Fluency is the ultimate goal for most language learners, with spoken language fluency probably the most desired skill. Ultimately, there is no shortcut to success, however, there are a few easy wins when trying to get your students to speak English fluently. Here is what I would do…
First, ensure all students know how sound linking works and practice all new vocabulary with sentence drilling/chanting. Secondly, allow students plenty of opportunity to speak about their own chosen topics without pressure. Thirdly, provide plenty of native speaker input from books, movies, and series.
As well as the above points we are also going to be talking about building momentum in language learning, production activities, feedback, the nature of language learning, motivation and more. So, here goes…
TEFL/ESL/ELL Fluency Tips and Strategies
#1 – Provide Opportunities for Success
Nothing motivates us more than our own success so give the students a chance to get that feeling of success every time you teach them. Make sure they have speaking activities that they can get a sense of fulfillment from. Of course, the activities should also be challenging but make sure they always get that feeling of success.
We all know how good it feels when you learn something new or have a conversation in a new language. Well, we simply want to harness that power as regularly as possible for our students to use.
A few easy activities that allow us to give them this feeling are:
Barrier activities whereby each partner has the missing information for their partner (these are ideal as they can easily be differentiated for higher and lower abilities), mini-debates where this is no right or wrong answer, simple role play activities, or full on reenactments of movie scenes, ‘show and tell’ short talks – where students talk about an object they bring in an object that is meaningful to them. That’s just a few to get started with.
You can read about more ideas for speaking activities in one of my most popular articles here: 15 Speaking Projects And Activities For ESL Students.
#2 – Practice Sound Linking
This really is a simple hack for boosting students fluency levels if they are not already doing this. In fact, if a student is not doing this already it can make a huge impact on how natural they sound.
The easiest way to get students started with this is to show them how when a word ends in a consonant sound and the next word starts with a vowel sound that the words blend together.
I like to use song lyrics and ask students to underline where the sound linking will take place before we then listen to the song and then we often have a sing out loud as well. Of course, its even more fun for them if you let them choose their favourite English song.
After this you can then go on to point out the sound linking in all the activities you do thereafter and get students to focus on it until they start doing it more automatically themselves.
Sound linking is taught on most TEFL courses these days and in particular on the TEFL courses featured in my TEFL course guide here.
#3 – Imitate Native English Speaker Pronunciation
Students select a 30 second clip from a movie or television show of their choice. First, they have to write out all of the words without using subtitles. They simply need to keep replaying the clip over and over again until they get it all written down.
You then need to cheek the words and help with the meanings of any new words. Next, the student have to read their sentences out aloud with the exact same speed, tempo, intonation and sound linking as the speaker.
Allow them sufficient time to practise this and then ask them to perform to the group. You play the clip and the student starts speaking, then you fade out the volume and the student keeps speaking as you fade the clip back in.
Ideally the student will still be speaking at the same speed, tempo and intonation and will sync back in with the recording.
Peers can give scores out of ten for how well they do this just to keep it competitive. This can also be set as a homework task and rinsed and repeated again once students get the idea of what is required.
Bonus point for copying the accents as well. Obvious sources of clips here will be Youtube and TedED.
#4 – Get Real Life Feedback From NES
Ideally all of your students would be able to get access to a native speaker to converse with. Clearly, you can’t always get this for your students but you do have you, so provide as much opportunity as you can for students to have real conversations with you.
Even if it is just a few minutes each lesson it is amazing how powerful a successful interaction with a teacher can be for an EAL student.
Likewise, though this might sound obvious, encourage other staff members if you are working in a school to make the effort to have those small conversations with ESL/ELL on a regular and ongoing basis and it can do wonders for their confidence.
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#5 – Enjoy The Language Learning Process
To become fluent in a language takes a long time, and students are going to progress much more quickly if they enjoy the process.
To this end put a real emphasis on tailoring the topics you choose to study to the groups interests and needs. There is no reason why all students should be studying the same topics all the time, unless of course it is a prescribed curriculum for a certain qualification, or certificate.
If you have sports fans in your class then produce conversations that are linked to their sport.
Even better if they can be topical questions related to their sport. The added enthusiasm that this brings can add real momentum to their process aside from putting a smile on their faces.
At this point you may be interested in checking out my research based recommendations on how to teach vocabulary here.
#6 – Throw Away ESL Word Lists
Environmental damage, greenhouse gasses, ozone layer, atmospheric pressure. These are all collocations i.e. words that we usual use in combination with certain other words.
This means that rather then learning new words in isolation we should also be learning them alongside the words that they are usually used with.
Matching exercises, and example sentences are ideal ways to introduce these words and I also suggest that you make use of a corpus. You can either research collocations for words you are teaching with this tool or get students to do the research and inform the class what the usual collocations are for new words> https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/
#7 – ESL Educational Technology
As expanding vocabulary is one of the keys to language fluency then it is important you get your students to review new vocabulary often.
Naturally you should promote the use of online tools such as: memrise, and so on. My personal favourite is Quizlet.com as it is very user friendly and Duolingo is a rising star.
Whilst none of those tools can replace human interaction it is better than spending travel time, or any other dead time on Facebook! (related scholarly article here).
#8 – Study Small Chunks Everyday
Getting your students to fluency need not be painful involving long drawn out grammar sessions. Rather, keep sessions easily accessible in short chunks where students are actually using the language keeping teacher talk time down where possible.
#9 – Be Patient
Educate students so that they are not expecting miracles overnight. Be realistic about how long it is going to take for them to achieve some sort of fluency.
Five to seven years is the typically suggested length of time to reach academic fluency, however, noticeable improvements can be seen by all in just two months of focused effort (Read a report from J Cummins regarding this here if you are not familiar with BICS and CALP yet!).
Avoid the temptation to keep testing the students to see if they are progressing. Students tend to gain very little from doing tests and it is a chunk of time that could have been spent more usefully doing something else.
Do set realistic goals for students though and dish out rewards plentifully when they do achieve their interim goals.
And don’t assume that a students goal is fluency, often times it is actually not, they just wish to attain a level that will get them the IELTS score they need to get into the university of their choice, or get up to the next level of the career ladder.
In fact, right now the students I teach lose interest in improving their English when it is high enough for them to get good grades in the UK CIE ‘A’ Level courses they are studying for, and no matter how much I want them to develop higher levels of fluency it is never going to happen without their focused effort.
Overall, then, get the students to enjoy the process and the journey of language learning. If you can master this then fluency will take care of itself!
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