Speaking practice in a class of 30

Take a 45-minute lesson. Remove the register, the recap, the instructions, the transitions, and the last two minutes when everyone is packing up. You have perhaps 25 minutes of usable time, and speaking is competing with reading, writing and grammar for it.

Give speaking a generous third of that — eight minutes. Split eight minutes between thirty students and you get sixteen seconds each. Even with a full lesson dedicated to nothing else, you are at ninety seconds per child.

No amount of enthusiasm survives that division. This is why speaking quietly falls off the timetable in most schools — not because teachers do not value it, but because the format cannot deliver it.

The standard answer is pair and group work, and it genuinely works: thirty students in pairs means fifteen people talking at once instead of one. Talk time goes up roughly fifteen-fold. If you are not doing it, start there before anything else.

But notice what pair work does not solve. You can monitor two or three pairs properly in a lesson. The other twelve are practising unobserved, which means errors get rehearsed as often as they get corrected, and the quiet student is quiet in a pair too — now without you noticing.

Class time is the scarcest thing you have, and it is the only place students can do genuinely unpredictable interaction with each other. So spend it there. The things that do not need you in the room — rehearsal, repetition, pronunciation drilling, building the nerve to say a sentence out loud — can happen elsewhere.

This is where practice a student can do alone changes the arithmetic completely. Thirty students speaking at home for ten minutes is five hours of speaking practice in a week you did not have to find.

Speaking practice without feedback is just talking. It builds fluency and confidence, which is worth having, but it does not correct anything — and a student who has said a word wrong two hundred times has learned it wrong.

So whatever a student does outside your classroom needs to come back with something attached. In Dily that is a short, encouraging summary: what they did well, quoted from their own words, and one or two things to try differently next time, phrased as an alternative rather than a correction.

You see more than the student does — the full picture of who practised, for how long, and where the class as a whole is struggling. That is the part that lets you plan Monday's lesson around something real instead of a hunch.

1. 1In class: one pair or group task, ten minutes, on the language you are teaching that week. You monitor three pairs properly rather than all fifteen badly.
2. 2Set as practice: ten minutes of speaking each student does on their own, twice in the week. Short enough that it actually gets done.
3. 3Before the next lesson: look at who practised and what came back. Two minutes, not twenty.
4. 4Next lesson: spend three minutes on the thing the whole class got wrong. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes students believe the practice was read.