Glad to see you again in my blog!

In this entry we are going to talk about Teaching Speaking, which is very important when trying to learn a new language since it allows learners to actively engage with the language, develop communication skills, improve fluency and pronunciation, their vocabulary and grammar, and to get many other benefits.

During our sessions teacher Orlando was explaining to us many ways in which we can teach speaking, of course, conversations are the main activities that we can do in order to develop this skill, however, there are other activities such as, roleplays and tongue twisters. When talking about roleplays, we can create scenarios or dialogues where we can practice conversations in various contexts. Role-playing helps students to simulate real-life situations and practice specific vocabulary and expressions.

My favorite part of the sessions was when we started talking about Jazz Chants, which are an effective language learning technique that combines rhythmic and melodic chants with language acquisition. They improve pronunciation, intonation, and fluency by emphasizing on natural language patterns. Jazz chants aid vocabulary and grammar retention through repetition and make language learning engaging and enjoyable for the learners. They enhance listening skills, boost speaking confidence, and provide cultural insights. By incorporating jazz chants into language learning, learners benefit from an effective and motivating approach to develop their overall language skills. We watched videos about their origin, how to use them and how to create our own, and because of this, we had to create our own jazz chants in groups so we divided our class and started doing it. At the beginning I wanted to create a Jazz Chant using the lyrics of a song called Chun-Li, and it was really cool, I had to admit it, however, we couldn’t perform this for obvious reasons, so we created another one talking about animals in a farm; our Jazz Chant was something like this: “What do you find in a farm? A insert name of an animal”.

I recorded some videos of other groups performing their Jazz Chants, here you have them:

Nidia's Group:

Maru's Group:

And that was it, this was my summary about Teaching Speaking, I hope you liked it.

See you in my next entry!