View Content #24449

From https://sandymillin.wordpress.com

Sandy Millin has written an excellent blog post around the theme "Why should they care?" For each skill (speaking, reading, writing, listening, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation), she presents a common scenario of uninterested students and then provides concrete suggestions, based around more widely applicable concepts, for making the activity or task engaging. Here is the example for speaking:

You ask students to discuss a question like this in pairs:

Tell your partner what you did at the weekend.

They each monologue for about 30 seconds, and the whole activity peters out after less than two minutes. Neither student really listened to their partner, and apart from saying a few words in English, they haven’t really got anything out of the activity.

...Here are a few little tweaks that might avoid this situation.

Give them a listening task too. These can also be used as questions for feedback after the activity.
‘Find something your partner did that you didn’t.’ > Feedback = ask one or two students to say what their partner did and why they didn’t do it.
‘Decide whose weekend was more boring.’ > Feedback = put your hand up if you had the most boring weekend.

Add challenge.
Students have 15 seconds to tell their partner what they did – time it strictly. Afterwards they change partners and tell someone else what their partner did. Give them thinking time first to decide/rehearse what to say in that time.
Students can only say two sentences before their partner speaks. Give an example, and make sure you include questions!

Change the interaction pattern.
Students mingle, speaking to as many others as possible. They have to find one person who did the same three things as them/did none of the things they did/did something they wish they’d done.
Play Chinese whispers with two teams racing to correctly write down one thing each person in their team did.

Give them some functional language you want them to use.
‘No, really? Why did you do that?’
‘That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’

Read the full blog post at https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2018/01/06/why-should-they-care/