Oral repetition drills develop audio and speaking abilities of EFL students. Practice such drills by modeling the oral form of a word. Write a word on the board like “visit.” Pronounce the word out loud and ask students to repeat. Cycle through this process three times. Explain to students that “visit” consists of two syllables, and the inflection is stressed on the first syllable. It may be helpful to write the word to represent such inflection: “VIS it.” Use the word in a sentence: “I visit my brother in California every summer.”
After you have modeled both the written and oral form of a word, it’s important to check for students’ understanding. Ask “Is that clear?” as students may be unlikely to admit that they “do not understand,” for fear of sounding stupid or slow. Learning a foreign language is very much an exercise of testing self-confidence. If students, when given the context of a word like “visit,” express that they understand the word’s meaning, ask students to explain what it means to visit a person. The best gauge for comprehension is students’ ability to verbally describe meaning of words or phrases. This test will also hone their speaking skills.
Group work is essential for students to gain trust and confidence in class. Students should feel free through group activities to discuss more about their personal experiences over time. Encourage students to get into pairs and ask what different types of clothing are represented in pictures that you provide for them. They can answer in short sentences by saying, “It’s a skirt,” for example. Pointing to objects or pictures is also a good way to improve vocabulary and comprehension. You can point to a chair and say, “What’s this?” The students can respond, either in pairs or as a group: “It’s a chair.”
Miming stories and verbally telling short stories are wonderful ways to get students involved in narrative, while exposing them to a variety of vocabulary and verb tenses. After reading a short story, you can ask a class: “Can you tell me anything you understood about the story? Who was the story about? Where did the story take place?” EFL students, as they become more comfortable with the language, should gradually grasp essential information ingredients in narrative such as “who, where, when, why and how?”