(Sorry if this is the wrong forum, please move if it is)
My Iraqi colleagues have asked me to teach a class in English as a second language. We are in a slow period, so I have agreed. I’ve done a little teaching of ESL before, but I’d appreciate some ideas for activities. Because this is something I’m doing on the side, I won’t have time for reviewing a lot of essays, or grading papers. Mostly, my value is that I am a native English speaker. The class will primarily focus on spoken English although we might address a little bit on writing.
I have divided the students into 3 classes: beginner, moderate ability, and expert. The beginners are very limited, but the experts are very fluent. Each class will have about 15 students.
I’d appreciate any advice for excercises we can do in class. I particularly would like to hear strategies for getting the less vocal students to participate. Today is the first class and I thought we’d do some basic stuff like have people interview each other and then stand up and tell the group about the person (cheesy, but it will get people talking).
Okay, I teach EFL, but in an elementary school. Here are some ideas, but they’re really for kids. You might be able to adapt some of them.
My kids like reading dialogues. I write them about familiar situations and make photocopies. Partner work works well with getting the slower students to participate. I’m planning on writing out some nursery stories in dialogue form, to have them act out.
We also play “around the world” with cards I made of numbers and letters. Two kids stand side by side and I show them a letter or number. Whoever says it first moves on to the next kid, and so on until the kid at the end of the line wins. They LOVE this. They REALLY know their numbers now.
I made a Memory set, using their new vocabulary words. They’d play this all class if I let them.
If you can find pictures of random objects, it’s great to just hold them up and let them call out the correct work in English. Works well with visual learners. (We did this in my Bulgarian class too, and it really helped me, and I’m an adult.) I find a lot of good pictures in National Geographic.
With more advanced students…have you checked Project Gutenburg for copyright free literature? Also, the BBC and Voice of America have news articles in basic English. I don’t really have a lot of experience with more advanced students.
Beginners - well, that is pretty basic so you don’t need much other than a blackboard, the alphabet, numbers, colors, etc.
For moderates and advanced, one trick to get everyone to speak is to put very basic topics on a slips of paper and make them take turns, pull out a slip of paper and then talk about the subject for a few minutes - very generic subjects like “cars”, “food”, “music”, etc are good…gives lots of leeway for a little speech and some follow up discussion. I learned the hard way, do NOT use topics like religion, politics or family (I once had a class of basically all orphans and it was a disaster…crying and very emotional!!)
Playing games can be fun - 20 questions for instance…but make it easier…“I am thinking of a city.” Pick London or Paris or places that don’t take a geography expert to figure out. Go around the room and everyone asks one question, but anyone can guess the answer out of turn.
You will find what works, but especially in your location, be careful of hot topics, keep the subject materials as generic as possible and keep moving - never sit down while you are teaching! It keeps the energy level up and you will find you actually think better on your feet - trust me on this tip.
And I always tried to end every class with a simple joke, or a puzzle/brainteaser or some kind of entertainment to make them smile on the way out…as the old showbiz adage goes, “keep them wanting more…”
See if they can figure out what these two sentences have in common:
Thanks for the tips, all. I taught my first class this afternoon, we played this stupid game I made up on the spot where each person told a line from a story and it grew and grew. It was okay, but I’ll need to have a better plan for next week.
Games seem to work, I was worried that since I was dealing with adults and professionals that it would fall flat, but they were ready to go with whatever I wanted to do.
The level thing is a problem, I have people in class who studied English in high-school in Iraq and engineers who studied at UCLA, so it is hard to address everyone’s needs.
Are you familiar with Mad Libs? I very much doubt you can purchase them in Baghdad, but you could write your own to use with the advanced (or even intermediate) group. You have the shell of a brief story ready to go, with blanks left for various parts of speech. You then prompt the class to supply a verb here, and adjective there, nouns, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions… whatever. The end result is a grammatically correct but silly story that are usually elicit laughs.
You could also play a version of Dictionary, where you pick a word for the class. Each person then writes a fake definition for that word. You read them all aloud, with the real definition mixed in. Award points to each person who selects the real definition from the bunch. To make this work without involving writing, you can assign a word with its real definition to each person out of the hearing of the others, then have them tell their word and both the real and a made-up definition, and have the class vote on which is real.
Depending on the sensibilities of your class, you might get some good interest in how to handle real-life situations with English-speakers they may encounter in travel or from visitors. Teach them how to curse effectively in English, teach them military orders they may hear being barked, teach them compliments, teach them how to ask for directions to the bathroom. Download some menus from famous restaurants and translate them. Practical stuff is easier to absorb.
In my experience the game Taboo is enjoyed by all.
You write a word on a card and the player has to make someone else guess the word by describing it. But there are some other words on the card, and the player is not allowed to use them in describing the word.
So in American culture, you might have a card that says, “Beauty,” and the player is not allowed to say the word “sleeping” or “beholder” or “woman.”
Fun stuff! I’m also a strong advocate of using songs to learn languages, but I have no specific examples. Tongue twisters are also good.
