ESL students generally need extended speaking practice, but with a class of 10 students or more, it is unrealistic to try and engage each student in a dialogue. One way to maximize student teaching time is to conduct full-class activities that give everyone a chance to speak. For example, when teaching students adverbs of frequency, ask every student to stand up and find out how many people in the class always eat breakfast. Students ask every other student in the class, “How often do you eat breakfast?” When answering this question students respond appropriately with, for example, “I sometimes eat breakfast” or “I always eat breakfast.” In this way, every student in the class has an opportunity to repeatedly practice using adverbs of frequency.
Role-playing allow students to develop their fluency and accuracy by adopting a different persona. This allows them to express opinions they might otherwise be reluctant to and helps them overcome any shyness they feel when speaking a foreign language. You, the teacher, need only set up the activity and then observe it, making notes of any repeated errors from students for correction later. For example, arrange the class into groups of three and assign each student a famous person to play, such as Mother Teresa or George Bush. Tell each group they are adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, are getting very hungry and must choose which member of their group to eat. Students tell their group why they should not be the one to be eaten and who they think the group should eat and why. After everyone has had time to speak, stop the activity and ask the students to vote on the unlucky victim.
Using songs within the foreign language classroom is motivating for students and an effective method of developing listening skills. Give students the lyrics to a ballad with any language you wish to focus on erased or deleted. Students listen to the song two or more times and fill in the gaps with the words they hear. Alternatively, cut the lyrics into individual sentences and ask students to work in groups of three or four to arrange the sentences in the order in which they hear them.
Visual aids enable you to explain to students the meaning of pieces of vocabulary -- that might otherwise take a long time to explain -- quickly and easily. To teach students the meaning of the words “spill” and “splash,” for example, instead of attempting to explain orally, simply show the class a cartoon picture of a man spilling tea from a teacup and another of a child splashing people in a swimming pool.