Something to Say: Ready-to-Use Speaking Activities

authors’ review by Tessa Woodward and Seth Lindstromberg, UK

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About the book
An introduction by the authors
Overview of the chapters
An activity’s ‘demand level’
What is the extra benefit for learners in monolingual classes?
Notes

About the book

Something to Say: Ready-to-Use Speaking Activities. Tessa Woodward & Seth Lindstromberg. The Photocopiable Resource Series. Helbling Languages. 159 A4 pages. ISBN 978-3-85272-780-6.

An introduction by the authors

Something to Say is for teachers to use when we want our students to speak, in English, in pairs or in trios. These students may be adults or they may be teenagers down to about age 15. The level range is low intermediate to advanced. When putting the book together, we particularly had in mind students in monolingual classes, where it can be difficult to achieve a high percentage of on-task talk in English rather than the mother tongue. That said, every activity works at least as well in multilingual classes.

Mostly, the book is based on handouts. The first and last chapters are exceptions, as we’ll explain later. The idea for the book came to Seth after he had already amassed a large stock of handouts that he had created and tried out in many classes over about 20 years. Each handout has a basic way of being used, but other ways are possible. For each type of handout we have now added ‘how to’ notes about the best alternative procedures that we know about.

For the book we chose handouts which

• have a really good track record at getting even the quietest students speaking
• require relatively little preparation on the part of the teacher
• are easy to explain
• are fun and interesting to use.
• recycle useful vocabulary and grammatical constructions.

If your class is mixed in level, lower and higher proficiency learners can use the handouts in different ways. (The book gives tips for this.) Or lower and higher proficiency learners can be given different versions of the same handout (often, the book provides for this) or they can get quite different handouts that differ in level.

Many of the handout-based exercises in chapters 2–6 are ideal for students who have finished some other activity sooner than their classmates and so need something useful and interesting to do while the others continue with the first activity.

Overview of the chapters

Aside from an introduction that includes discussion of monolingual classes, correction techniques, and what we teachers already do to develop our students’ speaking skills, there are six chapters. All involve lots of speaking. Additionally,….

Chapter 1 prepares students as follows. For students to be able to use the handouts fruitfully, they must be able to read English out loud sufficiently well that their classmates can usually understand them easily. And your students will need other ‘pairwork skills’ as well. So, in this chapter you will find exercises (ones not based on handouts) that are designed to help students develop the skills they will need to get the most out of the activities in the other chapters. Put another way, it furnishes the teacher with procedures for addressing some very basic impediments to understanding and making yourself understood. These procedures include work on intonation, voice volume, clarifying, asking for clarification, and…yes…reading aloud.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the development of students’ ability to ask and answer questions, respond to what other people say, and gain confidence and fluency.

Chapter 4 concentrates on grammatical structures in the context of using/ responding to items on a questionnaire.

The main aim of Chapter 5 is expansion of vocabulary. This is the last of the four handout-based chapters.

Chapter 6 is for freer, less prompted exchanges.

For each chapter there is an introduction that does two things. Firstly, it says how the activities are likely to help students get better with respect to particular aspects of the speaking skill that are relevant in everyday conversation (such as responding to questions and appropriate turn-taking). Secondly, it gives general guidance and general guidance about the order in which the procedure(s) and handouts can be used. If the chapter contains handouts, there are also descriptions of the procedures for using them.

We won’t go into detail here about other information you can find in the book about the individual activities and handouts―only that for each activity, or procedure, you can find all the information that is usually given in a book for teachers (e.g., level range, typical duration, language focus, possibly new vocabulary, options, variations, and so on). Also, the Introduction includes a section on correction techniques; but we won’t say anything about that here either. What we’ll go into a bit of detail about instead is the matter of what makes a speaking exercise demanding or undemanding.

An activity’s ‘demand level’

“So, what makes a speaking exercise demanding?¹ There are two ways to look at this question. One is to consider how demanding exercises are for us as teachers. An exercise that was demanding for us would be one that involved doing a lot of materials preparation, giving a lot of complex instructions, talking a lot to the class, intervening a lot (e.g. to correct errors or explain new steps in an activity), and assessing students’ performance in a formal way. Another way is to consider how difficult students find the exercises to do. Students can find a speaking exercise difficult for many different reasons. Here are some rules of thumb about what makes a speaking exercise hard or easy for a student to do:

• The more difficult the language the students are expected to use, the higher the demand for ability and effort.
• The more help is given with ideas and language given, the easier for the students.
• The more familiar the topic to the student, the less demand, usually. (It is possible however for a topic to be so familiar that it’s boring for students to talk about.)
• It’s tempting to suppose that demand will tend to go down if students can choose their own topic. But we have probably all known students who find it difficult to think of something to talk about. For them, it is not being given a topic that makes an activity demanding.
• The more difficult the concepts to be expressed, the higher the demand.”

Just above, we have in fact been quoting from the book’s introduction. The relevant section goes on to speak about other ‘demand variables’―including task type, task focus (e.g., accuracy v fluency), task support, and personality²―before it turns to example speaking excises and discusses where each is likely to fall on a scale that ranges from ‘undemanding’ to ‘very demanding’. After this part of the book’s Introduction we turn to the following question: ‘How do students benefit from doing relatively undemanding exercises?’ That’s a key question because one of our major aims when putting the book together was to include a very high percentage of speaking exercises that keep demand relatively low on the grounds that this will raise the chance that your students will say more―that is, speak for longer and say more words per minute. This in turn means that they will share more information with each other (and perhaps with you also) and that their fluency is likely to develop faster. In short, we believe that in order for students to get better at speaking what they have to do is speak, lots. We quote again from the book’s introduction: “By concentrating in this book on more personal or interactional conversations, on fun topics, and lots of natural speech, we feel students will benefit from the sheer interest value and amount of talk. Also, because the activities in this book encourage students to do lots of speaking, lots of listening is done too. Additional goals for students are vocabulary development and learning about the world.”

What is the extra benefit for learners in monolingual classes?

The benefits we’ve talked about arise in classes of students with different mother tongues and also in classes where students speak the same language. But there is a particular additional benefit of using low demand speaking exercises in monolingual classes. That is, students are less likely to lapse into speaking their mother tongue than they are when they’ve been asked to do a high demand activity. Our experience has shown us that students are especially likely to stick with English when they’re working with handouts (like the ones in Something to Say) that provide them with a rich supply of interesting and easy-to-use speaking prompts in English.

Notes

1 For scholarly discussions of what makes tasks hard or easy see Cognition & Second Language Instruction by Peter Robinson, (2001, Cambridge U Press: chapters 7, 10, & 11) and a Cognitive Approach to Language Learning by Peter Skehan (1998, Oxford U Press).

2 If you’re wondering why we haven’t mentioned learning styles, it’s because there is no good evidence for them. See ‘Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence’, by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork (2008, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 8, nr. 3). Available at
www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf