Rational step-by-step scaffolding that actually works.
Allow students to build their speaking skills with practice at the level they need.
Make learning a certainty.
To learn to speak English confidently & usefully, learners’ need to move through 4 levels of skill development.
Basic sentence construction.
Can competently and comfortably understand & speak very basic sentences to describe what someone sees, likes, wants, or can do.
Detailed sentence construction.
Able to skillfully understand & speak sentences with varying adjectives, numbers, articles, and past/present/future tenses change the sentence’s meaning.
Confident sentence pattern switching.
Can comfortably participate in communication that requires correctly choosing the right sentence pattern from a variety of different sentence patterns.
Full communication competence.
Can draw from previous learning to successfully communicate in new, untaught situations that they haven’t previously encountered.
Why are the steps of this learning progression so important?
William has been studying English in school for 10 years.
A recent vocabulary test revealed that he knows over 2000 English words.
But as you can see in the above video, he is struggling to verbalize a routine sentence pattern using words that…
…according to the vocabulary test…
…he knows.
The video above shows William’s first time attempting this speaking practice activity.
This second video shows what he could do after just 2 practice sessions.
Yes, William is still making some basic mistakes, but the progress (in both ability & confidence) after just 90 minutes of practice is undeniable.
This progress is the result of William getting several hundred repetitions of practice attempting to verbalize sentences.
It takes hundreds of repetitions of practice to make progress in learning a skill.
Without a sufficient number of repetitions of practice forming sentences, English language students get stuck.
The Playguistics toolbox of speaking activities give teachers the TOOLS they need to give their students the PRACTICE they need.
In this video, Jenny is practicing describing a piece of a donut as part of the Donut Collaborative Group Activity, a highly-repeatable group speaking activity.
Jenny and her classmates had received 5 hours of English class every week for 7 years.
That’s over 1200 hours of classroom English instruction.
But their speaking skills never advanced past being able to construct basic sentences about things that they like or want.
Some of the students in their class couldn’t even produce a basic sentence in English, other than a few memorized phrases.