Speaking Activities For The Online Classroom

Speaking activities can successfully take place online with some planning and by taking advantage of the functions in an online classroom, with the obvious being the breakout rooms.  These can be used for pair work or groupwork for completion of a speaking task.  There are other features on platforms such as Zoom which can optimize a speaking activity.  The chat box is often underutilized in a speaking task, but it can serve many a purpose.  It can be used to elicit language to be used in the speaking task or if one half of the class is performing a speaking task such as a role play, then the other half can be set a listening task to maximise group participation e.g. they type in the target language when they hear it.    Feedback can also be given via the chatbox, particularly if you want to give personalized feedback to individual students.

Below are three classroom favourites which are easily adaptable for an online environment.

Warmer: Speak for a minute

Speaking for a minute in an online classroom might feel like speaking for an hour so I suggest changing this to “Speak for half a minute”.    A “Topic Wheel” could be used with each student “spinning” the wheel and then speaking for 30 seconds about the topic it lands on.  Making a wheel like this is simple using websites such as Wordwall.net, so it could be produced on the spot with the students suggesting the topics they want to talk about.  This is a great activity for practicing fluency over accuracy.

Debates

A debate can still be conducting in the traditional way in an online classroom i.e. half the students arguing one point and the other half giving a different view with the whole class practicing the language of stating opinions, backing up arguments, giving examples, etc.  The teacher will still have to make sure that all students have the chance to participate and this can be done by using the mute function and only allowing one person to speak or the students can use the ‘hand up’ icon to indicate they want to take a turn.

Find someone who

Find someone who is a classroom classic and is often used for the purpose of students and teachers getting to know each other whilst moving around and mingling.  This speaking activity can be moved to the online classroom, with slight modification.  Students can still ‘mingle’ with the teacher putting them into randomized groups of 3 or 4 in the breakout rooms.  This can be done several times, or the teacher can increase the size of the groups each time culminating in them coming together as one large group at the end.  Don’t forget that unfortunately the students can’t see the shared screen in the breakout rooms so they would need to either take a photo of the “Find someone who” worksheet or make notes.  For this to work successfully, there needs to be a lot of ICQs at the beginning with the teacher checking each “room” to make sure the students are on task.  Setting a time limit for each grouping would also be beneficial.

Setting and conducting speaking tasks in an online classroom may seem a bit daunting and disjointed at first but with practice, they will become easier, run more smoothly and become part of your daily classroom routine.