What I learned about teaching speaking skills

The most important part of speaking English is simply you as a teacher should be speaking English at all times during the class activity. Sometimes, the learners can feel shy about joining the conversations but once they all know English is the only way to join the activity then they would have no other chance but to speak English and overcome their fear of speaking in another language rather than their mother tongue.

From my own experiences, I also found it very interesting that the timing of the speaking activity is also important for English learners, during early morning times I had very engaging and full-on speaking activity classes with learners. On the other hand, I had difficult times making the learners calm down, stay in focus, and be very quiet at other times especially during or after lunchtime.

I have also experienced very positive outcomes with learners when they are having recognition and feeling appreciation for what they achieved after their speech. Real-time feedbacks work really great, positive feedbacks are needed for each learner when they joined the conversations and state their opinions about the topic. That way, they would also encourage to join actively and more importantly understand the importance of not being afraid of telling or sharing their own views with others.

If the learners are quiet for some reason, then I always like to think perhaps the topic is rather new that they have never had thought about it previously, so I start giving more examples and trying to make the learners see it from a different perspective or even stating very absurd idea to encourage them to see which position they take and defend on.

While joining speaking activities are important to see the level of each learner and increase their own confidence level but developing a wide range of different ideas, the teachers have to have good planning for speaking classes including attractive and challenging topics to push the boundaries of learners to come up with new sentences and words as well as would be very handy to learn if learners had any special interests in life and bring out new fun topics on every class.