Note: The format described here is for all future posts on this blog with the prefix ‘Speaking Pairwork’. There are literally hundreds of ways you can adapt it to different subject-matters, grammar points and role-plays and in time I plan to post many, many examples.
These activities are best for classes with between 4 and 12 students but can be adapted for larger or smaller classes too.
I usually do my two-hour classes by working from a textbook for the first hour, where students are taking in a lot of new grammar and vocab. Then in the second half I do ‘free-style’ pairwork where things are more relaxed and students can just speak at length and uninhibitedly.
The emphasis is on fluency rather than correctness, with students working within private pairs where even the shy ones need have no fears. I go round listening in to each pair but mainly just to help them along if they get stuck, and with the minimum of error correction. The students always work with questions or sentences or word-groups they have produced themselves: I find that makes them more invested in the activity.
You give them a topic and basic guidelines and if they're writing up questions, you should emphasise that they must produce survey-like questions, asking for opinions or personal information, which anyone can answer and where everyone’s answer will be different.
Imagine the topic is ‘Survey questions using modal verbs’. After you give them examples and possible sentence-beginnings on the board, each student/pair prepares 5 questions.
e.g. ‘Should teenagers drink alcohol?’
‘Do you think aliens might exist?’
‘Is there anything you must do tomorrow?’
‘Can you swim?’
When they’re finished with their versions you check and correct their sentences to make sure they're grammatically correct and it's possible for the other students to answer them.
The basic format is that they speak to another student for about 5-10 minutes and then move on. Depending on the number of students in class you just have to get the mechanics right so that everyone can swap around frequently, talk to a new partner each time, and hopefully not get too bored.
Another important point for all these exercises is that you can stretch the students a little bit as the speaking pairwork process is repeated again and again by getting them to remember the questions. On the first and maybe the second round they can read from their notebooks but after that, tell them to close those notebooks and on the board rub out most of the words so that only a few keywords in each question are left. Finally rub out everything on the board: they should end up speaking to each other without any written prompts.
For 4 students named A, B, C, D
Each student prepares 5 questions individually and then A talks to B, while C talks to D. Swap around after a while so that it’s A with C and B with D, then finally on the last round A with D and B with C.
For 6 students named A, B, C, D, E, F make 3 pairs 1)A & B, 2)C & D, 3)E & F
Each pair prepares 5 questions and emphasise that both students in the pair must write the same 5 questions in their notebook. Then ask B, D and F to stand up and swap chairs, moving one place to their left or right so that for example B is with C, D is with E, and F is with A. After 10 minutes ask them to stand up and move round again- so that B is with E etc.
For 8-12 students Just repeat the method above, with 4, 5, 6 etc pairs, and get them to swap around more frequently- after only 5 minutes, say. And of course you don’t have to get them to talk to a member of every other pair if time doesn’t permit.
For larger groups Once the number of students gets to 9 you might start thinking it makes more sense to splitting them into 3 groups of 3. Certainly if you had say 16 students I would make 4 groups of 4.They prepare the questions together as before and all write the same thing. The logistics of matching everyone up by this stage become a bit of a headache so that I usually just tell them to go out and find 3 people from other groups to talk to, and I simply shout ‘OK, everyone change partners’ every 5 minutes.
For odd number of studentsFor any of these groupings if you have an odd number of students then two students must ‘pretend’ to be one student. If you have 7 students for example still think it as A, B, C, D, E, F in 3 pairs 1)A & B, 2)C & D, 3)E & F but two students must constitute ‘student A’ and actually the first ‘pair’ has 3 students.
For three students or less It doesn’t really make sense to do pairwork. You can still use the same topics and get students to prepare questions in the same way but the actual speaking phase should be just an open conversation between everyone present with one student asking the other two a question and you chiming in and prompting them if necessary to ask follow-up questions of each other, to make it as much as possible a flowing conversation involving all parties.
These activities usually take about 40 minutes- 5 minutes for your explanation and a few examples on the board, 10 minutes for their preparation of what they’re going to say and 25 minutes where the class should be very noisy from lots of people talking at once.
The students don’t have to – and indeed shouldn’t- take any notes during the speaking phase. It’s all about the talking.
