#MFLsatcov 2 - improving confidence in speaking

Welcome to #MFLsatcov part 2 - otherwise known as "How to get the little darlings to talk"

I have immense sympathy with my pupils who view speaking in a different language with utter terror. Those teenage years just got more excruciating! The question is, how do we help them over these barriers?  My first post looked at precisely this, and I now have a few other tricks to try out.

Being able to hide behind a different persona can take the social trauma out of the experience.  Helen Shaw, who has experience in both secondary and primary, brought along her puppets which she uses to great effect with secondary school pupils.  Building on this, Amelia showed us an ipad app called puppet pals, which allowed the pupils to choose a "puppet" and a setting.  It's amazing how quickly those inhibitions can fall away, especially amongst teenage boys.

There is another website which I want to explore, which @fcharidine used to great effect in his virtual visit to Paris - www.voki.com This allows you to record and embed audio into a blog page, but even better than that, you can choose an avatar.

Teaching in a boys-only school has many joys, but getting teenage boys to expand on their ideas and go beyond a grunt can sometimes be hard work.  @baboohaz has developed an activity based on that great Radio 4 game "Just a minute".  The pupils are given a task, e.g. to talk about their favourite rock or pop star.  They are given a learning mat with key structures and vocabulary, they are allowed to make notes on a whiteboard to help them for the first time they do this.  They then have to talk for a minute on the topic, and the partner challenges if there is repetition, hesitation, etc.The person who challenges the speaker then takes over the task.  The support is then taken away, and the challenge is to talk for as long as possible with no prompts.  This does require stopwatches, but I'm not so sure about using whistles..;-)  In our school with paper-thin walls, I don't think my colleagues would thank me!  I'm going to try it where pupils hold up a flashcards with the relevant challenge shown on it. The competition element, the gradual removal of support both lend themselves well to the development of speaking.