Mary Poppins' Bag of Speaking Fun

For those who don't remember or who had an underprivileged childhood, Mary Poppins is a nanny with a magic bag that fits anything and everything. This post is kind of like that. I found some great sites that will address all your speaking needs--topics for discussion, idioms, pronunciation, and everything in between.



I'm very partial to discussion topics, myself. For one, it makes students feel like it's worth it to speak up when the topic is important or interests them. And though some may try to avoid using forms they aren't proficient with, they will also be confronted with these same forms when other speakers use them. But sometimes it's difficult to constantly come up with something to discuss. At least if I went on a blind date, I would run out of things meaningful things to talk about pretty quickly before reverting to the daily habits of my cat.

ESL Discussions is a great site with a plethora of topics to discuss, and each comes with several questions for teachers to ask students to elicit their opinions. There is a bar on the right side of the page with links to discussions of the latest news topics, such as "Swine Flu," "Barack Obama," and "Rising Prices." There are even sections for discussions that revolve around grammar and idiomatic language.

The discussion on animal idioms, for example, opens with "Does your teacher ever have to badger you to get your homework?" This can open up into a great cultural comparison of which animals are used to convey which personality traits in the L1 and L2. There are actually many similarities between these in Russian and English, such as the infamous crafty fox.

Another site I'm fond of, English Daily, focuses specifically on idiomatic language. Each "lesson" provides a short conversation for context that features an idiomatic word or phrase, such as "to get on board" for "to participate. At the end of the conversation, it glosses and explains the phrase. These can provide great warm-ups for a class in general or for a discussion in which you want students to use idiomatic language. No book-talk allowed!

I would also like to use these discussion questions, particularly those on "Russia" and "A New Cold War" and record the reactions of people from different cultures to discuss Russian history and stereotypes and how they feel about them.

Finally, the real bag of goodies comes from the website SpokenSkills. There are idioms, specialized vocabulary (from business English to aviation), and speeches, and practice with pronunciation. Every one of these is accompanied by listening practice and a recorder, so students can compare their pronunciation to that of a native speaker.

Many advanced students can recognize which sounds they need to work on because they are the same sounds they have difficulty distinguishing in listening comprehension. For example, Russians tend to have trouble distinguishing between the short "i" and short "e" (pin / pen) and the short "u" in "but" and "love" and the long "a" in "father." (On this site it is referred to as the short "o," but it is commonly known as the long a). These clips will help them compare the sounds, so they can draw the line between them.

The site also offers teachers the opportunity to upload sound clips, so students will have more of a variety of material. This would be a great site to supplement practice with minimal pairs or drawing attention to the different types of language that are used in different situations, such as telephone calls vs. business meetings, but it also offers students an invaluable resource for self-evaluation and practice.

Role-Playing Madness!

In the world of language teaching, role-playing usually means a short activity where students pretend to interact in situations, such as "You are having lunch with a friend, but you forgot your wallet. Try to negotiate with the waiter to let you go get it, so you don't have to wash dishes all night." These make great speaking exercises, and I found a few I really like.

Strangers on a Train: In this activity, students are situated in groups of four, facing each other as if they are in a train car. They then engage in some light conversation about the weather, where they are going and why. Now, it may be unusual for Russians to talk to each other on the subway, but they have no trouble talking on trains in my experience. Why the difference? I have no idea.



The next part of the activity, though, is where it gets interesting! Taking students aside individually, you give them time to memorize a short phrase. They will have to work it into the conversation in a regular way, so the other students can't guess what their phrase is. This not only encourages fluidity of speech, but also focus on what their partners are saying. Phrases like "I agree" or "me neither" depend on what the former speaker said, and more uncommon phrases like "I've always wanted to go to Zimbabwe" depend on the topic of the conversation.

Jungle Survivors: This activity splits the class into reporters and the survivors of a plane crash. Questions could include everything from what they lost in the crash to how their bowels handled coconut milk. They have been living on their own in the jungle for two days, but that's not too unbelievable, is it? You can survive that long easily without food or water. I think students would have a much more interesting time explaining how they survived if they'd been lost for a week or more. And why did they leave the crash site to begin with? Maybe someone shot them down, or maybe they just couldn't stand each other anymore! I think this activity could be spiced up a bit, but the download comes with some nice resources.

