Stop teaching speaking, so to speak.

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Dear Colleagues,

IATEFL Poland and Grzegorz Śpiewak, educator, trainer and writer,
have the pleasure of inviting you to the webinar which will take place on Wednesday, 14th of October 2026, from 20.30 to 21.30 CEST.
This webinar is titled: “Stop teaching speaking, so to speak.”.

Summary:

A quarter of a century after the CEFR was published, language teaching has still largely failed to act on one of its most consequential distinctions: spoken interaction vs. spoken production. In everyday classroom practice, the two are still treated as variants of the same skill, assessed with the same criteria and corrected with the same instincts. The result is a silent contradiction at the heart of communicative teaching: learners are asked to interact but judged as if they were performing.

In this session I’ll argue that many familiar problems in speaking lessons — over-correction, unclear expectations, fragile fluency, and learner frustration — are not methodological accidents, but symptoms of a deeper conceptual confusion. Drawing on CEFR descriptors, research on interactional competence, and psycholinguistic models of speech, the session demonstrates why interaction and production are in essence incompatible modes — cognitively, pedagogically, and assessment-wise.

The talk challenges modern EFL professionals to stop teaching “speaking” as a single construct and to adopt two distinct strategies of success, with radically different feedback, standards, and roles for both teachers and learners.