[openmind]

If your students don't want to speak or are afraid of speaking you can do the following: split them up in pairs and give each pair an interesting dialogue to read. After all, what exactly is speaking? It is producing words with your mouth. Now, if you don't have the right words and sentences readily available, what happens? You feel uncomfortable to open your mouth. When you read a dialogue out loud it's almost as if you speak freely because you have to produce the sound yourself. Reading texts aloud can be a powerful method of building speaking skills because you practise your articulation, you reinforce correct sentence structures and you can follow an interesting story...