Essential Elements in Your Speaking Lesson Plan

As you begin planning your speaking lessons for your students, here are some essentials to keep in mind:

Prepare your students for the task at hand:

Remember in my listening blog post how I talked about providing scaffolding so your students could succeed in a listening task?  This is very similar!  One way that we refer to this step is developing “metacognitive awareness.”  Metacognition basically just means the process of thinking about thinking.  You should begin every lesson by engaging your students’ awareness about their speaking/learning process.  For example, if your students were going to do a role play of a doctor’s visit, you might ask your students questions like, “When was the last time you went to the doctor’s office?”, “What kinds of questions did the doctor ask you?”, or “How did you explain your symptoms?”  As your students reflect on their real-world experiences in their native language, they will prepare for the conceptual preparation step in speech production.  Your students will realize that, even if they do not have the English vocab on hand, they know how to navigate a doctor’s visit in their language.  They are not starting at ground zero for the speaking activity.  

Other ways to develop your student’s metacognitive awareness happen throughout the lesson.  You may ask your students to reflect on the last time they performed a similar task and ask them questions like, “What helped you succeed?”, “How did you use this grammar structure?”, or “What did you do when you did not know a word you wanted to use?”  

As you help your students to think about the task or think about their speaking process, they will better monitor their own learning and make conscious choices that will lead to greater language acquisition.

Give input or guidance for the speaking task:

This step could look like many things.  Ask yourself, “How can I prepare my students for the upcoming speaking task?”  You may choose to introduce a new element of grammar, provide some new vocab, remind students of yesterday’s lesson, provide some cultural context for the task, or ask your students to focus on a specific element of speaking during the task (intonation, turn-taking, a grammar element, etc.) 

Conduct the speaking task!

The meat of your classroom will be the opportunities your students have to practice!  Your students can’t get better at communicating if they don’t perform communicative tasks!  Here are some ideas of speaking tasks you could use in your classroom!

• Communication-Gap Tasks: In these tasks, partner up your students.  One partner will know something that the other does not (a plot to a video only they watched, a picture only they saw, directions to their house, each partner has alternating parts of a story, etc.)  The point of the task is to have the students communicate and close the knowledge gap between partners (summarize the plot of the video, describe the picture, give directions to their house, tell their parts of the story, etc.)  Get creative!  

• Discussion Tasks: In these tasks, the students will share their experiences or opinions with one another.  They can be done in partners or small groups.  Role plays, conversation prompts, debates, giving advice… if it will start a conversation, it’s a discussion task!  

• Monologic Tasks:In these tasks, only one student is speaking at a time.  Be careful not to use too much class-time for monologic tasks since it allows for only one student to practice speaking at a time.  These tasks can be prepared or improvised presentations.  You could ask one student a day to present in front of the class about themselves, about a celebrity, or about an element of their native culture!  For improvised presentations, you may ask a student to give a review of the last movie they watched or ask a student to tell a story from their childhood.  Monologic tasks are a lot of pressure for a student since all of the attention is on them, so do as much as you can to help your students feel at ease!

Focus on learning language/strategies/skills/ after conducting the task:

After your students perform a task, gather them back up and focus their attention on one specific element of the speaking task they just performed.  It could be grammar, pronunciation, intonation, turn-taking, co-construction… Whatever the focus is of the daily objective will be the skill or strategy that you will ask your students to focus on.  

As a current undergraduate student, I am studying French.  In my French class one day, we did a speaking task where we partnered up and had a conversation about our favorite vacations from our childhood.  After we had finished the task, we watched a video of four native French speakers having a conversation about a trip two of them had taken to Tokyo.  We watched the video, and then my professor asked us, “What do the other members of the conversation do to add to the main speaker’s construction of the conversation?” We talked about their reactions like, “Wow” or “Actually?”.  We also talked about how the speakers finished each other’s sentences or asked questions to further the conversation.  Our professor then asked, “During your conversation, while your partner shared, were you a passive or active participant in the conversation?”  This activity is an example of focusing your students on a specific element of a speaking task.  My professor asked us to focus on co-construction.  Does this remind you of anything?... My professor was developing our metacognitive awareness!  He asked us to think about how we helped to co-construct the conversation.

Repeat the speaking task!

After my professor helped us focus on co-construction, he then had us repeat the task, actively thinking about our efforts to co-construct.  My second effort was miles better than my first!  Rather than simply listening to my partner, I asked questions, reacted, interrupted, and built a natural conversation!  

Repetition is a beautiful thing!  After focusing your students on one element of speaking, they conduct the activity actively focused on what you taught them.  This helps them grow!  Your students will notice their progression!  Nothing helps a student like a good-old confidence boost!  

Have your students reflect on what they learned:

Not only will this continue to help the students recognize that they are learning and growing, but reflection will help store the day’s knowledge in their long-term memory.  This could mean performing a self-reflection on the day’s accomplishments, writing three things they learned, or summarizing the day’s lesson in a paragraph.  Collect your student’s reflections so you can learn how your students are feeling and keep track of their progression.

Give Corrective Feedback:

Though this seems to be at the end of a series of steps in your lesson, giving feedback will occur throughout the lesson.  This may mean responding in written-form to your students’ reflections from the day, but often it will come in verbal form as your students perform various tasks throughout the day.  When giving feedback, be conscious of the goal of each speaking task.  If you are hoping to help your students develop fluency, correcting your students on accuracy will put them on the defensive.  They may be less willing to speak up or make mistakes and may pause more to ensure that they are using accurate form.  This will inhibit rather than build their fluency.  However, giving corrective feedback is absolutely essential in the classroom, especially when the focus is on accuracy.  The most effective way to give feedback is to do what is called a prompt. 

Imagine one of your students said, “I goed to the store last week.” 

Instead of saying, “That was wrong.  The correct sentence is ‘I went to the store last week,’” you might say: 

“Do you remember the special form for ‘go’ in the past-tense?”  

Prompted, the student may then correct himself and say, “Oh yeah!  I went to the store!”  

As you give corrective feedback, your students will recognize their errors, learn from their mistakes, and progress more quickly in your classroom!