TEFL Listening and Speaking Class Activity

By Azys Syaiful Anwar

TEFL teachers may work harder to encourage the learners to speak or comprehending English sentences. Since the less chance of speaking, or hearing people in their community speaking English, they don’t have the habit of using English in their daily conversation. As a result, they, sometimes, feels hesitant in practicing their English mastery. As a solution, teachers can try to make a class which mainly focuses on the English speaking and listening skill to help students more communicative.

To teach listening and speaking skill, teachers can’t make simple activity involving the entire student. The activity must be planned well and it has to stimulate students to practice their English. For example, teachers can take ‘chain sentence game’ to teach their students. It’s a game that demands the students’ listening and speaking ability. Using this game, teachers can get the overview of the students’ ability in comprehending and pronouncing the words.

To run this game, teacher needs to divide the class into groups. The group is in a row to back. Teachers can adjust the number of group members depending on the entire class number. Teacher can make a grammar and vocabulary focus as the main topic. Then, teacher can write some sentences in a slip of paper. The slip paper is going to be distributed to each group, so teacher may write three to five sentences to each group (consider the time provided in the English lesson).

The next step is explaining the game’s rules. Teacher gives each student the slip papers to the group leader (first person of the group). Teacher has the leader read the sentence on the slip paper and then flipped it down. After that, the leader whispers what he just reads to the next group member and so do the rest of the group member. Finally, the last man of the group will say the sentence loudly. Teacher can give feedback whether they correct or not.

This is only a simple game for your student that can be practiced without spending much time on preparation. This is intends to force your students to speak and to comprehend English. Since foreign language seems hardly to learn, somehow, teachers need to ‘force’ students to study it. Teachers can provide some fun activity which is adjusted to the standard of achieved competence. Moreover, teachers can try to make teaching tools if they’re needed.