Language Teaching Tip: Use Native Speakers

Teaching a foreign language to high school aged kids is a challenging proposition.  I suspect that the vast majority of  students who complete their required year or two of a foreign language – most often Spanish in the States – have no real vision for how they might actually use that Spanish even if they did learn it. Turks learning English face the same problems.  Motivation is low.  Interest is lower. Attitudes are less than positive and commitment to learning is lacking.  Teachers are fighting an uphill battle against these factors. In my free ebook Sustaining,  share that motivation, commitment and attitude are factors that perhaps do more than any one thing to affect language learning.  Amazing methods mean little if  teachers cannot engage students in ways that create, nurture and protect student’s motivation, commitment and attitudes toward learning.

Here is how it would work:

• Divide students into as many groups as native speakers. (you could do more groups and have some do other activities when not with the native speakers)
• Choose three or four topics that you will have your students ask questions about to the native speakers.  You will want to give these topics to your guest speakers before they come so they have a heads up.
• Set up your room in a way that a guest speaker can each be in a different area of the room with room enough for a group of students to sit with and interview them.  Start by putting a group of students with each native speaker.
• Make sure you have a timer before you begin.  Each group will ask the same question to their native speaker.  The native speaker will respond and talk about the subject for 3-4 minutes.  As the teacher you will want to give a 30 second warning and then have groups rotate.
• The groups will rotate and then ask the same question to the next speaker.  This allows each member of the group to practice asking the question and allows all of the students to hear several native speaker talk about the same topic.  This creates a rich narrow listening experience.  The same sorts of grammar forms and vocabulary will inevitably be used, but from a different perspective and experience.
• Groups will continue to rotate through the native speakers until they have heard from all of them.  Then they can begin again, this time with another question.