How to Teach Speaking Lessons on CELTA

Transcript - Teaching Speaking on CELTA: A Practical Guide

Today I want to talk about something that sounds simple, but actually isn’t simple at all.

Teaching speaking

Because very often, new teachers think speaking lessons are going to be the fun bit. The easy bit. The bit where learners just chat to each other while you smile encouragingly and wander round looking professional.

And then they teach a speaking lesson and discover that it’s actually quite hard to do well.

The learners go quiet. Or one person dominates. Or they make lots of mistakes and you’re not quite sure what to correct. Or they can’t think of what to say.

Or the whole thing feels a bit thin and random and you end up wondering whether much teaching actually happened at all.

So in this video, I want to give you a practical guide to teaching speaking, especially if you’re doing CELTA, but also if you’re already teaching and want your speaking lessons to work better.

Why teaching speaking is different
The first thing to say is that speaking is not just “doing grammar out loud”. It’s a different skill.

When learners are speaking, they have to do lots of things at once. They have to think of ideas. They have to choose language. They have to organise what they want to say. They have to pronounce it clearly enough for somebody else to understand. They have to listen to the other person and take turns appropriately. And they have to do all of that in real time.

That’s what makes speaking so demanding.

With reading or writing, learners usually have a bit more time. With speaking, they have to produce language on the spot, and that creates pressure.

There are two big things we often think about in speaking:

          fluency and accuracy.

Sometimes the aim is to help learners speak more freely, more smoothly and with more confidence.

Sometimes the aim is to help them speak more accurately, with better grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation.

And one of the big challenges in teaching speaking is knowing which of those you’re really focusing on at a given moment.

Because if you try to focus equally on both all the time, you can very easily end up not really helping with either.

Common mistakes when teaching speaking
So let’s look at a few things that often go wrong.

The first is: too much grammar and not enough speaking.

Now, I’m obviously not anti-grammar. Grammar matters. But sometimes teachers think they’re teaching speaking when what they’re actually doing is teaching a grammar lesson with a small speaking activity tagged on at the end. So the speaking becomes a kind of afterthought. A little reward for surviving the present perfect. And the result is that learners don’t actually get very much speaking practice.

The second problem is: neglecting pronunciation.

This happens a lot. Teachers focus on meaning and grammar, but don’t really help learners with how to say things. And of course pronunciation matters enormously in speaking because a learner can know exactly what they want to say and still struggle to communicate if they can’t say it clearly enough.

And I don’t just mean individual sounds. I also mean stress, rhythm and intonation.

And the third problem is: weak speaking tasks.

Sometimes the task just isn’t doing enough work. If you ask learners to “talk to your partner about your weekend”, you may get a little bit of chat, but not necessarily much more than that.

A good speaking task usually needs a reason to speak, some kind of outcome and often a bit of support. Otherwise you can get very short exchanges, awkward silence, or one confident person doing all the talking while the other one says, “Yeah… same.”

So what does a good speaking lesson look like?
If you’re on CELTA, this is really important. A good speaking lesson isn’t just putting learners in pairs and hoping for the best. You need to think carefully about the shape of it.

First of all, learners need a reason to communicate. That might be solving a problem, making a decision, ranking options, planning something, telling a story, sharing opinions, or reaching a conclusion together. In other words, there needs to be some communicative purpose.

Secondly, learners need the right level of support. That might mean useful vocabulary, prompts, a model, a speaking frame, time to prepare ideas, or a clear task structure.

Speaking tasks often go badly not because learners are lazy or shy, but because they haven’t been given enough to work with.

And thirdly, you need to be very clear about your aim. Are you trying to develop fluency? Are you practising a functional area such as agreeing and disagreeing? Are you creating opportunities to use target language from earlier in the lesson? Are you focusing on pronunciation?

You need to know that, because it affects the task, the feedback and what you pay attention to while the learners are speaking.

Now if you’re doing CELTA, here are a few things I’d really keep in mind.

First: Plan the speaking task very carefully.
Don’t just think They’ll talk about this.

Think:
What exactly are they going to say?
Why are they going to say it?
What support do they need?
How will I set it up clearly?
How will I know whether it worked?

Second: Make the instructions very clear.
Speaking tasks can fall apart very quickly if learners aren’t sure who they’re talking to, what they’re discussing, how long they’ve got, or what they’re trying to achieve.

So set the task up carefully, check instructions if necessary and don’t assume they’ve understood just because you said it confidently.

Third: Monitor with a purpose.
When learners are speaking, don’t just float around the room vaguely. Listen. Notice what language they’re using well. Notice what problems are coming up. Notice whether the task is actually working. That gives you something useful to work with afterwards.

And that brings me to feedback.


Fourth: Feedback really matters.
After a speaking task, don’t just say, “Well done,” and move on. Use the feedback stage. Pick up on good language. Pick up on useful errors. Highlight pronunciation issues if that’s relevant.

And be selective. You don’t need to correct every single thing they said. In fact, please don’t.

Finally: Aim to build learners’ confidence. Speaking is exposing for learners. It makes people feel vulnerable.

So if learners are hesitant, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unmotivated. It may just mean they need more support, more preparation time, clearer scaffolding, or a task that feels safer and more manageable.

You can’t force speaking out of them by sheer willpower. Your job is to create the conditions that make speaking more possible.

Another thing to think of here is that it’s a really good idea to have the opportunity to repeat a task more than once. It’ll help with their confidence and the first time they do a task, they have to think about it but the second time they’ve got more brain space to actually think about the language they’re using so repetition is really, really useful. Crucial, I’d say!

Beyond CELTA
Of course, this doesn’t stop once CELTA finishes. Teaching speaking well is one of those things you keep getting better at.

The more you teach, the more you notice what makes a task work, what helps learners keep talking, how much support is enough and how to balance fluency work with accuracy work.

So keep developing. Watch other teachers. Try things out. Reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Join communities of teachers. Keep learning about pronunciation, task design and communicative methodology. Because this really is ongoing work.

If you’re doing CELTA at the moment or thinking about it and you’d like more help with all the bits that can feel a bit overwhelming at first, have a look at my CELTA preparation materials in the link above.

And if you’re already in the classroom and want to develop your teaching in a supportive community and with flexible, unstressed programme, check out The Next Step.

Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next video.