Adapting Speaking activities

 

Illustration from Sunny Day.

Activity for 1st cycle of primary

- Activity: RHYMES, SONGS, CHANTS, TONGUE TWISTERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsR0h50BiFQ

- Organization: whole class

- Arrangement: U-shape

- Materials: Song, Digital Board
- Timing: One session

- Procedure: 

Presentation: First, the teacher will draw and identify the pictures of a circle, a square and a triangle in the whiteboard and the pupils will do the same in their notebooks. Later, the teacher will give instructions to children, telling them that they will be shown a song about shapes. Do they know what a shape is? Let's learn it with the song! Children would not have to worry if they do not understand something because they will have plenty opportunities to learn either what a circle, a triangle, square are (and that they are shapes) and the song itself.

Therefore, the song will be watched at least three times. Then, the teacher will stop the video after every sentence and will use body language, gestures a mimicking to show the meaning of the phrases. 

Practice: Children will be encouraged to use the gestures teacher's model while singing to acquire the words meaning. They will watched the video three times more so that they together with the teacher can sing and use body language like a kind of dancing while listening.

Production: Finally, they will be free to walk around the classroom while still singing the song in order to find shapes. E.g. "Come on, let's find shapes! I see a circle" (and they point out a ball), and so on.

In order to know how they liked the activity and whether they feel they learned something new, the teacher will ask them to show their thumbs up or down.

- Aims of the activity:

• The pupils will practice pronunciation about shapes through singing the song.

• The learner will learn to express how to identify a shape in the classroom.

• Pupils will learn to identify a shape, a square, triangle and a circle.

Activity for 2nd cycle of primary

- Activity: USING FLASHCARDS

- Organization: group work

- Arrangement: modular

- Materials: Flashcards with drawings of actions (e.g. playing the piano, playing football, singing, etc).

- Timing: one session.

- Procedure: 

Presentation: First of all, the teacher will show the flashcards to pupils and he/she will prompt them to say what pictures show. He/she will substitute drills in a controlled activity. For example, this is a bicycle, I can ride a bicycle. Can you ride a bicycle? Pupils will tell if they can do it or not. Practice: In groups, children will be provided with a set of flashcards similar to the previous ones. In turns, they will ask and answer to their group mates whether they can or not do the flashcard actions. Production: In groups, they will tell the rest of the classmates what they can do or not.

For self- assessment, the pupils will express in groups what they would have like to do or say better.

- Aims of the activity:

• Pupils will identity and express actions related to hobbies.

• Pupils will be able to say their abilities.

• Pupils will be able to reflect on his/her own activity in groups

Activity of 3rd cycle of primary

- Activity: DRAMATIZATION

http://www.rong-chang.com/easykids/

- Organization: pair work

- Arrangement: pairs

- Materials: short stories hand-outs from the web

- Timing: Two sessions

- Procedure:

Presentation: The previous day, the teacher would have distributed a short story (story number 57. "Polar bears need help") for each pair and tell instructions to the pupils: that they are going to do a dramatization starting from that text. What they will have to do is to read it in pairs and check if they know all the vocabulary. If they do not know some words, they will ask the meaning of the words to other classmates, the teacher, or even they could look up them in a dictionary whether it would be a book or through the internet. They can use the story as a model and choose another animal if they want to investigate about it. They will be helped by the teacher with pronunciation. Practice: After they all know all their stories, pupils could pretend they are nature documentary reporters and they are filming how wild animals live, practising their pronunciation reading out loud the story at this first stage. Then, they will agree which one of them is going to say each sentence and if they would like to use the text like it is or they would like to change it to a dialogue instead of telling the story. After that, they will have to think about what things they will need to bring to the class the next day to perform the story. (Whether they will bring puppets, drawings, costumes, cuddly toys, etc).

The following day, in the first part of the lesson time, pupils will rehearse their performance.

Production: Finally, in the second part of the lesson, every pair would show their performance to the rest of the class.

