speaking – Page 2

Ask the expert

Throughout my 34-year career as an English teacher, I have taught adult students from all walks of life: doctors, lawyers, farmers, the unemployed… Their interests have been just as varied, ranging from Formula 1 racing and fashion to videogames and techno music.

Mining reading passages for collocations 1

Today we are going to ask Claude to generate collocations (clusters of two or three words that commonly appear together in spoken and written English more frequently than they would occur by chance) aligned with reading passages from coursebooks or the web. The aim is to use this material for both communicative activities and raising awareness of collocations before the reading task.

Conditional sentences

Today I will be adapting 3 types of activities focusing on practicing conditional sentences to involve our language assistant –ChatGPT- to, in turn, engage and provide extra motivation for our students live in class.

Class debates 2

This is the second blog post on how we can get Gen.AI to create content for debates in the language classroom and then how we can use that material when we see our students later on and how the lesson could unfold. The potential is endless!

From reading to speaking practice

With the rise of Gen.AI, language learners now have countless ways to practice speaking and conversational skills. They could simply hold voice conversations with the sole intent of having someone to talk to in order to use the language they are gradually acquiring. These conversational exchanges could also take a more structured format. Today I am going to share an idea for our students to try in a quiet place for a few minutes, in combination with reading material.

Dice-rolls grid

A dice-roll grid is a table with 6 rows and 6 columns and a total of 36 cells representing the outcome of a roll of two six-sided dice. The 6 rows and 6 columns correspond to each die’s roll. Dice-roll grids are often used in board games and speaking activities in the language classroom. Students roll a die twice to get the coordinates for the task. Gen. AI can create these grids in a split second, ready to be printed or copied and pasted into a digital document for later classroom use.

Mind maps

Mind maps are visual records of information that allow learners to see how words, concepts or ideas relate to each other. In most instances teachers in the ELT setting make use of mind maps for brainstorming purposes.

In our case, we are going to ask ChatGPT to generate text-based mind maps to prepare materials for the class.

Class debates 1

Today we are going to explore the potential of using ChatGPT in class and bend it to our will to help us generate ideas for class debates and also to present us with arguments and counterarguments to engage our students in these debates. Additionally, we can use it to search for relevant lexical items in relation to those debates.

Creating stories: find the differences

Today we are going to ask ChatGPT to create two short stories with 5 small differences, tailored to an A2 language level. Students will be working in pairs to exchange information in order to identify the differences. We will be copying and pasting the texts, then printing copies for use in the language class.

Speaking exam practice: monologue

Today we are going to use Claude for live brainstorming in class to generate subtopics from a general topic provided for a speaking exam. Next we will focus on gathering some useful vocabulary and expressions to use in the exam.