Similar activities can be found on ESL Flow


Other Types of RPs
Now, these are fun, but there is also a wide, wide world of role-playing beyond this. It includes video games like Final Fantasy (one of my favorite, but pretty useless for the classroom), forum stories, IRCs (instant refresh chat rooms), and- best of all- the LARP (live action role-playing). Each of these have some similarities, though: participants create an original character that is appropriate for the story setting, and they reply to each other as if they are this character.

Now, I'm not telling you to have your students run around screaming "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Plus 20 damage!" But this can be a great way to tie writing, reading, and speaking practice in with culture, depending on the setting.


Forums:
A forum is a place where members can create threads and reply to comments on each thread. On forums for computer trouble, for example, threads usually denote different types of problems, different conversations. An RP forum is laid out in exactly the same way, but the threads usually denote a new scene to help with organization. Other sections can also offer a place for students to provide information about their character. This alone could become a great research project for students.

For example, if you fancy a story that takes place in the old American West, students may need to become familiar with the geography, the relationships between immigrants and Native Americans, the different jobs available, and maybe a little history. As many times as I've been asked whether or not I ride a horse, this may not be as much work as it seems!

This can become an area for students to freely practice their English, or you can develop scenarios that elicit certain forms. If your cowboys are about to go on the Oregon Trail, for example, they need to buy some oxen and whatnots. This then becomes an interesting way for students to practice shopping vocabulary.

Free forums are available at My Free Forums, and the site offers a lot of tutorials for narrowing membership, adding sections, etc.


IRCs
Instant Refresh Chats are very similar to forums, but these would be even more helpful for advanced students because replies are required in real time. They are basically instant messaging tools that allow multiple people to write to each other at the same time. Many IRC role-playing groups usually have an accompanying forum or web page for members to reference information about their story setting or characters.

One free IRC service is Star Chat, but it may require a download of the program pIRCh. The same can easily be done by inviting multiple members to Windows Messenger or AIM conversations. But Windows, AIM, and pIRCh all allow participants to save or "log" conversations, so students can have something to show for their effort.


LARPs
The most famous LARP known is Vampires: The Masquerade, but if you ever played "make-believe" when you were a kid, then you have LARPed. In free-structure LARPs, this will be exactly the same, but just like with the others, if you want students to concentrate on something specific, then you simply do something like, oh, tell them they are strangers in a train car that strike up a conversation about the weather!

All LARPs give a little freedom, but there are also pre-made structured games online that you can purchase, such as Dinner and a Murder. These are a little costly (~$40) and much too long to be completed in class, but it is definitely worth it to organize a fun get together like this for students at the end of the year.

In the Dinner and a Murder games, students will receive information about their character, their background, and their personality. In the 1920s game, festivities are interrupted by a murder, and all the guests are detained while an investigator talks to them. As the night goes on, however, other guests may feel inclined to murder each other for various reasons. (After a body is discovered, these people get to come back as a secondary character of less importance.)

Once the party is dying down, the participants regroup to try to solve the mystery together, but this can also be revised into a writing activity-- just to make sure you cover all four skills!

ELL-Designed Information

In my limited high school experience, the most important things in laying out a newspaper is space and marketability. You need to make sure the story fits, and you need to make sure it's understandable. Our instructor's advice was to write every article as if you were writing it to a child in about fifth grade. Usually, smaller words help save space, too!

Unfortunately, my more extensive experience in reading the newspaper is that most journalists don't follow this advice, especially now that the Internet provides limitless space for their articles. Many times, article-reading can turn out to be very similar to searching for a word in the encyclopedia or dictionary. Trying to understand one thing ends up trying to understand a chain of different things.

For learners of other languages, this can be an extremely frustrating experience. Luckily, there are several sites that shape the articles for ELLs, such as The Bangkok Post: Easy English News and the Simple English Wikipedia. Both simplify existing articles that can be compared to the original if you want, and the Bangkok post also has listening components.