As assessment, once the performances would be finished, every child will say which performance they liked most and why.

- Aims of the activity

• The pupils will be able to describe animals (polar bear) and their lives.

• The pupils will be able to express likes and dislikes about their classmates’ performances.

Some listening activities

Activity for 1st cycle of primary: LISTEN AND MATCH
Activity: Food bingo.                                                      Whole-class activity
Materials: Food figures/ Flashcards and Bingo Cards      Individual work

In this game or activity, pupils will be provided with a bingo card, one for each pupil, where different kinds of food words appear along with theirs pictures (butter,soda drink, banana, sausage...).

After that, the teacher will say out loud many different food names. Meanwhile, pupils will have to watch figures or flashcards, listen carefully and match what is being said by the teacher with the names and pictures that appear on their own bingo cards. The first child to cross off all the names on his/her bingo card wins the game.

Aims of the activity:

• Pupils will be able to identify and remember the food.
• Pupils will be familiarized with the correct pronunciation of the food.

The activity could be implemented by drilling the words (foods in this activity) as they appear. The voice can be altered, to improve pupils’ pronunciation in a controlled way.

We had realized by doing this task that firstly we have to attract the students’ attention. Make sure everyone was listening and watching. If possible, show them what to do –give a demonstration or example: showing what to do is more effective than telling what to do. You can demonstrate the activity by playing both parts yourself (moving position to show that you are two people), by playing one part and choosing a strong student to play the other part, or by asking two strong students to do (part of) the activity in from of the class. In our performance as we were a group, we did it ourselves.

We think that monitoring what the pupils are doing is just as important a skill as the teaching. When pupils are engaged in the activity, our aims will be to see if they have understood our instructions, to assess how well they are performing the task.

Activity for 2nd cycle of primary: LISTEN AND DRAW
Activity: Draw what you hear.                                     Whole-class activity
Materials: Pieces of paper, crayons, felt-tip pens, etc. Individual work

The idea of this activity is for children to listen to a story, or part of a story, without seeing the book illustrations. They need to create a drawing in their mind of what is happening.

Once they’ve created a picture in their mind, then it’s time to actually draw it using art materials.

A story we could use for this activity is “Meg and Mog on the moon”. It is a very original illustrated book and it also allows you to change different details of the story.

It can become very motivating for pupils, because the drawings they create are uniquely theirs and valuable because of their individuality.

With this activity pupils can:

• understand and identify specific information in an simple oral text about a trip and apply it in a drawing.

Activity of 3rd cycle of primary: LISTEN AND GUESS

Activity: From Crossword to role-play                                 Individual and Pair work

Materials: Crossword                                                         Whole-class activity

Each pair of pupils will be provided with a blank crossword. Previously, the teacher had split the paper with words across and down so that one of the pupils will have to complete the words across and the other the words down without showing each other. 

Later, taking turns, one pupil will describe a word (for example, part of the face that is between the eyes and the mouth: nose) and the other will guess it, until they have their crossword finished. 

Then, pairs will write a sentence for each word in order to use them to make up a short dialogue for role-playing: ‘at the doctor’:

-          Good Morning! What part of your body hurts?

-          Hello! I have a pain in the eye, nose, leg, headache,…

With this game pupils will have to use their imagination and creativity.

Aims of the activity:

• Pupils will be able to identify, describe and express orally the parts of the human body.
• Pupils will be able to ask and answer for the location of a pain/an illness/ a part of the body.

After implementing  Communicative  activities in class.

