I’ve been following an interesting discussion on LinkedIn’s English Language Services Professionals group (you may need to request to join the group before you can access the discussion, not sure).  It is focused on a very common problem, the reluctance of learners to practice speaking in the classroom even when they have good skills. Nicholas Rowe, editor for the Writtenword.edu editing service, has been also been serving as volunteer teacher for a conversational language group in Lapland and is getting very frustrated.

•  Easing the fear of making mistakes
• Distractions from this fear
•  Putting students in situations where they are gently “forced” to speak regardless of their fear

• Sean Daley of the EF Language Foundation in Boston hands out index cards with different, easy-to-discuss topics (“family,” “police” “a good birthday gift”, etc.) to small groups of students. They flip the cards to see the topics, and then have one minute to discuss before switching cards and starting a new topic. The unsupervised, quick discussions “give students a chance to speak freely without error correction” while focusing on topic content.
  
  The fact that several students will be talking at once also provides a screen of general hubbub so that students have less fear about others listening to their mistakes. (Sean sometimes also plays background music during the activity with the same goal.)
   
•  Helena Saskoova, an English-Czech translator in the United Kingdom, suggests that when students are split in pairs, those pairs be arranged “according to their willingness to speak—with silent students working together, at least one of them will have to start talking.” She also suggests activities that concentrate on speaking to complete a task together, for instance one drawing a picture and then describing it to their partner with the goal of having them draw their own picture that will be similar but not the same. 

• Rosemary Nordström, also now a translator in the U.K., reports that when she was a teacher, she found it very effective “to make my opening speech to the class in my then less-than-perfect Swedish and tell them that I had now taken the risk of embarrassing myself and hoped they would do the same. I also related self-depreciating stories of errors I had made in conversation when learning Swedish, the funnier and more self-depreciating the better.”
   
•  Megan Tootle in Seattle says that “when confronted with similar circumstances, I would take my students on ‘field trips’ to places that required them to speak.” She also would sometimes schedule phone calls for individual students to talk with herself or other native speakers.

—Lia Nigro, TOEIC USA Team