I taught German engineers and scientists with university degrees from the US or UK…and for the most part, they were more interested in getting idioms down, and brushing up on their conversational English. I usually had them translate relevant documents in their field and try to explain it to a layman (like me) who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. They seemed to actually enjoy doing that.
Sometimes we would just read a short magazine article in English and discuss it. Again, these types really just wanted to keep their English fluent and practice pronunciation - but they certainly do keep you on the ball. I spent many a night researching some obscure grammar rule, just to be able to answer their questions.
For one class of guys who all had advanced degrees and experience living abroad, I had each get up and give a presentation in English and then field questions from the group. Again, this will keep you on your toes as you have to correct any errors in the presentation, questions and answers, all the while trying to follow along with the (usually complex) subject material. Although teaching at this level is quite difficult, you will certainly become a better teacher in the process.
I had posted yesterday thanking everyone for their great ideas, but it was lost during the outage. Needless to say, the original post was brilliant and would have changed the standards for excellences in the written word, but alas.
Anyway, thanks again, I’m going to use these suggestions. DMark I like the idea of asking engineers to explain their projects in English, especially since I have a couple of guys I can just wind up and set loose for the entire class period if I need to.
One of my friends (well, she’s an ex-friend, actually–but that’s not important right now) makes decks of cards. Each card has a picture of something that students are supposed to know the word for in English. She pairs up the students, shuffles the deck (or has a student shuffle the deck), and deals out six cards to each student. Each student has to make up a story, in English, involving the objects or actions on the cards they were dealt. Each student can talk with his or her partner to refine the story, get suggestions for idioms, etc. When they finish making their stories, they tell them to the class. Class members get to ask questions.
This activity seems to work well with students who have good senses of humor and an intermediate skill level. Students tend to really like it and get into it.
You can tell your students to do some research on someone (someone from an English-speaking place, of course) and then do a presentation to the class as if they were that person. People apparently tend to get into that, too.
Sometimes simple games of charades work well, too. I used some of those to learn Portuguese.
Classroom discussions or debates about subjects the students have some passion for could work well, too. People have a tendency to want to butt in and express their opinions when something interesting and/or slightly controversial is being discussed. People have a tendency to want to throw in their two cents in once they get drawn into the topic.
I’ve been told that having students listen to music works well to help them learn a foreign language. I learned a whole lot about the languages I’ve studied through music.
You could work in some great classic English-language music, so that people get a small lesson in the musical history and traditions of English-speaking places while they’re improving or keeping up their English. Getting students to listen to and understand songs from lots of different genres of English-language music could help them understand different accents and dialects, too.
One friend of mine used Barenaked Ladies’ song “If I Had a Million Dollars” to teach the English subjunctive.
Paul I really like the stuff you sent, but I didn’t understand the Greek test. To be honest, I thought you sent me something from a Greek class you teach as well. I’ll take another look at it. The grammar tests are awesome, though.
Do you have the same issue with all the cultural landmines? I was looking for some news stories to use in class and so many of them are unacceptable in a Muslim country. Even the funny “news of the weird” type stories will have someone getting drunk, or too much sex in them.
Add to that, just the problem of any discussion in Baghdad. We were discussing hobbies and I asked people what they do in their free time after work and the first answer was “I take an AK 47 and my neighbors and me protect our street from the police deathsquads.”
Me: “Okay, how about football? Anyone play football? Farooq? No, just the guard your family thing all night? Okay then.”
Then we were taking turns talking about our families and suddenly I realize that one person in the group just had her husband murdered and another colleague’s son just lost his legs in a car bombing.
So, I thought I’d print off some Straight Dope articles to use, but wow, there are a lot of articles about sex and drugs, and then some more sex.
Maybe, rather than you deciding what the topic of the discussion will be, you could ask them to tell you something interesting. Or, better yet, funny. Why not ask each person to tell the class a joke? Or a funny story that happened to them? I would guess that lots of people in Baghdad have pretty sharp, dark, and twisted senses of humor at this point. Maybe you could ask them to tell you about something they think is beautiful, or an experience they had when they were really touched and amazed by something beautiful.
You might get one of the braver or more extroverted people to tell a joke. Then, when everyone at least smiles, things might loosen up a bit. There might be some commentary on the joke, and you can then get someone to offer another one.
You can also switch to student-driven games pretty quickly. It seems to me that the more control over the subject matter you give them, the better off you’ll be.
…I warned you about that… I know you have to teach about families (mom, dad, cousin, brother-in-law, etc.) but as mentioned, draw stick figures on a family tree of sorts, and point to that family, do NOT bring in personal family…but now that you have learned, you won’t be doing that again, will ya…
Now please trust me and do not bring up religion or politics, and you’ll be fine.
And for the advanced class presentations, usually I would ask only one person to give a presentation and that would be the entire class period…if you have six students, you just found a way to get through six classes. The individual presentation should be no longer than 10 minutes top, with about 20 minutes of questions and answers to follow. All the while you are furiously writing notes, then you use the rest of the class to go over phrases, idioms etc.