We chose three activities, adapted to a singular/particular course,    explained the aims we wanted our students to achieve with it and the     classroom management.       When doing these activities, we found that adapting them to the    different cycles and grades is not an easy task, because we have to    take many factors into account if we want that the activities to be    useful and communicative for our pupils.      We learn to formulate the aims/goals putting the learner at the center of   the process. In addition, we found that it is not easy to give instructions to   explain what an activity is about and we often complicate when and what to   say. It is much better to give simple and direct orders so that students can    better understand the message, beacuse if they are complex we risk they do   not understand us.      With the activities developed in class (the Food Bingo, Draw what you    hear and crossword) we had to look what we wanted our students to do.    They were easy at first, and harder gradually. We learned how to drill, not    only by repeating words but changing our voices' volume (louder or lower).       Finally, we would like to add that in these activities we learned that as    teachers we must be aware that not all activities are for all students as they    all have a number of individual characteristics that we should not overlook.

Activity: Make a Story

http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/activity/makeastory.html

6TH of Primary                         Age: 11-12                              Organization: individually, pairs, groups

Aims: In this task pupils will develop the knowledge and skills that help them to say I am able to:

- Produce a tale using specific vocabulary in a correct way

- Have a polite debate with my classmates

- Discuss my own point of view

- Reach an agreement in group

- Use ICT for academic purposes.

Essential Materials: laptops

Our lesson implementation proposal:

Since we understand this web activity as something incomplete because it should be just a part of a bigger one, we have decided to start by proposing how we would implement it into the classroom in order to make a better and more complete analysis of it.

Firstly, the teacher explains her/his pupils what they have to do with their laptops to get the web page which they are working with. Individually, pupils have to fill in the boxes of the web application in order to create their own story. After finishing it and clicking "my story" hyperlink and once every pupil has his/her own story, the students will share them with a companion (chosen/ elected freely), and create a new story in pairs. Pair work is important because it increases the amount of student language practicing the 5 skills and their use and improvement of their superior cognitive abilities through reading their stories and sharing them outloud, understanding and listening the partner's, analyzing them and speaking about what to take off and what they should include to create the new one and, finally, writing it. Of course, these previous things can only happen thanks to the use of social and interactive skills, cooperating, reaching agreements, and handling the rules of the discourse either when talking or writing. It will be a close pair work. After working in pairs, we will work in groups and create another new story. Group work increases the amount of student talking time and the opportunities for students to really use the language. Besides having the same benefits previously mentioned for pair- work, it is also more relaxing than that and it provides more chances to solve problems.

Comments and suggestions

This task is a fun and interactive way for children to learn. It keeps children focused on practicing and consolidating what they learn. The production is the fun part. It gives students the chance to use their new learned material freely and openly. The production activity will be done individually, in pairs and in groups. The main goals of these groupings are that they try to promote oral production, since all of them are oriented towards communicative competence. Successful speaking activities are those in which learners talk a lot, participation is even interactive, motivation is high and language is an acceptable level as students are encouraged to use English/ FL.

This task should provide pupils reason for speaking. And it will be even more successful when we combine different arrangements such as practice individually, practice in pairs, small groups and bigger groups. Accordingly, the distribution of the space will change in several occasions. At first we will use the traditional classroom arrangement, which can be suitable for working individually with the laptop. Later, pupils will start working in pairs and after that they will have to change into groups, where we should use the modular classroom arrangement, which tends to increase communication between students but we have to be very careful because it also makes interaction with the teacher more difficult. Hence, the teacher will walk around the class making sure that everyone has what they need to work and providing language support when pupils demand it or resolving doubts.

During the activities the teacher will play several roles:

- He/ She will be an organizer, when arranging the way students will group and the activities they will have to develop.

- She/ He will be an informer, when providing the information needed (e.g. the webside where the activity is uploaded).

- He/ She will be a controller, when supervising and controlling everything is fine in the classroom.

- She/ He will be a motivator, when encouraging students, using motivating materials, providing positive feedback, etc…

- He/ She will be a guide, when guiding the pupils to perform the task correctly.

- She/ He will be a corrector, when helping them to make corrections and improvements of the mistakes that are considered serious.

- He/ She will be an assessor/evaluator, when observing pupils from different points of view in order to evaluate them once the task is over.

