Effective Interpersonal Speaking Activities to Get Your French, Spanish, Italian Students Speaking in Class!
The task of engaging and motivating students in the domain of interpersonal speaking can be challenging for a variety of reasons. We know through the research that speaking proficiency is one of the last skills to develop, and oftentimes students know a lot more language than what they are capable of producing orally. Coupled with this inherent difficulty come the awkward social elements of speaking in the target language that make students resistant: speaking requires a level of vulnerability, resistance to shame, and positive self-confidence that many students struggle with in middle and high school.
With these two important realities in mind, speaking activities are critical in the World Language classroom for the following reasons:
they recycle target vocabulary and grammar.
they improve automaticity and fluency.
they build self-confidence with the target language.
they assist students in consolidating language in their minds.
In this post, you will learn three tried and true speaking activities that I use in my thematic units to get students speaking in class.
Speaking Activity #1: Information Gaps
In info gap speaking activities, each student is given information that his/her partner is missing. Partner A exchanges information with Partner B and vice-versa so that both students are able to accomplish a given task. This activity is effective because it ties an outcome to the speaking practice: there is a concrete goal that needs to be accomplished, and it can only be accomplished by using the target language.
In my French Family Unit, Spanish Family Unit, and Italian Family Unit, I include an Info Gap speaking activity that will really help your students use vocabulary and grammar from your Family Unit. Students will ask and answer each other’s questions about two different family trees; each student will be responsible for filling in the missing information in order to complete their family tree.
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Speaking Activity #2: Whole-Class Surveys
In a class survey speaking activity, students need to ask and answer targeted questions to a large number of their classmates. The benefit to this speaking task is that it gets students up and moving, allows them to practice with multiple partners, and keeps them engaged through short, targeted conversations.
In my French Food Unit, Spanish Food Unit, and Italian Food Unit, I include two class survey speaking activities that will really help your students use vocabulary and grammar from your Food Unit. In the first survey, students will ask and answer each other’s questions about their favorite foods and drinks and record their answers in the grid. In the second survey—which is slightly more advanced—students need to provide additional information to explain why they like and dislike certain foods and beverages.
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Speaking Activity #3: Interpersonal Conversations - Questions & Answers
In an interpersonal conversations Q&A activity, students work in pairs and ask each other specific questions, answer the questions, and then provide corrective feedback. You can have students work with one partner for a period of time, and then you can have them find a new partner to get in some extra practice. Students are provided with the questions they will be asking as well as sample answers so that they can help gauge the accuracy and quality of their partner’s oral responses. There are multiple benefits to this sort of activity: students have to listen to a question, potentially ask clarifying questions to better understand the question, formulate a response in their mind, articulate their response, and receive feedback from their partner.
In my French Clothing Unit, Spanish Clothing Unit, and Italian Clothing Unit, I include an interpersonal conversations Q&A activity that helps students practice clothing-related vocabulary and grammar (e.g. to wear, colors, adjectives, etc.). I also include detailed directions and suggestions for implementation. It should also be noted that these documents come in PRINTABLE PDF as well as EDITABLE GOOGLE DOC so you can customize the questions & responses to best suit your students’ needs!
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General Tips for Implementing Speaking Activities
Model a sample conversation. You can have two students volunteer to engage in a mock conversation, or you can choose one volunteer and speak with them (teacher to student) to model what a proper conversation should sound like before students begin working on the activity.
Provide students with verbal communication strategies. This is a great opportunity for students to practice expressions such as “Repeat, please! I don’t understand. Speak more slowly. What does ___ mean? How do you say ___…?” Make sure you have these expressions easily accessible to your students in list format or via posters that are hung in some visible space in your classroom.
Tie a grade to your speaking activity. In my experience, students need to have a grade attached to a speaking assignment in order for them to take the activity seriously and to try their best. Consider walking around the room and listening in on your students’ conversations and giving them a score out of 5 based on how fluid/fluent they sound, how much vocabulary they can accurately produce, etc. Alternatively, consider having students come up to your desk and demonstrate a sample conversation they have had with their partner, which you can then count as a grade.
Limit or ban the use of English. Oftentimes, if students are using English during these targeted speaking activities, it means they are off task. Consider deducting a participation point every time you hear English. In the past, I have given each student three raffle tickets at the beginning of a speaking activity. Every time I hear English, I take one away from them. At the end, they write their name on however many tickets they have remaining and I collect them and raffle off some cool prizes. This is a great way to motivate students to use the target language only!
I hope that this blog post has provided you with some ideas and resources for implementing speaking activities in your French, Spanish, and/or Italian classes. Speaking is an important skill to cultivate from the very beginning of your students’ language learning journey, with the understanding that it will most likely be their weakest skill. Give them a bit of grace — you’re expecting a lot out of them, after all! — but students need to know from the very beginning that they are responsible not just for reading and writing in the target language, but listening and speaking as well.
What types of speaking activities do YOU do in your World Language classroom? I’d love to hear in the comments below!
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
