Author: Seynabou Faye (Senegal) | Published on 18 April 2025

 

Question: How can we get male learners more engaged in speaking activities?

Answer: By using targeted strategies like role plays that appeal to their interests, build confidence, and create a balanced, inclusive space where all learners feel encouraged to speak up.

When it is time to reinforce speaking skills through activities such as role plays; male students are often less motivated.

So, engaging our male students in speaking activities can present challenges.

Here are some of the main challenges:

  1. Confidence - they lack confidence in speaking English as they are more used to listening e.g. movies and music, and do not use/speak it often in their daily lives.
  2. Shyness – this can be due to layers of different situations, they may be shy to speak in front of others, they may be shy to use English, they may be shy to work with girls and they may even be shy as their voice is changing as they emerge in adulthood.
  3. Ego – they are frightened to make mistakes in front of their peers and be corrected, so they become defensive and resistant to participating in speaking activities.
  4. Conditioning – they believe speaking activities are for girls as often the characters in roleplays are female.

Solutions

Being an effective teacher requires being able to integrate all students in classroom activities. Here are some practical solutions to better include our male students in speaking activities.

1. Confidence

  • Make them at ease by using their names
  • Reward their efforts with general encouraging words like “ Good, very Good, Excellent” and offer specific and meaningful feedback for example,  “I enjoyed your physical expressiveness in supporting your language use such as your facial expressions and the use of your hands.
  • Create friendly relationships in your class by socialising with all students during group activities and offering encouragement through nods, smiles and informal feedback
  • Create a supportive environment by reinforcing a variety of interaction patterns – solo work, pair work and group work so they can practice with peers.

2. Shyness

  • Scaffold the language for the roleplay clearly
  • Model the language
  • Practice pronunciation
  • Drill rounds
  • Go from Solo work -> pair work -> group work
  • Give them a character / puppet / role as this depersonalizes the language and makes learners braver to speak

3. Ego

  • Let them express themselves by focusing on fluency  rather than accuracy with communication being the goal
  • Define Slips and Errors and reassure learners that these are a natural part of language learning - slips are often caused by temporary factors, like tiredness or distraction, while errors are often caused by a lack of knowledge or communication strategies.

4. Conditioning

  • create inclusive topics e.g. clothing, music, favourite stars, movies, cartoons.
  • role plays must have male and female characters

I hope you found these ideas useful. Which of these solutions will you choose to try first to actively engage your male learners in speaking activities?

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