Insights on Teaching Speaking in TESOL

Book excerpt: The TESOL Classroom Practice Series captures the dynamics of the contemporary ESOL classroom. It showcases state-of-the-art curricula, materials, tasks, and activities reflecting emerging trends in language education and seeks to build localized language teaching and learning theories based on teachers' and students' unique experiences in and beyond the classroom. Each volume in the series focuses on a particular communicative competency or learning environment. The TESOL field continues to experience increased valuing of experiential practitioner knowledge. A welcome result of this evolution has been the broadening of research perspectives. The 16 practitioner narratives in Insights on Teaching Speaking in TESOL are written by teacher-researchers who describe explorations into aspects of their own classroom practices. The findings shared by these practitioners shed light on contemporary ESOL classroom practice in teaching speaking and highlight some of the currents that flow through classroom practice at this time. The volume is divided into three sections: materials development & implementation, public speaking, and feedback & assessment. All of the chapters detail practical applications for implementing new ways of teaching speaking such as encouraging critical thinking in ESOL speaking courses using learning technologies in the ESOL classroom staging public speaking events like presentations, speeches, and discussions arranging student group configurations to encourage greater student time on-task What emerges from the chapters in this book is a clear sense of the reciprocal link between classroom interaction and teacher development. ESOL practitioners will find the descriptions of teaching practices in this book a useful guide for their own professional development.