ESL Speaking Fluency Activity: 120-90-60 | How to speak English Fluently and quickly

All of our students want to speak more fluently in English! It can be difficult to help your students with this though because most of the activities you’ll find in textbooks focus more on accuracy. However, teaching English speaking fluency can often be quite a difficult task. That's why you'll need some good TEFL speaking fluency activities like this one, 120-9-60. Help your students speak more quickly in English. ------------------- • Here's another one of my favourite speaking activities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlcp_EI2n8&t=2s • Speak English Fluently by: @Oxford Online English https://youtu.be/KaA_mxga3PQ ------------------- Learn more about this speaking fluency activity: https://eslspeaking.org/120-90-60-fluency-speaking-activity/ Want to find more ESL Icebreakers? Check out my book: 39 ESL Icebreakers here: https://amzn.to/3cQ9M3K -------------------- https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #teachingenglishwithjackie #speakingfluently #englishspeakingpractice Timestamp 0:00 Intro 0:56 How to do the activity 1:32 Follow-up questions 1:52 Switch roles 3:02 Class feedback 3:25 Conclusion Transcript for 120-90-60: Today I'm going to talk about one of my favourite activities to work on speaking fluency. When you're teaching speaking, there's kind of two different things. There's accuracy which is like correct grammar, and correct word choice or there's fluency which is how quickly and easily students are able to talk. I find most ESL textbooks and even most teachers and I mean I'm guilty of it too, focus on accuracy because it's much easier to say to someone, your grammar was incorrect or use this word instead of that word than it is to tell students to speak faster. I mean, you can't really say that students will often just speak at the pace that they speak so I like to use this activity in my classes in order to help students work on that and build some confidence that they actually are able to speak more quickly. I get students to prepare a short speech based on something that they know quite well so it kind of depends on the topic of the day or the grammar or vocabulary that I'm teaching but it could be something like your favourite restaurant or talk about like a memory from high school if you're talking about the simple past or something like that. And then I get students to make some notes, one or two words per line but they're not allowed to write full sentences. And then I put them in pairs and the students have to talk for 120 seconds or two minutes to their partner about that topic. At the end of that two minutes, the person listening has to ask one or two follow-up questions. The follow-up questions are actually not super important but I do that to encourage active listening so the other person just isn't thinking about what they're going to say and paying no attention actually to what this other person is talking about. So after they talk for two minutes and then one or two follow-up questions, they switch roles and the other person talks for two minutes and then one or two follow-up questions. Then after that, I get students to switch partners and then they have to give that speech again, saying all the same things but they have only 90 seconds this time so they have to speak more quickly but most students are able to do this because it's fresh in their head and saying something the second time, of course, is easier than saying something the first time. And so then the same thing happens they speak for 60 seconds one or two follow-up questions switching roles and then do it again or sorry 90 seconds they speak for 90 seconds and then they switch partners again and then the third round they have to speak in 60 seconds including all the same things. So this is where it gets a little bit difficult. Not all students will be able to do it because the information from two minutes, cut down to one minute is not that easy to include even if you speak very quickly but most students will give it a good try and do quite well and it is the third time that they are saying it. So the same thing happens: they do the speech and then follow up questions and then switch roles. And at the end of that, I'll get the whole class together and I'll get them to give me some feedback about how it went, what was difficult, if they felt confident that their time, things like that. So we have a bit of a discussion about how it felt to actually speak more quickly, probably than they've ever spoken English in their entire lives. Probably this is the most quickly they've done it. Tags: ESL Speaking Fluency,speaking fluency,fluency activities,fluency lesson plan,fluency lesson plan,120-90-60,How to speak fluent English