Teaching speaking - Unit 9: Fluency | TeachingEnglish

Unit 9 looks at how we can help learners improve their fluency to become effective communicators of English.

This unit looks specifically at group work, warmers and controlled practice. In the video you will see students engaged in speaking activities – a role play and a debate – while John Kay talks about the different factors involved in helping learners improve their fluency.

This unit contains the following elements:

A short video providing input.
A downloadable series of reflection tasks and activities.
If you are a teacher trainer and are planning to use the material in a face-to-face context, there is a set of trainer notes for each topic.

The downloadable material asks you or your trainees to look at ways of helping students speak more fluently – particularly how careful lesson preparation can help.

The videos in this series express the view that “English language teaching has the same challenges the world over”, but that the solutions to these problems depend very much on the local context, and for this reason the approach taken focuses on tasks that enable the participants to relate the video to their own specific practice and experience.

If this video is not available for viewing in your location, please click here

Downloads

Teaching speaking - notes for trainers: 9. Fluency111.71 KB

Teaching speaking 9: Fluency - activities510.26 KB

Teaching Speaking: Answer key758.83 KB

Bookmark this

Comments

useful

Fluency and Accuracy

Students need to be encouraged to express themselves without being afraid of being assessed. They need to feel free and relaxed when they speak

I've learned about a couple…

I've learned about a couple of fluency activities that can be helpful to my students. For example, the mirror activity may well be engaging and amusing for high school graduates, which can motivate them in class.

Fluency

I think fluency is marked by communicating in an effective way. If the message is getting across and the listener understands your ideas, you are fluent no matter what grammatical mistakes you make or not. Accuracy is another thing from fluency. It does not mean that accuracy is neglected at the cost of being fluent. Once an optimum level of fluency is attained one must consider it to be more and more accurate, meaning that try to minus mistakes.

Hi:

Hi: What I understood is that in a communicative activity in class, we should encourage students to look at each other because this is what we do in real- life situations when we speak with another person. By doing so, we encourage students to "dramatize" what happens in real-life situations. Ss need to speak as naturally as possible in order to gain in fluency since the definition of fluency is to speak naturally. To encourage students to make eye contact, I always use the "look-up-and say" technique every time they practice a dialogue. They are reluctant to do it at first, but once they get the hang of it, they love it; and little by little, they start speaking more naturally; in other words, more fluently.

eye contact

this video mentioned certain "justifications" for reading out loud and then went on to say that for fluency however, one needs to look at the person... in what situational contexts can one look at the person who's speaking? not in the following: telephone radio broadcast public speaking event, etc. etc. this is not a determiner of "fluency" and is therefore, is not entirely accurate as an experienced teacher who's developed "fluency" practices with my 7 - 9 graders, I would recommend that this information be reviewed in line with modern communication practices - such as what I am doing now for example... thank you

feedback on the activities

Extremely useful!