Languages Roadshow – Building Conversation Confidence

As a language teacher, we constantly ask ourselves what are the goals we want our students to achieve? What do we want them to achieve as foreign language learners? To be able to find out answers to questions? To survive in a foreign environment? To make new friends around the world?

In a foreign language class, perhaps one of the hardest challenges language teachers face is to engage students to converse in the target language. Difficulties can be a lack of time to practise or exposure to new content; students’ fear of making mistakes and unwillingness to take risks; self-consciousness and shyness; assessment pressures; and students learning online.  

It takes time for our learners to build confidence in speaking a foreign language. We as teachers need to make oral conversation a part of the everyday routine to gradually foster learners’ confidence. We had the pleasure to share some conversation strategies at the Languages Roadshow this year. We will be collaborating in future programmes to focus on this aspect of language teaching. The activities are low preparation, easy to embed into everyday lessons, and will allow teachers to create a controlled environment to encourage target language use in a conversation. The participating teachers gained understanding of different strategies and activities through repetition, scenario setting, questioning, and describing. There is no better feeling than knowing teachers are going to implement some new strategies into their own class and modify the activities to suit their learners.  

This experience made us realise teachers need practical strategies to support and foster learners’ confidence in the language they are learning. We will be collaborating in future programmes to focus on this aspect of language teaching. We will be building learners’ confidence in our Grow - Equipping Junior High School Students for Their Senior Language programme during 2023.

Article by Tui Tuia | Learning Circle Facilitators Chi-Tzu Anny Ma and Fiona Yen

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