Speaking Activities

The materials in this text were compiled over a period of ten years, in Thailand from 1993 to 2003, while I was teaching at The Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University and later at the Department of Language at KMUTT. I started a file of speaking activities because there were too many tasks and ideas to keep in my head, and I wanted to be able to access them when I needed them in the future. Eventually, the file grew thicker and thicker, until it was big enough to become a book.

The speaking activities in this text come from a variety of sources:

A lot of the tasks sprang from my own imagination, stimulating me to go into the classroom, feeling motivated by the freshness that accompanies a new inspiration and being eager to share it with my students. This could be compared to cooking on impulse rather than following a set recipe. I got many additional ideas from talking to fellow-teachers about what worked for them in their classes. I even picked up some good examples from the handouts of various courses that I was required to teach, all of which taught me a lot of time-proven tricks that almost always work.