Conversing In English...

Some students are very weak in their usage of English language. This is because most of the time they converse by using their mother tongue ; be it Malay, Chinese, Indians or Javanese etc. This has resulted to a very weak performance of students communicating or conversing using English language. Some students can apply the language in their studies and manage to answer questions (usually objective (MCQ) questions)  quite successfully in their examinations, however they tend to fail in their speaking test. This usually happens to students from lower level which is primary schools.

Primary schools students  are exposed to daily conversations or greetings such as bidding Good morning, Good afternoon etc and they are even taught on how to reply to a questions on certain situation. This can be imply when the sections on greetings/conversations are inserted in the Primary School Evaluation Test (UPSR).  Pictures of the situations are given in form of a dialogue and students need to complete the dialogue. This could be quite easy as students usually memorise the answer according to what they are taught in schools. However, when students are asked on something which is unfamiliar to them they tend to be confused.

Conversing in English language is very important as students would use it in their future (when they go for secondary school, speaking will be graded and evaluated as a component to pass the subject). But how to encourage students to speak? From my experiment, the first stage that I take is to familiarise their tongue with English pronunciation. Therefore I would give the students short paragraph  for them to memorise. Most of the passages consists of dialogues for example:

The hare was once boasting of his speed before the other animals. "I have never yet been beaten," said he, "when I put forth my full speed. I challenge anyone here to race with me."

The tortoise said quietly, "I accept your challenge."

"That is a good joke," said the hare. "I could dance around you all the way."

"Keep your boasting until you've beaten," answered the tortoise. "Shall we race?"


The students would have to memorise the story and present it to me. This experiment does help those students to practice more English in their daily conversation. In fact this practise also exposes students to exciting story books for them to read.