Speaking of speaking

The main purpose of EFL teaching is the development of the four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. From my experience, speaking is the most difficult skill to develop in the context of our educational system. How do you make your thirty students speak? Can their progress be assessed without forgetting the rest of the course syllabus?

I must admit that I mainly focus in the formal aspects of the language since there are too many students in each class. An excuse? Perhaps. Which of you shall cast the first stone?

So the students' level of language input (listening) is usually higher than the level of language production. I use many speaking activities to enable pupils to participate with a minimal verbal response, but when they are encouraged to manipulate language and express themselves, that's a different story. This is when a little extra help is required.

Back at work, we are about to fix the dates for Trinity College GESE (Graded Examinations in Spoken English). Our school has been a registered examination centre for the last four years and it has become a remarkable help in our students' learning process. I guess there are hundreds of different ways to improve your students' level of speaking and there are also many other factors you should take into account, but this option suits our school fine. So far, so good, but I am always open for suggestions.