Problem solving: reorganising the zoo
Explain to the students that the local zoo is undergoing re-organisation and/or that new animals are being welcomed into the zoo. The students are given a plan of the zoo; the names of types of animals and certain criteria e.g. some animals cannot be close to each other e.g. the deer and tiger: the deer would be afraid. Some animals don’t smell too good so they should not be close to the café. Avoid frightening or dangerous animals at the entrance: children would be put off. They need to decide where each animal will be housed; it’s important to come to a consensus within the group so students will need to persuade each other that their opinion is the best. I first read about this activity in Penny Ur’s Discussions That Work.
Discussion about jobs (based on an activity in Discussions A-Z Intermediate)
Give students a list of occupations; dictate the list or show pictures to elicit the job title. Examples include: teacher, stockbroker, waiter, secretary, dentist, nurse, taxi driver, dinner lady, window cleaner, architect, hairdresser, cleaner, air traffic controller.
Ask students to discuss the jobs freely using the following questions as prompts:
What are the daily tasks carried out in each of the jobs?
In your opinion, which job is the most interesting, boring, unpleasant, stressful, rewarding, important to society?
Which job is best-paid, most badly-paid?
Do you know someone who does any of these jobs?
Which job would you most like to do and why?
Which job would you least like to do and why?
Discussions based on pictures
It is a good idea to make a collection of pictures from magazines, newspapers, the Internet, etc. You can use them for a variety of purposes including using them as prompts in your speaking classes. Here are three simple ideas that can be used with any picture:
You can ask students to simply describe the pictures: what is happening? How many people are there? and so on.
What are the people in the picture thinking? How do you think they are feeling? Why are they sitting there? (or whatever it is they’re doing). What happened previously? What is going to happen next? What are they talking about?
I have described the role of speaking separately from other skills but it is quite rare for a lesson to be devoted wholly to speaking. As a lead up to a speaking activity, students might listen to a cassette or read a text on the subject. If students are speaking, obviously some of them are also listening. So we can see that skills are rarely practised in isolation. It is also not desirable for the lesson to be structured in that way since it would not imitate real life situations.
Questions:
1. What is the role of teaching dialogue and monologue in speaking?
2. What strategies of teaching speaking do know?
3. What types of speaking activities do you know?
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