How To Get Students Speaking The Target Language

Traditional education in a World Languages class makes it difficult for students to gain confidence and proficiency in speaking. Anyone who has ever been in a traditional class, or taught one, knows this.

When I tell people that I worked as a Spanish teacher, I can’t tell you how many adults have told me that they studied Spanish for years and still can speak it. Yet, gaining proficiency is the top priority of my Spanish 1 students.

So, what can be done?

In this post I’ll address a few strategies that can be used in a World Languages class to get students talking.

Narrating A Set Of Images

A lot of textbooks come with images that come with each unit to prompt students to use the target vocabulary in spoken conversation. When I used the Holt textbook Exprésate, I got images that look like this.

Once a unit, students needed to develop dialogue to narrate the images for the corresponding unit. They then needed to call a Google Voice number and speak their dialogue as a recorded message.

If this was the first time that they were calling, they needed to state their name and period first. I would save their name in my contacts, so when they called back successive times, if they forgot to say their…