A set of six wordless picture sequences and the questions that turn them into spoken stories, retellings and eventually written paragraphs.
A picture sequence removes the two things that usually stop pupils speaking: not knowing what to say, and being afraid of being wrong. The pictures supply the content, so all the pupil has to supply is the language, and because there is no single correct wording, weaker pupils can contribute a sentence while stronger ones build a paragraph from the same image.
The six sequences are drawn from ordinary life rather than from a foreign setting, so pupils are not decoding an unfamiliar world at the same time as decoding English. Each one is deliberately open at the end, which is where the most interesting speaking happens.
The same sequence is used across four stages, from naming what is in each frame, to retelling in pairs, to a group version with connectives, to individual writing. Teachers with a single forty-minute period can stop after stage two and still have a complete lesson.
Give the class a silent minute to look. The urge to start questioning immediately is strong and it produces thinner answers.
Stay on naming questions until nearly every hand can answer, then move up. Reaching the open questions in the first lesson is not the aim.
By the time pupils write, they should have said the story aloud at least twice. The writing then becomes a record of something they can already do.
A repeatable opening routine that gets every child speaking English before the first lesson begins, with nothing but a blackboard and a class list.
A debate format that gives sixty pupils a speaking turn in one lesson, with sentence frames that make it possible for pupils who have never spoken in front of the class.