So why don’t they speak? I will talk about the main mistakes teachers make and show how I solve the problem of speaking in my Russian lessons.
The entire lesson should be focused specifically on speech. You need to perceive all exercises precisely as preparation for speech, as steps to conversation.
It is absolutely not necessary to be able to read and write to have a conversation. At all! To have a conversation you just need to be able to:
- listen
- understand what you heard (this is about listening in class; I had articles and videos on this topic)
- know how to react
To know how to react you need to know:
- how words are pronounced, what intonation the sentence has
- speech etiquette
- what form does the word have (in what case is it used, etc.)
Why do I like students to hear the word first? Because it becomes easier for the teacher to teach how to pronounce this word correctly. If a word is learned not from hearing, but from a graphic version, then we need to read this word out loud several times. If you don’t do this, then your eyes will remember it, not the muscles of the speech apparatus. But it is better, of course, to use pictures rather than a graphic version of the word.
The same thing happens the other way around. If you have learned words by ear, you need to show how they are written and read, again connecting what we see with what we hear. Therefore, all the exercises from the Activity Book need to be spoken in order to establish a connection between the eye and the ear, with the word that we heard with its writing, and then we can do the task. When the speaking stage is skipped, nothing will come of the letter in the Activity Book. I write about this all the time in the Teacher’s Book.
To reinforce the pronunciation of words, we repeat them several times. You need to give your muscles time to get used to the word and sentence. How do we repeat? Sometimes purely mechanically. For example, I ask you to repeat three times: велосипед, велосипед, велосипед.
This is the technical side of things, and many teachers make the mistake of skipping this step. Yes, each word needs to be spoken several times, and later you must return to the same word (after 15 to 20 minutes) to consolidate what you have learned.
I have articles and videos about oral drills in class.
When students have learned to recognize a word in speech and when they have learned to pronounce this word, you can start a conversation. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. It could be a simple question: Что это? — Это карандаш. Кто это? — Это мама. Где ручка? — Вот.
You can play games such as bingo or guessing games. I wrote and spoke a lot about them, and there are many of these games in the textbook Soroka and Sarafan.
We start the conversation with dialogues and only with them! The answers in the dialogues will most likely be monosyllabic: да, нет, вот. This is how it should be at the initial stage.
Monologues should be used at higher levels of language proficiency and for older students. There are no monologues in the Soroka course, because of the age of the students and the low level of Russian proficiency.
In general, Soroka’s entire textbook is about speaking. In the lesson we teach words to recognize and pronounce, and then use them at the right time. We talk in class.
What to do with grammatical forms of words?
In Soroka we study each new form of a word as a separate word. Those велосипед и велосипеда are two different words. And we teach them immediately in the right situation (нет велосипеда) and with the right ending. The student does not think about what the genitive case is, but what the ending is. This is a separate word; it is used in such and such a situation.
I already had articles and videos about output to speech.
And, by the way, my textbook is aimed specifically at speech. Write questions in the comments. Also write how you put it into speech and what you do for it. Best wishes!
