What I learned about teaching speaking skills

Classes must be initiated with a warm up activity that eagers students to do good things in the class. There must be a strong emphasis on pronunciation, fluency, accuracy and grammar. It is difficult for foreign learners to be aware of grammar when they are speaking then activities that help them built that awareness are mandatory in speaking classes.

What I learned about teaching in online environments
Foreign language pedagogy  suggests the compatibility of literacy-based approaches with uses of technology, defining literacy as the ability to deal with technologized forms of language use. One of the goals of literacy-based language teaching is to reconcile communicative language teaching (CLT), with its focus on face-to-face verbal interaction, with helping learners develop the ability to read, discuss, reflect on, and write critically about texts in all modalities. An example of this can be the use of YouTube as an ICT tool where students  and teachers broadcast themselves despite of recording with a camera and bringing the videos to the classroom as it used to be.  Thus, rather than differentiate between ‘old’ and ‘new’ technologies it is seeked the continuities as well as innovations across time and mediums.

My principles about teaching speaking online

During my teaching practice I could realize many strengths and weaknesses that bring an important learning to my professional life. Within the strengths I can mention the way I planned my lessons. Every moment that I was assigned with my students was really important for me. I structured my lesson taken into account the Presentation – Practice. - Production model which worked very well. I also introduced a warm up activity every single class so that students felt motivated and wanted to learn something new. The warm ups were interesting for them and also created an environment of joy and pleasure in the classroom. Some students said it was really nice to start the classes with something different, even competing among them.

As I had great experiences there were also some aspects to improve and keep on working. In some classes students were assigned to working individually most of the time which was not very convenient for the students as they felt boring sometimes and wanted to establish social connections with the other in class. Speaking activities became interesting for me. I asked students to prepare something short giving them some minutes (5-10) and then we socialize as a class with the rest of the class. I noticed that in the preparation time they were just doing other things, or translating things in Internet. Then the results in the speaking activities were kind of improvise and not of a good quality. Then I decided to monitor permanently what the students were doing and it was much better. They centered on the activity and the results improved a lot. Another difficulty was the exposure students had to English. They were used to speak in Spanish all the time, and then it was challenging to try to speak more in English. They did it finally.
I suggest student teachers to take their teaching practice with responsibility and seriously. It is one of the most important  subjects in the career because it is the real practice of the aspects we had been studying before. Commitment and resposiblity is a must.