented students from speaking is sometimes low self-esteem and lack of self confidence. Students always believe that they lacked sufficient vocabularies, they are afraid to use the pronounciations that seems dominant, they believe that they make too much mistakes, so , instead of creating grammatical or vocabulary scandals, they prefer to keep their mouths shut ! I suggest that you give them a five minute motivational speech before starting the real class because this will make them understand the fact that the only way to improve speaking is to speak and continue to speak until you speak more fluently. Let them understand that timid people may not go far when it comes to learning speaking.
- Discover their center of interest in order to provoke simple conversations in the class. Ask them random questions when they are not preparing for it and encourage them to try.
- As their instructor, avoid correcting them when they are speaking but make sure that you note all the errors which you will later try to correct. This will naturally build their courage and determination. if you keep correcting them when they are speaking, you�ll unknowingly or unconsciously push them off the track. It is a form of indelibrate distraction.
- Encourage them to read and listen a lot because good readers naturally improve their vocabulary strength and good listeners are generally good speakers !
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