It probably won't surprise you that the largest section in this book is devoted to activities whose primary focus is on speaking. After all, the goal for most learners is to achieve a degree of spoken fluency. And yet many students are reluctant – through lack of confidence or shyness – to speak in the target language in the classroom. Of course, speaking never occurs in a vacuum, and most of the activities in this section are designed to maximize opportunities for two-way interaction and provide an incentive for resolving communication breakdowns.

One way of doing this is to incorporate an ‘information gap’: I have some information – you have to find it out. ‘Describe and draw’ is a classic example of this principle. The information gap is also the basis of many game-type activities of the ‘Guess what animal I am’ type, but also activities designed to build a warm and supportive classroom dynamic through the sharing of personal information, as in ‘What do we have in common?’

There are other activities in this section that focus on specific subskills of speaking, including pronunciation (‘Pronouncing places, products and planets’, ‘Chants’) and question formation (‘Interview interrogatives’), while still others encourage longer speaking turns, such as ‘30-second stimulus talks’ and ‘Recorded stories’.

30-second stimulus talks

From Language Activities for Teenagers edited by Seth Lindstromberg