Intelligibility is the art of being understood by others. Many students think they need to speak a language flawlessly and with a native-like accent to make themselves clear, but this is not quite true.
While there is a correlation between proficiency and intelligibility, even students of lower general proficiency are capable of expressing what they mean, in a way that the listener understands, if they are using good intelligibility practices.
Being understandable in a second language is often extremely important in work environments, especially as the world becomes more connected and job markets more competitive.
Intelligibility is a vital aspect of communication but it is not exactly a skill in itself. Instead, it is a combination of fluency, pronunciation, and managing your speed of speech. To reflect how important this is for language learners when studying, traveling or at work, we use an Intelligibility Index as part of our Versant English Test scoring.
This index is based on factors affecting how understandable speech is to fluent English speakers. These include things like speed, clarity, pronunciation and fluency. Ranging from 1 (low) to 5 (high), the Intelligibility Index shows how intelligible someone’s speech in English is likely to be in a real-world situation.
Let’s go into some activities and exercises you can try in class to help your students improve their intelligibility with their English and speaking skills.
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There are a number of factors that influence a student’s spoken English. Here are some ways to start building it into your classes.
Making a recording can be a good way of getting a clear picture of someone’s current manner of speaking and understanding in what ways their clarity might be improved. You can do this using a smartphone or laptop computer in class or outside of it.
There are plenty of ways to encourage students to speak. Have them answer an open question; for example, ask them to talk for a minute about a topic they are passionate about or tell each other what they did at the weekend.
Listen to the recordings and help them analyze their speech. Identify parts with low levels of intelligibility. This may be related to their pronunciation, how fast they speak, the amount of hesitation, repetition, etc.
You could even take this further by asking another fluent English speaker to listen to the recording and give honest feedback about which parts they found difficult to understand.
Afterward, it’s important to explain why it was difficult to understand and what can be done to improve their intelligibility. The activity below may help.
Listening is a vital part of intelligibility. After all, students have to be able to hear a word before they can say it. Listening also takes focus away from how words are written on the page.
This is key because speakers fluent in English tend to blend words together, so pronouncing each word perfectly in isolation is not a good goal. This kind of practice reinforces poor English pronunciation.
That’s where shadowing comes in.
Shadowing is a useful listen-and-repeat activity that students can use for speaking practice almost anywhere.
Shadowing involves trying to say the same words as the speaker at about the same time (or as fast as possible), for about 30 seconds at a time. Students can pause, try again, and even record and listen back to their own versions. Just like when you sing the words of a song you already know well, you are trying to match the speaker’s pronunciation and pace as best you can.
This will help your students focus on how fluent English speakers modulate speed, use intonation, and blend words together. By repeating what they hear, students can improve their intonation, connected speech and overall fluency.
This simple but fun activity will help your students focus on their individual problem sounds. It will also get them to listen to each other carefully.
Throughout the lesson, as you listen to your students speak, identify a number of words that reflect the pronunciation challenges your students face. Write the words on the board and group the words by phoneme, for example:
/i:/ Heat, Sheep
/ɪ/ Hit, Trip
Above, we can see an issue with the /i:/ and /ɪ/ sounds (the long and short “i”). Once you have enough words to work on, write a list of numbers on the board. Explain that each number has a corresponding word.
1 – Hit 4 – Hat 7 – Head
2 – Heat 5 – Heart 8 – Hood
3 – Hot 6 – Hurt 9 – Hid
As you can see in the above example, the words only differ by one phoneme (heat/hit, hot/hat, heart/hurt, etc.). This will make the exercise more challenging and useful for the students.
Next, identify the vowel sound in each word and write their phonemic symbols on the board.
Drill the sounds and the words until you are confident your students can repeat them successfully. There are a number of phonemic charts online, that can help you identify the phonemes and model the sounds for your students.
Then test the class by calling out a number and having them shout out the corresponding word. Then call out a word and get them to tell you the number. Deal with any problems that arise.
Put students into pairs. Have them read out their phone number only using the words in the list (note they can use a real number or invent one).
Their partner should listen and write down the number which corresponds with each word they hear. They should then swap roles and do the same again.
Finally, get students to check and see whether the number their partner wrote down is correct. Monitor and go back and drill any of the sounds with which students had the most problems.
While problems with individual sounds may occasionally impede understanding, we should also focus on other aspects of pronunciation such as word stress, sentence stress and intonation.
Keep a note of any new vocabulary that comes up during your class. At the end of the lesson, take five minutes to review it with the students. Write each new word on the board and record the word stress using the oO method:
Use ‘o’ to highlight unstressed syllables and ‘O’ to highlight stressed syllables. For example, the stress is on the second syllable of the word “behavior”:
Be-hav-ior = oOo.
The stress is on the first syllable of the word “Saturday”:
Sat-ur-day = Ooo
This has the advantage of recording unstressed as well as stressed syllables. Next, drill this new vocabulary until your students get the hang of it.
To make drilling more interesting, you can also add an element of drama! Have students say the words while expressing different emotions. Ask them to secretly choose an emotion (angry/happy/sad/excited), then say the word and have the other students guess it.
You can also drill whole phrases or even sentences. Backchain drilling is an excellent way to do this and build confidence in lower-level English learners. It involves breaking phrases into sections and having students repeat them after you, from the end of the phrase to the beginning, in this way:
“the test”
“pass the test”
“I’m going to pass the test"
As well as individual sounds and word stress, back chaining also allows you to help students with their intonation and you can also use it to introduce strong and weak forms. Working on multiword expressions and longer phrases with your students will also be helpful.
Employers, schools and organizations use theVersant English Testto assess an individual’s level of English. It covers the two skills of listening and speaking and also includes an Intelligibility Index rating alongside the GSE, Versant and CEFR scores.
