Tasks to help students get rid of speaking anxiety

Speaking is a really important skill for a modern society. For sure, students have to develop this skill during and outside English lessons. For most students, speaking is the most difficult because they have to speak in front of other people transforming their thoughts into words. Some students can feel anxious about being negatively judged while speaking or not being socially accepted because they cannot express their thoughts adequately. 

How can teachers help students calm nerves before speaking? 

First of all, they should accept that being nervous is not a bad thing. Nervousness produces adrenaline, which helps to think faster and speak more fluently. If that doesn’t work for your student, teach some breathing techniques. Breathing from your stomach muscles, not your chest, calms the nervous system. Students should focus on their exhales. By taking small sips of air on inhales and extending their exhales, they will start to calm down.  

Secondly, students should think positively. Encourage learners to see themselves as fluent and confident speakers and to remember that listeners want them to succeed.

Finally, the best way to reduce anxiety is to rehearse until you feel comfortable. Experience builds confidence. That’s why there should be plenty of speaking activities in every lesson. Create opportunities for your students to build successes.   

Below there are some easy tasks that can be used to develop and improve students’ speaking and can help them to conquer their anxiety. 

Tall tales

Students have some preparation time to make up tall tales and think of some ideas on how to convince their classmates that these stories are true. Sentences must be long enough, and there should be more than 5 of them. For instance, choose the topic «My family» and ask each student to write three stories: one must be true, the others – lie. Every student reads his/her stories and the others have to guess which story is true and give a small talk with proofs of their thoughts. 

Decisions, decisions 

The idea is quite similar to the previous task. Find some weird ideas or facts connected to the topic you’re currently studying or have already studied. Make a presentation of these ideas (it is better to choose no more than ten ideas for one topic and no more than three topics for one lesson). Students should discuss them in pairs and come to a conclusion if they are real or imaginary. Students will feel confident doing this task as they know the topic and have already studied the vocabulary necessary to discuss it.  

What is the solution? 

As my teaching experience shows, students tend to forget about their speaking anxiety when they are deeply involved in problem-solving. On the YouTube channel TedEd, there are some riddles that can be used for this activity.

You can watch one of the videos and organize discussions with all students in the class. It could be brainstorming to find an answer to one riddle. 

My emoji weekend 

Prepare a story of your weekend but write it with the help of emojis. Divide students into pairs and give them a task to transform the story of your weekend into words. It is a good activity to practice past tenses. Then give students some time to make their own emojis stories and let them swap their stories and try to describe them in words. 

These are only some ways to develop students’ speaking skills. Trying them in your lessons will help your students increase their confidence and develop fluency. We continue recruiting teachers for short 15-minute Speaking lessons, Talks, for students at Skyeng online school.
If English is like a native language for you or you permanently live in the country where you speak English, try yourself as a teacher of speaking lessons.