Secondary tips and activities: Reading aloud

These activities describe different ways you and your students can read text aloud in order to develop your students` feeling for the music of the language. • Not only individual sounds, but the way words connect, intonation and rhythm are all important in coming across as an effective, natural-sounding speaker of English. It can be helpful for students to have practice in stretching speech, in playing with it, in exaggerating to help them overcome shyness. You can help in this regard by playing with the language yourself, by making fun of it, by putting on different accents, etc, and by encouraging your students to do the same. • Having a small piece of text which students are familiar with gives them a secure footing from which to jump in different directions.