Teaching Speaking and Video Clips

This website, created by the National Capital Language Resource Center, provides suggestions about all aspects of teaching languages and is particularly geared towards college and university instructors. The site has a section dedicated to “Teaching Speaking” which can be found under the “Principles” tab on the left hand side of the page (The above link should take you straight to it). The site provides many good tips about both what the teacher should be doing in the classroom and what the students should be aware of when working on their oral proficiency.

The NCLRC lists resources (mostly books) and strategies for developing speaking activities. In this “Developing Speaking Activities” section, the site addresses the need for real-life, authentic communicative exercises in the classroom and provides description of and ideas for implementing specific activities. One example: information gap activities where students are partnered and must ask each other questions to get information from one another. The website also gives advice for creating role play and group discussion activities and provides very useful tips about how to implement these activities in the classroom.

Another website I've found provides great examples of native-like speech. This site is entitled Spanish Proficiency Exercises and could be used in the classroom to prompt discussions. It presents video clips of native speakers talking about different subjects ranging from describing physical characteristics to discussions about American business practices. The website was created by the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas and in the site’s introduction, they make the point that their objective is to provide students with the necessary tools to be able to discuss the same topics themselves in Spanish. The site is well organized, presenting videos on 14 different topics for each of six levels of proficiency: Beginner, Intermediate A and B, Advanced A and B, and Superior. For each topic, there are five or six different speakers from different Spanish speaking countries who present their own view/experience about that topic.

In the classroom, these videos could be used to teach oral proficiency in a variety of ways and the activities could focus on different aspects of speaking. For instance, the teacher could play some videos in class, pointing out differences in pronunciation among speakers and then the activity could become more focused on accurate language production. The teacher might also assign these videos for homework and then have the students prepare a short speech about their own opinion/experience with the topic. The video clips could also provide good opportunities for group work, as some of the topics involve dialog and real-life scenarios like giving directions, talking on the phone, etc.

The videos are a great source of authentic language in that they provide the student with exposure to varying accents as well as themes, both great for prompting discussions. Although the website does provide a script in both Spanish and English for each video, there is the option to hide the script so that only the video plays. They also offer simplified versions of the videos, where the speakers talk slower and some slang is omitted. This would be useful for beginning speakers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed with so much spoken input.