It's Not Always About You

Between Wednesdays and Fridays, I spend a heartbreaking amount of time trying to figure out topics for a mixed level, social club environment to engage my diverse group of ESL learners. However, their diversity isn't always enough to keep the conversation going. Each week I'm going to try and present my reflections on these conversation class environments and hopefully provide some useful tips.

My question to myself this week:

How can I create an English speaking environment where my students can discuss something else besides themselves and their families?

I wonder how much my students are learning by repeating the same information over and over again ad nauseam. However, most ESL lessons that target adults rely on this source of information to build lessons around. It seems too easy, too obvious, too status quo to me.

Here are some ways to stop making it about them:

+ Use the great websites like Breaking News English and BBC Learning English for inspiration.

Notice I say only for inspiration though. While the lesson plans on these sites are varied, their usefulness in a conversation centric environment is quite limited unless you can add additional activities to supplement the vocabulary and listening comprehension activities. I use The Flatmates from the BBC on a weekly basis to help my lower intermediate students get some practice listening to different ways of speaking but also to introduce types of people they don't usually come across here in China. I'm hoping that they learn to identify with these characters after a while so that they may learn to predict certain behaviors and ask more detailed questions related to these characters. My follow up activities always relate to some aspect of the episode we listened to in class. I haven't mastered these activities yet but I believe the quality of the materials that the BBC provides is excellent enough for any teacher to incorporate into their classroom.

+ Improve your writing skills.

I've noticed there's a subset of TEFL teachers who go abroad in hopes of having more time and more inspiration for their writing. In my school alone, I'm surrounded by some of the most voracious readers I've ever met. We all share the dream of writing books one day but few of us actually are working towards it. This fact combined with my experience of using Kohlberg's Moral Dilemmas in my classroom has led me to believe that giving students characters to talk about is helpful to give new opportunities for increasing their communication skills. Why not create a cast of fleshed out characters yourself and present your class with mini-dramas each week? Throw in some follow up questions and scenarios and you can really get your students talking if you create characters worth talking about.

+Encourage lying

I owe this to the insight of Alex Case at TEFL.net after seeing this group of activities. In my school, we don't actually teach grammar. It's rare that you'll ever hear the terminology of modals, possessives, and the like- only because our students know all of that information in theory. Instead, I'm given the task of creating an environment where students feel compelled to speak. This is exactly what makes my job so frustrating and so exciting at the same time. Thus when I saw Alex's Only In My Dreams activity, I realized that I could use my classroom to encourage productive lying. My first test of this will be this week in a crazy jobs class where we'll discuss lion tamers, extreme sports athletes, and other jobs that just might spark a conversation or two. It's worth it!