Speaking tasks, fluency, communication strategies and pronunciation (intelligibility, prosody, individual sounds). For exam classes this is where PET/FCE Speaking and IELTS Speaking preparation lives.
Where the sources disagree
- Accuracy vs identity: Tichá and Bryan-Jordan (via Jennifer) argue for keeping L1-shaped English and learner varieties; Jennifer’s own pronunciation posts work on individual sounds for B2+ professionals. Compatible if the target is intelligibility for the learner’s purpose (Jenkins; Levis’s intelligibility principle). (Claude)
- Shadowing: promoted as a speaking technique; the research mostly shows listening/decoding gains. (Claude)
Fluency and strategies
- Fluency rests on memorised word-groups
- Twelve conversation strategies worth teaching
- Going blank when speaking - compensation strategies
- Stop apologising for your English - listener-focused communication
Task design
- Information-gap design - convert any exercise into a two-way task
- Nomination cards for balanced small-group speaking
- Why pairwork fails - fix the task, not the students
- Fishbowl speaking with narrow-focus peer feedback
Pronunciation
- Intelligibility as the goal, accent as the learner’s informed choice
- Visualise sentence stress with audiograms
- Chants train stress-timed rhythm
- Shadowing - a ladder from echo to performance
- Scaffold a difficult sound from a neighbour sound - zh from sh
More notes (by source)
Carol Read (ABC of Teaching Children)
- Jazz chants - a six-step procedure
- Oracy - talking to learn, not just learning to talk
Gianfranco Conti (The Language Gym) - Speaking develops from input and retrieval, not speaking practice alone
Scott Thornbury (An A-Z of ELT) - Creative automatization - five criteria for fluency activities
The Teacher James - Low-prep image warmers - mystery objects, doodles, story icons
Visualising Ideas (Naomi Epstein) - Choral participation can hide misperception
Key terms (DELTA M1)
fluency · accuracy · complexity (CAF) · communication strategies (Dörnyei & Scott: circumlocution, appeal for help, fillers) · negotiation of meaning · information gap · Lingua Franca Core · intelligibility vs comprehensibility (Derwing & Munro) · prosody · connected speech · voicing · minimal pairs
Open questions
- Which three communication strategies are worth explicit teaching for IELTS Part 2 and PET Part 3?