 One of the main problems I find is that all our learners come to our classes mainly to develop their speaking skills and become better communicators using the language and what happens is we tend to focus a little bit more on other aspects of language development so we have load on grammar and vocabulary and writing and we tend to focus a lot on assigning homework tasks that really help them develop those skills or those systems of the language. So yeah, I think I can live with that. I'm fine. There. Okay, so go back. That's fine. So we have that, we have the need that comes to our classroom really focuses on the communicative aspect of the language and in particular the oral communication but what happens is that we don't really cater for that because it's quite difficult to think about it. It's quite difficult to say to learners, go home and do this activity for speaking because sometimes we think, you know, how are we going to assess that? How are we going to help them develop that we're not there? We know that's the only way to improve our speaking skills is by noticing active noticing, which means that the person speaking at the same time as performing the act of speaking develops that ability to notice what's getting out of their mouths and whether it's accurate, whether it's appropriate and whether it's fluent and how effectively that message comes across. And we as teachers need to help our learners develop that skill first before we focus so much on, you know, be more fluent, do this task, speak better, try this again and again. And I believe that by giving them some extra activities to do at home, which focus on speaking, we can help them become better monitors of their own linguistic performance and their own linguistic output. So that's not a new idea and it's not my idea. The first time somebody talked about it was in 2001 when the idea of speaking at home was out there. And the most important thing is that it helps learners use the language that they would not use. I mean, you might have here is a different case obviously because an English speaking country. So when they leave the room, they will have to speak English, but most of our learners usually socialize with people of their own nationalities and their own, their own mother tongue. So when they leave our room, they start speaking whatever language they speak. So their opportunities they get for speaking practice outside of the classroom are minimized. Now, why speaking homework? Well, there is low stress because the teacher is not present. Low stakes because you have nothing to lose. Your colleagues in the room, your other, your co kind of students will not kind of judge you if you're afraid of that. It's a great opportunity because it allows non-native speakers to speak to non-native speakers. And that's very important if you come from another country and you find yourself in Dublin, in Ireland, where everybody is saying, oh, English, and you don't know what to do. And it can get really stressful. But at times, it's helpful when you speak to somebody from another nationality, perhaps, that you don't share the same and one, but it does allow you to use English to communicate with them. The other very important aspect is that out of class setting, which I find very important anyway with whatever it is that we do as language teachers, but the most important thing of all is that we break away from that artificial environment that a classroom has because you walk into that door and usually there is a sign that says, you know, English only. And we talk about specific subjects and we give them tasks that resemble as much as possible a real life scenario, but they are all controlled by the teacher. So it's not very, very helpful for them, but if you make them and give them opportunities to use their language outside the classroom, it's a little bit more authentic for them and a little bit more meaningful as well because they can see their relationship between what they're doing and what the real outcome for them will be. So, some of the ideas that I have here and that I've tried with my learners are these aids and I'd like to talk about them one by one. So the first thing that whoever knows me is, I hate course books. I find them dull and not interesting and at times I think it's great to have my learners, especially if they're young learners or teenagers, to act out those dialogues from course books when they're at home. That's an activity that I would not encourage to do in class. I hate reading aloud. I don't see the point of it when you're in class because that's a valuable time that learners pay. But when they're at home, they can practice doing that. They can actually go and record themselves acting out those dialogues, focusing on pronunciation, focusing on making those associations between letters and sound, focusing on making the dialogues a little bit more interesting because especially if you have people of higher ability, pre-intermediates and above, they can change the dialogues, they can make them a little bit more interesting. You can give them a task where you say, take these and make it better or make it relevant to you or how would you say, to whom would you say, change the characters, give them life. If there is anybody here working with young learners, you will know how important it is that the content you have is relatable to them, that they can actually identify with the characters of a course book or a short story. And that's something we can do at home. Prediction tasks, most of you have gone from training, you would know there would be somebody in your training like me saying, you need to make them predict because that would help them anticipate what's coming, which would activate those neurons in the brain that would help them get the gist of the text better. But that's something that you don't really need to do in class. Learners can do all the predictions at home. They can actually receive the title of the text. They can receive the pictures that come with the text. And you can give them a particular task saying, go through these four titles, think about what this is all about. And they can have an all-round, if you like, response to the task that you receive. And when you start your lesson next day, you can start with their output, which in this case will become the class's input for listening, where they will all listen to their voices talking about whatever the text is all about. And then you can present them with the text. And this will save a little bit of time, of class time for you to do more meaningful activities, more comprehension tasks. If you are preparing learners for exams, you would know that most of the higher level exams require learners to summarise information and present it. IO, CA, ECP, they all need to make sense of a particular prompt. And this is a great opportunity for learners to practice at home. You can give them a list of bullet points. They can see them and then they can summarise them orally. The same can happen with texts, with pictures, with a story, with something they watched with whatever they liked. And they can start focusing on oral summaries, which is something we sometimes neglect to focus on, because we tend to think of summary as a written genre only. Storytelling is, again, great for teenagers. It's great for young learners. It's great for adults and the best I have found that works for mature students that sometimes come to refresh their English. Again, you can have storytelling activities that they can do at home. Report it for a day by far my favourite, where you send your students to do or go out in the street and ask people about something and interview somebody that goes well with number seven. If they are in their home country, they can interview their parents or somebody from their family. But if they are here, it's very easy. Just go to the supermarket and ask somebody for something and record that. And the last activity I do is an oral learning diary to help to promote a little bit of learning autonomy. Wherever Friday, they need to go home and record themselves talking about the week where they say, this is what I learned. This is what I liked. This is what I didn't really like. Please don't do it again. Which is very helpful for me, but it's also very helpful for them. Now, the way I do it is I use voice thread. It's a website. It's also an app. It's free. You don't need to pay. The only thing that you do need to do is you need to register. If you have, though, younger learners, minors, or anybody with issues of consent when it comes to online data protection, you can use vocaru.com, which does not have any sort of registration sign up signing. You just record your voice and send it to the teacher's email. The same thing you can do with your phone if you are in a high-tech environment. But the beauty of voice thread is that it creates threads. So, if you have a class and you have a prediction task, say, rather than seeing this here, you can see the title of a text or two or three pictures, and you can, if I'm the student, I go to the link that my teacher sent me. There is an ad button there. I click on that ad button and I add my comment orally. My comment does not go live until I ask it to go live. So, I can listen to it. I can see if I like what I said, if it was accurate or not. I can pause. I can redo it again, which is great because it gives rehearsal time, which is very important for speaking development. Then, when I'm happy with my final outcome, I can press publish, and all the other students in the class will listen to me, and they will respond to me orally, and all that stays there and the teacher can control. So, it also promotes self-correction, peer correction, and it gives you loads of material to use as input on subsequent lessons for some feedback and error correction.