We've all watched a speaking task 'finish' in two minutes flat – students tick the box, move on,
and nobody has been pushed to say anything they couldn't have said at A1.
This webinar is about changing that.

Drawing on Demand-High teaching principles (Scrivener & Underhill, 2012), task-based learning research (Willis, 1996; Skehan, 1998; Swain, 1995), and the affective filter hypothesis (Krashen, 1982), this session gives teachers a practical toolkit for auditing and upgrading the speaking tasks they already use – without redesigning everything from scratch.

Participants will explore:

- Why most information gaps, opinion gaps, and roleplays allow students to 'survive' on minimal language – and how to close that loophole
- The Report Stage: how a single writing step transforms a speaking task into a syntactic workout
- Three techniques for upgrading opinion gaps: the Trade-Off, the Cross-Examination, and the Survivors' Manifesto
- How to lower the affective filter through personalisation tasks – and then raise the linguistic demand once students are engaged
- The Secret Mission and the Curveball: two roleplay upgrades that eliminate memorised scripts and test real communicative flexibility
- A three-step Task Audit Tool participants can apply to any task in their course book the following week

By the end of the session, participants will be able to identify the 'autopilot shortcut' in any speaking task, apply at least one upgrade technique, and design outcomes – not just activities – that demand more from every learner in the room.