Teaching English Speaking to Primary Students

The Role of Speaking in Primary Education

• Vocabulary for basic concepts: Ensure students leave their first lesson with some English to "take away."
• Greetings and introductions.
• English names: People and countries.
• Chants, rhymes, and songs: Impression learning quickly to show off.
• Drills.
• Aim: To heighten children's awareness of language and to build up their confidence.
• Formulaic language: Language that is produced as whole chunks; routines or patterns that children memorize and which enable them to communicate with a minimum of linguistic competence. This includes:
  • Simple greetings
  • Social English
  • Routines
  • Classroom language
  • Asking for permission
  • Communication strategies

The Role of L1 in the Primary Classroom

• As a last resort: Try to make children understand you by using gestures, pictures, and examples.
• Instructions through demonstration: Ask them, "What do you have to do?"
• Classroom guidelines: Used for discipline.
• Create an English atmosphere.
• Use L1 less and less.
• Sometimes it is not worth spending too much time explaining something.

Key Definitions and Speaking Activities

Silent Drills

Very effective for the process of learning and remembering. Elicit back; students repeat to themselves silently. Ask "Who can say it best?" to save your voice.

Mood Drills

An injection of humor; keeps students motivated and likely to pay attention.

Back-Chaining Drills

Drill sentences backward in chunks to master rhythm, sentence stress, weak forms, and intonation.

Mingling

A controlled speaking accuracy activity involving question/answer exchanges where students move from groups to circulate.

• Same questions: Personal copy of information (e.g., a class phone book).
• Different questions: From prompts or sentence stems. Ask and mingle.
• Assuming responsibility: Redividing, asking, and noting; final survey.

Skeleton Prompts

Key-word structures used as a reminder in speaking activities (e.g., What/name? or Got/pets?).

Cognitive Benefits of Songs, Rhymes, and Chants

• Help to develop concentration, memory, and coordination.
• Repetition enables children to predict what comes next and to consolidate language items.
• Accompanying actions or gestures help to reinforce meaning.
• Variety changes the pace and atmosphere of a lesson.
• Sensitize children to rhyming clues as aids to meaning.
• If compiled into song or rhyme books, they help develop good study habits.