The Art of Teaching Speaking

• What elements make a speaking activity successful?
• Which tasks or activities really help build speaking fluency?
• What does the research show regarding speaking activities?
• What mistakes do ESL teachers often make in speaking activity design?

In this highly accessible and practical teacher-training resource, Keith S. Folse provides a wealth of information to help ESL/EFL teachers design and use speaking tasks that will actually improve students' speaking fluency. This is not an ESL course book. The book presents and discusses the relevant research and assessment issues and includes case studies from twenty different settings and classrooms around the world so that readers learn from others about the problems and successes of using various speaking activities.

Teachers will find the chapters on Twenty Successful Activities and Ten Unsuccessful Activities particularly valuable. The successful activities are provided for classroom use and are reproducible. The book also contains five appendixes that explain what teachers need to know about vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and how they affect the teaching of speaking. Samples of successful lesson plans and a list of resources useful for teaching speaking are also included.

The companion site features activities to assist readers before and after reading each chapter.

This teacher-training book is not available for sampling for ESL courses.