Activities to Encourage Speaking

To ensure that the children find the classes interesting enough, it is necessary to enhance the interest that emerges from within the student, and that they find usefulness in their daily life, either in a clear and directly practical way or in form of a solid base of knowledge and competences that facilitate them to be able to cope freely in life's challenges and situations.

These are some activities that you can apply in classes for speaking skill:

• Who’s Telling the Truth? Have each student write three facts about themselves that nobody in the class knows on a piece of paper. Make sure each student includes their name on the top of the page. Collect the sheets of paper and bring three students to the front of the room. Read aloud one of the facts that is true for one of these three students.

• Descriptive drawing activity: Pair up the students and give each student a picture, placing it face down so partners cannot see each other’s cards. They must describe the picture for their partner to draw.

• Comic strip descriptions: Give each student a portion of a comic strip. Without showing their pictures to one another, the students should attempt to describe their image, and put the comic strip into the correct order. After about 10 minutes, the students can guess the order, show one another their portion, and see if they were correct

• Secret word: Students are given a random topic and a random word that is unrelated to the topic. The students must hide the word in a speech about the topic—they’re trying to make sure the other students can’t guess the secret word. The other students listen carefully to the speech and attempt to guess the secret word.

• Two Truths, One Lie: Each student should write three statements about themselves on a piece of paper. Two of them should be true, and one should be a lie. Students read their three statements, and their classmates question them to try to determine which statement is a lie.

• Roleplay is an activity where you must play a character and at the same time it helps you to empathize with others.