- And finally, she/ he will be a conductor, when introducing the parts of the lesson and the materials that are going to be used. The teacher should make sure students understand the purpose of the activity.

Nevertheless, once the activity begins, English should be used as much as possible without interfering to correct mistakes. Errors should be treated casually by simple repeating it correctly without necessarily  highlighting them. Finally, praise should always be offered for effort regardless of accuracy achieved.

With this activity pupils develop the different kills:

- Oral skills: Listening (e.g. at the beginning, when the teacher begins his/her tale as an example so that the pupils can understand what they have to do or when listening a classmate's story) and Speaking (when they have to discuss in pair or in groups the story, add elements from the different composition and arrive to a common end) and Oral interaction.

- Written skills (when they make the story, they read it, continue it and invent a new end, whether it would be alone, in pairs or in groups).

The activity will be pretty motivating and focused on the students. This task is a good example of a learned-centered approach, which requires students to be active and responsible participants in their own learning. The relationship between learners is more equal, helping each other and promoting collaborative attitudes through interaction. Therefore, it promotes the development of the communicative competences.

As in a learner-centered approach, education is focused on developing the students’intrinsic motivation to learn and helping them discover their own learning styles, understand their own motivation and acquire effective study skills that will provide them an all life-long learning. Learning is thus a form of personal development that will enhance the existential, skills and know-how, and ability to learn competences pointed at by the CEFR. In addition, this activity will promote a holistic pupils development through promoting other competences established by the LEA for the curriculum of Primary Education in Andalusia such as digital competence and information processing, social and citizen, cultural and artistic, autonomy and personal initiative competences, as well as attitudes to learn all life-long in an autonomous way. 

Interactive whiteboards and laptops in the classroom can add a new dimension to teaching and routine lessons. The use of ICTs gives us the possibility to connect with our pupils’ likes and needs. They are a good option, because our pupils are part of a new generation born surround of an environment where technology is everywhere. ICT activities provide lots of possibilities and can be adapted to the different educational levels or needs; they are pretty motivating for pupils (they will learn a FL in a funny way). The ICT material could be another way to cater for different learning styles of our students.

More ideas: As teachers we could try to cater for diversity: if we give each child a piece of paper to draw on. They will write one or two sentences about it under each one. Later they can stick the pictures on the walls of the classroom. Visual learners’ memory is connected to visual images, using them will improve their knowledge; kinesthetic learner`s will also be taken into account because the movement that implies drawing could help them to focus on the learning activity. During the activity, the teacher could put on classical music in order to create a relaxed atmosphere, like in the Suggestopedia. Using music we will work especially on one of the eight intelligences of Gardner, the musical one.

Regarding to assessment, we propose pupils to fill out the following self-assessment sheet.

Assessment for individual monitoring of the process: reflection and evaluation.
Pupils fill this information at the end of the task. Make a story.
1. What have we done in this task?			2. What do I like most?			3. What could I change?     How?
4. Did I do it well?			5. What have I learned and what can I do as a result?
6. What remains to be done, worked or studied?
Self-assessment   TALE TASK  I am able to..................
1. a. Give information about b. Answer information about c. Understand information about		my tale		1 Yes, very good.	2 Yes, I am able, but I need to improve		3 No, I am not able. I need to work harder.
2. a. Give information about b. Answer information about c. Understand information about		my agreement		1 Yes, very good.	2 Yes, I am able, but I need to improve		3 No, I am not able. I need to work harder.
3. a. Give information about b. Answer information about c. Understand information about		my disagreement		1 Yes, very good.	2 Yes, I am able, but I need to improve.		3 No, I am not able. I need to work harder.
4. Tell/Make		a short story		1 Yes, very good.	2 Yes, I am able, but I need to improve.		3 No, I am not able. I need to work harder.
5. Understand		a storytelling		1 Yes, very good.	2 Yes, I am able, but I need to improve.		3 No, I am not able. I need to work harder.