Ask your students to make the Chicken Chicken speech more coherent using connectors and linkers.įor example: 'To begin with, chicken chicken chicken. Afterwards, get students – individually or alone – to create a short story or presentation using their roadmaps.Ī fun way to practise using linkers is based on the infamous parody of unintelligible scientific presentations Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken, delivered more than a decade ago by a Google engineer. In this way, they will visualise the whole concept of signposting and its purpose for successful communication. It's useful to get learners to group signpost expressions according to function, but an alternative is to get them to draw a roadmap and put signposts on it. This can help bring learners' attention to the use and function of particular words and phrases rather than get overwhelmed by the text as a whole. He uses PowerPoint to highlight specific words (or phrases) while dimming the rest of the text. Tekhnologic has designed an interesting way to introduce the target language to language learners. No matter how useful linkers are, learners are unlikely to remember them if they have not had a chance to put them into a relevant context. Introducing linking and signposting expressions Here are some ideas to help learners use linking expressions and get their speech 'in shape'. It is speaking (and writing) skill which requires lots of practice. However, simply introducing a list of linking expressions (or 'linkers') to learners will not produce the desired effect. Just as with any skill, the ability to organise what you say into a whole can be taught. They help us organise our ideas logically. An important feature of cohesion is the use of linking and 'signposting' expressions, for example: 'because', 'whereas', 'also', 'therefore', 'first', 'second', 'however', 'in conclusion', and many more. We get the sense that a text (spoken or written) is generally coherent when it makes sense through the organisation of its content.
However, the formula 'grammar + vocabulary' is not enough to become a competent speaker of English (or any other language). This often becomes evident when we ask learners to speak in some depth on a subject, either alone (such as in a presentation) or in a discussion.Įven when learners can make themselves understood, and use correct grammar and vocabulary, you often get the nagging feeling that something is missing from their conversation. Learning to speak a language might seem fairly straightforward in principle: first you learn the words, then you form sentences using the correct grammar, finally you string the sentences together. Would you like to help your learners speak more coherently? Svetlana Kandybovich, the latest winner of the British Council’s Teaching English blog award for a post on speaking skills, suggests some useful classroom activities.
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