Question

What are some speaking and listening activities for ells where students speak to one another?

Answer 1

Answer.

Immigrant adults and children in English speaking host countries need English for daily life to communicate with the school, the community, the workplace, the medical sector,etc. English Language Learners at all proficiency levels can communicate, and they can be encouraged and challenged to further improve their skills in English language by engaging them in in interactive, communicative activities in different aspects of the class—ranging from ice-breaking activities, needs assessment, and goal-setting to life-skills, phonics, and spelling.

Communicative activities can be organised which provide opportunities for learners to use the language with one another and with people in the community. These can include class surveys where the students may be encouraged to go beyond passive approach of taking notes from the teacher and giving their own verbal responses to a series of questions posed in English. This would engage their listening comprehension and also the use of correct speech in communicating their own thoughts. Moreover, conversation grid activities can be used where learners are involved in independent, and cooperative conversation without direct teacher involvement and they plot the responses of all the team members on a grid pertaining to ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘who’ , ‘why’ and ‘how’ of an event and it helps them to learn new vocabulary and context specific words and phrases that they can use in everyday situations like how to ask for something in the grocery store, how to buy a train ticket, etc.

There are several such activities and tasks which can be applied to English language learning in immigrant students and the success with such learning activities is especially higher where there is a strong classroom community.