by Dr Rodrigo Arellano and Gizem Sahin
The students I teach have a love-hate relationship with the Speaking paper. On the one hand, many consider speaking to be their strongest skill. It’s certainly what many of our lessons focus on. But the IELTS Speaking paper isn’t simply about speaking freely about whatever topic the candidate has on their mind - the questions are supplied by the examiner, and this is where things often go wrong. Often the topic is far outside the candidate’s range of interests - and so they lack the vocabulary to describe their opinion, or they lack an opinion in the first place because they have simply never thought about the topic.
We can’t help prepare our students for every outcome, but we can help them prepare for most, and to adopt the kind of flexible mindset that will see them through, successfully.
Here are three activities that will help you prepare your students for the Speaking paper - or that will get your students speaking if you’re teaching a General English class.
Activity 1. Mind Maps for Sophistication
A common challenge for IELTS candidates, even for advanced students, is using specific vocabulary. One way to help your students here is to build mind maps for different topics, and then use these mind maps when you next engage in speaking practice.
Start by finding an example of someone speaking on a common topic, such as their likes and dislikes. If you can’t find something that fits the bill on YouTube, record yourself or a fellow teacher talking for half a minute about the topic. You won’t need the recording just yet, but hang on to it for now.
Make a poster-sized mind map with useful language connected to the topic. The mind map for ‘Like’ might include ‘be crazy about’ and ‘have a thing for’, and so on. You can discuss the different contexts in which these expressions are used, as they might not always be suitable, but when you have a good number of terms you can move on to the practice.
Ask one of your students a question on the topic. They can take a moment to scan the mind map before answering, and it’s all right at this stage for them to make further reference to the mind map if necessary. Practicing does not mean replicating every aspect of the exam at all times.
When your students are comfortable with the content of the mind map, you can then play the recording, asking your students to give some feedback on what they hear, and also to note down anything worth adding to the mind map. Hopefully there’ll be something - in which case, repeat the speaking practice from a moment ago. After all, practice makes perfect!
Activity 2. Paraphrasing
With enough practice of the exam, your students will start to get a feel for the topics they are most likely to encounter in Part One (the Introduction and Interview stage) - and so will you. You can use our first activity to build your students’ word power, but then comes another challenge.
When we speak, we generally seek to express our thoughts first of all - if someone asks us a question, we want to answer it, and unless we are suitably trained, we will use whatever language comes to mind quickest in our answer.
In practice, this usually means that we repeat the language used by the examiner, like in this simple exchange:
Examiner: “What’s your favourite colour?”
Candidate: “My favourite colour is red.”
All right, IELTS candidates are not usually asked questions written by a seven-year-old, but you get the point. What can we do to train our students to use different structures in their answers?
One way is through this activity.
- The teacher asks a basic question, like the one above. The first response is what we all expect, and so the teacher turns to the next student, who says: “My favourite colour is blue.”
- The teacher then replies, “Sorry, that structure has already been used. Try again!”
- The student might think for a moment, and then say: “Blue is my favourite colour.”
- The next student - a bright student who can see where the teacher is going before anyone else - thinks for a moment and then says, “Green. Yes, I’d say that green’s my favourite.”
- This makes life harder for the fourth student - so imagine now how the fourteenth is feeling!
I like this activity for how it teaches my students to think before they speak - not for fear of making a fool of themselves, but because that brief moment might be all they need to put together a more interesting answer, or to put their straightforward answer into a more interesting sentence structure.
Once you have demonstrated this activity to your class, you can then divide them up into smaller groups, and feed typical IELTS questions to them - and again, the goal is to avoid repeating a structure you’ve already heard.
Activity 3. Long Turn Activation
In Part Two of the Speaking paper, the candidate is given a cue card with instructions for what they need to speak about. They have a minute to put some thoughts together, and can make notes if they wish. Then they talk - for up to two minutes.
The long turn is intimidating, because there is no interlocutor to bounce ideas off, and there is no hiding if you run out of ideas. Some students stare blankly at the cue card because they’re out of ideas even before they have started!
Here is an example cue card for Part Two:
(Source: IELTS)
But we’re not going to launch straight into speaking practice here.
Instead, we’re going to borrow an idea called ‘One Minute Challenge’ from Christopher Walker’s book, Fifty Zero Preparation Games.
For this, you’ll need to distribute dice to your students, and on the board write six different roles that your students might adopt. For example:
- The richest person in the country
- Someone who grew up in a forest
- A survivor of a zombie outbreak
- A time traveller from the future
- A two-hundred year-old ghost
- A typical EFL teacher
(I recommend being as crazy here as your students will allow - part of the idea is to get rid of the fear your students will have when facing the long turn).
First, warm your students up. They roll the die and take on their character, and then spend a minute or two talking to their partner about their day. One will talk about feeling trapped in a dark place, constantly assailed and never sure of their survival (this could apply to those who roll a 2, 3, or 6).
When you feel they know their characters well enough, start feeding them some Part One questions like we practiced before. If you have those mind maps handy, they can use them again.
They’re now in character, and can face the individual long turn. Show them the rubric, like the one pictured above, and give them a minute to think - from the perspective of their character - about their answer.
You won’t be surprised to learn that this activity usually leads to a lot of speaking, not to mention laughter. You might, though, be surprised at how well your students do next time they have to talk for two minutes on a topic like those found in the IELTS exam - but for real!
Conclusion
Speaking naturally is what we want our students to do in our classes. It’s often the stated aim of learners coming to language classes in the first place. But to help our students prepare for the IELTS exam, we sometimes have to think differently - and these activities should help with that.
Author Biographies
Rodrigo Arellano
EFL and Spanish language teacher from Chile who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, where he studied for his PhD in Applied and Educational Linguistics. He is passionate about TESOL teacher training and has taught and researched various language-related fields, including Second Language Acquisition, Discourse Analysis, Research Methodology, Multilingualism and Assessment.
Gizem Sahin
Experienced language educator specialising in ESL/EFL/EAP and Turkish as a heritage/second language. Proficient in face-to-face and online learning settings for diverse learners, including, young learners, adults, undergraduates and professionals. Holds qualifications in TESOL, applied linguistics, and language teaching management, alongside certifications in assessment, training design and development. Passionate about empowering ESL students and fostering cultural connections through education.