This allows students, teachers and employers to see how easily others can understand the candidate.
The following list shows how the index is scored:
This scoring rubric offers a way to assess your students’ intelligibility based on the method used in the Versant English Test.
By giving them lots of support and pronunciation practice and nurturing their confidence to speak without worrying too much about making mistakes, you can help them to improve their clarity over time, allowing them to communicate in clear, understandable spoken English.
When you’re teaching English to young learners, you might find that there are a few students in your class who are struggling. But sometimes it can be hard to tell why. Is it because their language level is low? Or are they finding classroom work difficult because of a general cognitive difference, like dyslexia?
Do you ever find it hard to keep students focused and on task? Young learners get easily distracted and it can be hard to find ways to keep them engaged.
So what can we do to get, and more importantly, keep our students’ attention? Here are our five top tips.
Young learners have relatively short attention spans. In the classroom, it is rare to have the whole class fully engaged in something for a long time, since the children will have different interests and levels, so it is essential to plan a number of activities for each lesson.
The more variety you can include in the activities and tasks you plan, the easier it is to provide something enjoyable and relevant for each child. Choose short tasks and try to have a couple of extra activities up your sleeve if something you planned doesn’t work well. However, don’t worry if you don’t have time to do them all – you can always save them for a future lesson.
Another way of keeping students engaged is to mix up the classroom dynamics, having a combination of individual heads-down work, pair work, group work, and whole class discussions or games. When planning your lesson, consider how your students might feel at each stage. After doing some reading or quiet work, students may start to become restless, and this is the ideal time to get them up and moving about.
While you are in class, pay close attention to the mood of the class. When you sense that students are becoming distracted or bored, change the dynamics of the activity.
Ever notice that students become lethargic and show a lack of interest? Why not try introducing brain breaks at strategic points in your lessons? Brain breaks are short physical activities or games designed to get the blood flowing and to re-energize students to help them get ready for learning. They range from short activities that last a couple of minutes, to longer breaks that may be suitable if your lessons last more than an hour.
We can vary different aspects of the lesson using the previous strategies, but one thing that rarely changes is the role of the teacher! One way of keeping students involved is by giving them more responsibility and allowing them to take a more active role in their learning.
Peer teaching completely changes the classroom dynamic and has students teach their peers while you take a step back. For primary classes, ask one or two students to take charge of a ready-made activity, e.g. one from your course book. They should give instructions, demonstrate, monitor as necessary, and check answers.
When students are used to doing this, you can start to have them work in pairs or small groups to plan their own activities to use in class.
Of course, nobody is perfect and there will be times when you lose students’ attention and they are not on task. For these occasions, you can use a wealth of classroom management strategies to regain the class's attention. Here are a few techniques:
Finally, if we want our students to be motivated and engaged in our lessons, we must show enthusiasm for what we are teaching. The more lively and animated you are about the lesson, the more the students will want to join you and learn.
There is a strong link between well-being and friendship, which is just as accurate for children as it is for adults. that children with stable friendships are happier, more able to cope with stress, and have higher self-esteem. Moreover, too, and children who experience friendship adjust more easily to school and perform better academically. School friendships are also a valuable way of learning social skills like sharing, resolving conflict, and engaging with peers positively.
Having friends is an important part of school life, and teachers can play a significant role in creating a positive classroom culture and helping children and young people to form friendships. How can you promote friendships between your students? Here are some ideas:
If there is an example of a good friendship in a book you are reading with students or in your lesson materials, draw your students’ attention to it. For instance, The Jungle Book is an excellent example of a story about friendship. Encourage your students to think critically about the friendships that they read about. You can ask questions like:
By discussing friendship regularly in the classroom, your students will learn about the behavior and characteristics of being a good friend.
You can create lots of opportunities for students to build friendships with one another during class time. Design activities that call for pair or group work, and include at least one or two in every lesson. Focusing on a common goal or problem is a great way to encourage your students to bond with one another.As a bonus, this collaborative way of working promotes important 21st century skills like communication and problem-solving.
Another way of promoting friendships between different groups of students is moving them around. Adjust your seating plan regularly to ensure that all your students interact with and work alongside different classmates, to promote positive, friendly classroom vibes.
Friendship is a social skill that children need to learn – and you can help by teaching them. Be explicit about exactly what you expect from them. Saying, “Be kind” is an abstract, vague concept that children might struggle to put into practice. Instead, give them concrete examples of behavior, such as:
When you see a student engaging in these behaviors, draw attention to them and praise them.
But to really convey the importance of school friendships and kind behavior, it’s not enough to tell them. As the teacher, you must model the behavior you’d like to see in your students. Be consistently positive and upbeat in your interactions with students, thank your learners when they offer help with something, and try to refrain from sounding impatient (even when you are!). All these steps will help to build a positive classroom culture where students feel secure, supported and happy.
Conflict is an inevitable part of school life, but you can help students to navigate arguments and other difficult situations in the classroom. If two students argue, you can help them to resolve it with the following steps:
Following these simple steps teaches children a framework for resolving conflict and gives them the tools to process strong emotions.
An excellent way to promote a positive classroom culture is to do friendship-focused activities with your students:
You could do a Venn diagram activity, where students work in pairs to discuss and write down things they have in common and areas of difference. It’s good to pair students who don’t spend much time together for this activity.
Another positive activity is a 'Honey Roast'. Give students enough squares of paper to have one for each of their classmates. Get them to write their classmates’ names on the paper, and then, on the other side, write down a compliment or something they like about that person, for example, “I like your handwriting”, or “You always use kind words”. Collect the pieces of paper and read out some nice examples to the class. Alternatively, give them directly to the students to read to themselves.
