20 Ideas For Improving Speaking

20 ideas for improving speaking skills
Phoneme-grapheme links. Teach the difficult phonemes explicitly, ideally one per
week. Practise them using common words containing the phonemes, with tongue
twisters, rhymes and songs. Focus on the grapheme or graphemes that represent
the phonemes.
Rhyme, rap and sing. An effective way to focus on particular phonemes is to ask
students to listen to a song and do a tally of the rhymes they hear. Use YouTube
clips of songs with lyrics to encourage MFL karaoke. Sites like rime-en.fr can help
students create their own rhyming raps or chants on a topic.
Pronunciation websites. Encourage students to copy and paste words and phrases
into a pronunciation website, like forvo.com or voki.com. They will then hear the
language correctly and can work on imitating a correct model when memorising the
phrases.
Common mispronunciations. When students do speaking practice or a test with

you, note any words they mispronounce on a feedback sheet, highlighting tricky
phonemes. Ask students to stick this in their books and to work on improving their
pronunciation before their next speaking task.
Listening before speaking. Create listening activities based on model speaking

answers. Students need to be used to listening to the type of language they will
need to use productively. Remember that understanding comes before producing
language.
Analyse and adapt. Play or read a model answer to a question and show students
the transcript. Ask them to analyse the model and find different tenses, opinions,
more complex ingredients. Then demonstrate how they could adapt this answer to
make it their own by changing key details.
Group talk. Give each group of students some interesting pictures, for example of
celebrities. Include images that may elicit strong positive and negative opinions.
The first student asks ‘What do you think about … ?’ in the target language. The
next student gives an opinion, with which the others can agree or disagree. They
continue in the same way to discuss all the photos.
Spend the words. Give students a selection of more complex phrases which they
must ‘spend’ as they take part in group talk. Their partner has the words listed on
a bingo-style card and will cross them off as they hear them used. The first to use
up all the words is the winner.
Avocado mnemonic. When practising general conversation, a mnemonic such as

AVOCADO (Adjectives, Verbs, Opinions, Connectives, Adverbs, Detail and
Originality) can help to remind students what they should include.
Quiz, quiz, trade. Students are each given a sentence in the target language based
on the current topic. They translate it into English, then find a partner and read
out the English for their partner to translate back. They can give one or two clues
to help. Then their partner does the same with their sentence. Finally they swap
cards and find someone else to quiz.
© www.teachitlanguages.co.uk 2018 32604 Page 1 of 2

20 ideas for improving speaking skills
Steal the card game. Project a list of 12-15 sentences that students have been
practising. Give each student four pieces of card. They choose four of the
sentences and write one on each card. The game consists of ‘stealing’ as many
cards as possible, by using the sentences for group speaking. If the other person has
that sentence, they must hand over the card when they hear it used.
Board games. Create simple board games with a picture and a symbol on each
square to represent a topic and a tense. Each group needs a dice and they can
make their own counters. A student can only move onto the next square if they can
say a sufficient amount about the picture in the correct tense. This can be judged
by their peers, who can refer to their books to check verb accuracy.
Speed dating. Students sit in two rows of chairs opposite each other. Each student
has a series of three questions which can be the same as or different to others.
They ask and answer their questions for two minutes, then one row moves along,
and the same procedure starts again. It’s great for revision!
Speaking train. Cut up a set of French questions and short model answers. Give
each student a question card and an unrelated answer. The first student reads out
their question and whoever has the matching answer then reads it out before
reading their own question, and so on. Repeat the task but this time with students
adapting the answers or giving their own answers.
Describe the photo. As a first activity each lesson, show a different photo, with
some tense prompts such as past, present, future and conditional. The students
write four sentences about the picture on mini whiteboards and share these orally
in groups or with the class.
Support mats. Use mats with key language to help with describing photos. Reduce
the level of support on the mats over time. For example, provide the target
language phrases initially with English translations, then just provide the first
letters of each word, and finally just picture prompts.
Collective memory. Help students to memorise chunks of language, such as

answers to speaking questions, by projecting a sample answer on the board. This is
followed by a version with pictures representing some words, then another version
with pictures and just the first letters of words, followed by pictures only. Students
repeat the text aloud together each time to model this memorisation technique.
Pass the parcel speaking game. Cut up a set of speaking questions that you want
to practise or revise, fold them up and put them into a freezer bag, labelling it
with the topic. Play music while the students pass round the bag along rows or in a
circle, and then pause it at random. The student with the bag picks a piece of
paper, reads out the question and gives an answer.
Speaking assessments. Try to ensure that students have speaking assessments from
year 7 onwards, ideally once a term, if necessary while the rest of the class are
watching a film. Seeing the skill of speaking being formally examined helps
students to take it seriously and to see their progress over time.
Exam training. Make sure that your speaking assessments cover the same type of
tasks that the students will be eventually tested on at GCSE. Students will then be
used to the format of role plays, photo descriptions and general conversation.
© www.teachitlanguages.co.uk 2018 32604 Page 2 of 2

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20 ideas for improving speaking skills

Common mispronunciations. When students do speaking practice or a test with

Listening before speaking. Create listening activities based on model speaking

Avocado mnemonic. When practising general conversation, a mnemonic such as

© www.teachitlanguages.co.uk 2018 32604 Page 1 of 2

Collective memory. Help students to memorise chunks of language, such as

© www.teachitlanguages.co.uk 2018 32604 Page 2 of 2

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