In the digital era, learning spoken has become easy with tools, apps, online classes, and podcasts. However, people may not be sure until they confirm their spoken English skills with a native speaker or experienced tutors. Therefore, teaching the basic English speaking course to beginners has become a challenging task. However, here are a few ways to make it easier:
Determine Your Audience of English speaking course for beginners
The primary step to teach basic spoken English for beginners is to determine the audience. They are either children, very young kids, adults, housewives, employees, etc. In addition to the type of audience, one needs to determine the size of the group. For example, if you plan to give tuition classes to a single person, two to three, or five and more. Determining the class group size and the type of audience would make a massive difference in your teaching methods. Teaching an individual would require focussing on a single person’s spoken English skills, whereas teaching more than a person would require doing the same for everyone else.
Start with English Lesson for Beginners
After determining the correct teaching method, you can move onto the next step, i.e., lesson plan. An English class curriculum should include grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, pronunciation, fluency, etc. If the audience isn’t too young to understand, then you can distribute the same to inform about the current and upcoming classes.
Moreover, the content for lessons should make the audience familiar with the topics. New learners may find it hard to understand prepositions and adverbs during the introductory classes, so picking topics like tenses, vocabulary, sentence formation, etc., could ease their burden. Also, tutors could ask the learners to speak about something they are familiar with in English. By doing so, they can learn about the learner’s aptitude and explain the improvement in their speech, especially if they are preparing for competitive exams like IELTS and TOEFL.
Improve Pronunciation with a English speaking course for Beginners
A vital aspect of spoken English for beginners is enhancing pronunciation skills. There are many ways a tutor can help a learner to improve pronunciation skills. Some of them are reading paragraphs aloud, repetition, and stating about familiar topics like the weather forecast, cricket, etc., encouraging learners to focus on word pronunciation mentioned in the Oxford dictionary. During the pronunciation classes, a tutor must explain the essence of word omission while speaking, alphabet stress, spellings, etc., to improve the learner’s verbal English skills.
Commonly Used Words & Verbs
Students could get overwhelmed during vocabulary lessons and get confused among different words because they are new to the language. However, focussing on commonly used words, verbs, and vocabulary could help them retain knowledge for a longer duration. The tutor could begin with verbs like go, make, do, play, etc., during the initial stages and enhance them as more classes proceed. Moreover, using segments during the class could help educate the new learners better and keep them intact in their visual memory.
Conjunction Techniques
Simple verb conjunctions such as past, present, and future are easy to teach and easy to learn. However, English has numerous rules of exceptions that may prove to be difficult to remember or recall. The best way to teach students about irregular verbs is to incorporate them in conversational sentences. Begin by explaining verb conjunctions, types of verbs, past, present, & future sentence structures. Next, start teaching about a single subject-verb, then two subject-verb sentence applications, and so on.
Conduct Activities
Teaching spoken English to beginners should become interesting by conducting activities. These could include everyday conversations, scenario practicing, lesson flashcards, translation, match the column, sentence conversion, etc. During these activities, explain learners about the critical differences between formal and informal English, avoid using vague language, take the initiate, response, and follow-up model into account, differentiate between interactional & transactional conversations.
Explain the Essence of Body Language
Another essential aspect to remember while teaching spoken English to beginners is to avoid making the body language overwhelming and monotonous. During brainstorming sessions, the tutor could incorporate happy and sad expressions to make the class more exciting and make the learners attentive. Also, ask them to replicate real-world scenarios like restaurant conversations, store visits, etc.
The tutor should also add useful gestures to your body language to make lessons dynamic. Making use of exaggerated motions or showing clips about such gestures could make the class more interesting. While you are at it, explain the do’s and don’t during a conversation. Also, if tutors notice something that their learners are doing wrong, they should point out and state the best way to do it.
Build a Productive Environment in English lesson for beginners
Spoken English skills evolve by communicating more with other people or self. Therefore, tutors should keep communication above correct responses at all times. The best way to do so is through trial and error and explaining that learning a new language could incorporate mistakes. Second, before beginning any new lesson, establish the ground rules for it and the class. Reminding students to be courteous and polite can encourage a productive environment.
It should include not disrupting other students while they are answering. While participation in an individual class is usually necessary, it may not be the same in a group. There might be participants unwilling to participate in such activities. Its the tutor’s responsibility to initiate the participation of all students.
The best method to do so is to indulge everyone in the conversation. Building a productive environment also requires giving space to students to learn and memorize the rules of the language. The best method to make them remember the topics and rules taught during the classes, aside from the activities is to make class repetitions and to review.
Incorporate Personal Experiences with few English learning tips for beginners
Everyone goes through different experiences to learn a new language. A tutor was also once a learner. Therefore, take them through your personal experiences and try to converse with your students in English. For example, go back to a situation during your IELTS spoken exam. Tell them about the topics asked during the test, your thoughts, and your answers. Also, remind them that they can re-learn or improve their language skills by many practices.