The Bangkok post is designed for locals in Thailand. It has glosses of difficult words in English and Thai. The news is also more relevant to that region, but it can easily be expanded into a culture lesson or related to news relevant to your own students. For example, the article on smuggling could be related to the problems America had with Britain just before the Revolutionary War or to the more recent standoffs America has had with pirates.

Or for my own EFL setting, I could have students discuss their experiences with knock offs brought in from China, shoddy bootleg DVDs, or the Russian Mafia. I find it very difficult to watch V for Vendetta in Russian with the same guy dubbing all the male and female roles!

The Simple English Wikipedia, on the other hand, is designed to be readable by children and adults learning English. I figured the best way to test its usability would be to look up psychology:

Psychology is the study of human behavior, thought, and feeling. It deals with all actions and reactions of people. Because behavior is difficult to study as a whole, psychologists often only look at small parts of it at a time. Psychology overlaps with many other fields including Medicine, Biology, Computer Science and Linguistics.

Not bad! Even without reading the whole article, I think students will find these explanations more helpful than short dictionary entries. And if this version is even half as addictive as the full version of Wikipedia, your students will be reading junkies in a week! I also love that encyclopedias give students the opportunity to discover things in the target language that they didn't even know about in their L1. Just yesterday it helped a Portuguese student discover the walrus. After reading about it in English, he could click the Portuguese button on the left and read a similar entry in his native language-- after which he was certain he'd never heard of this majestic creature!

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab

I am in love with Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab. Randall's got listening exercises on topics ranging from UFO sightings to cancer treatment and all organized according to their difficulty. Even better? They play right off the site. You don't have to bother with downloading (but you can by clicking on the links below the clip)

If you don't love him enough already, each topic is also accompanied by pre-listening exercises great for schema activation in the classroom or at home. For example, on the section Car Accident, the student is asked what some common causes of car accidents are and how they can be managed.

The topics are accompanied by related idioms that could prove troublesome to learners. A crash course is not necessarily synonymous to a course you failed or a driving course that ended in disaster! They have quizzes to check comprehension, transcripts for visual learners, and several interactive vocabulary-building activities.

My favorite touch, though, is Randall's integration of the post-listening exercises with his blog, so students feel like their learning and opinions are meaningful and can discuss the exercises with Randall himself or with other ELLs:

Car accidents are often a part of life, and getting the right car insurance should be part of owning a vehicle. Choose a type of car in which you are interested. Then, select two in car insurance companies and compare insurance rates for each. Which company seems to provide the best coverage and the best price? Do the companies provide cheaper rates for good students? Do the rates go up for younger drivers?

Please write your opinions on a similar topic at Randall's ESL Blog HERE.

What a practical exercise! This would be a great one for American teens, not to mention a Russian buying a car. I don't know about Australia and New Zealand, but I know you can't get away with driving like a Russian in America or Britain unless you buy a radar detector, too!

All in all, I think Randall's site is one of those rare Internet gems. I'd like to use these in class as springboards for cultural discussions. Randall's particular expertise is in Japanese ELLs, so many culture clips are directed toward those students, but the activities open a door on American culture. The Car Wreck episode paints an interesting family dynamic-- an angry, expectant teen who blames her father's carelessness on what she ultimately decides will be the end of her social life.

Drawing from this and the mention of the father's golfing hobby, this could easily lead to a discussion of American child-rearing practices, particularly among the wealthy. Most adult Russians don't have the privilege of owning their own car, let alone teens, so I would be really interested to discuss this particular episode with students and ask how they feel about the daughter's behavior. As a follow-up activity, I would have them re-write the scene from the perspective of a poor family. What if this is the only car the family owns? What if it were the daughter's fault?

In a pinch, these short listening clips could easily blossom into a full hour-long lesson. The transcripts could be altered, so students could discuss what they believe will happen before listening to the full clip, or they can simply provide extra at-home practice to support themes covered in class.