Oral skills

As we all know, oral skills have not been given the importance they deserve in ESL teaching. Traditional grammar-focused ESL teaching methods left speaking skills absolutely aside, while listening activities were just occasional.

Fortunately, things are changing, since our global world currently demands communicative competence above all.

Teachers are thus required to prepare their students to be able to use the English language in an oral way, and not just in its written form.

Luckily, nowadays we have plenty of tools to develop our students' oral skills.

If you are a more traditional teacher, but still worried about oral skills and cultural awareness, you can always fall back on a good listening source, as the ones you can find at the British Council website. They are suitable for learners with different levels of English and you can even download the transcripts for your older students to take a look at them at the end of each session.

If you like challenges, innovation and creativity and have a certain command of ICTs, then you may want to create your own exercises for your students to practice either their listening or their speaking skills by themselves at their own level.

In this sense, Voxopop is a great tool to develop listening and specifically speaking skills, since it is a voice-based e-learning tool which allows students to record their voice messages while promoting interaction. It also gives you the option of listening to your own recorded messages, as well as adding written messages, so it is a quite complete and useful tool. Here you have an example of a talkgroup, created by me with this software, where students can share their thoughts about their favourite movies.

And, if you still want to know more about useful sites to develop oral skills, take a look at Clarityenglish.com