Being a teacher of an advanced ESL conversation course can be intimidating and thrilling at the same time. Before teaching any lesson, it is important to approach your teaching endeavors from the perspectives of the students. What do you hope for the students to achieve in each class? Heightened fluency in casual dialogue? New acquisition of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions? Expand their critical thinking skills?
Advanced students need a challenge in the classroom to consistently build on their current English knowledge. My teaching experience at the university allows me to create my own curriculum and decide the topics of each lesson. My first year of teaching this advanced conversation course allowed me to be creative and try new strategies to keep students engaged in their learning. To do this, I facilitated mini-projects based on weekly thematic topics. If you are a new teacher and need some ideas to structure your conversation course, here are a few themes that worked really well with my students:
- Business and Entrepreneurship: Pairs of students created a business proposal to build their own company, promote their product/service, and practice sales pitch strategy using business related idioms and vocabulary during the presentation.
- News Broadcast: Students research a news article from a given news category and present The 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why, sometimes how) to the audience. This allows students to be creative with presentation style - deliver a newscast, reporter interview, etc.
- Stereotypes: Students learn about words related to stereotypes and read articles about current events that display stereotypes in American culture. During my teaching, I used the success of Jeremy Lin (as an American Born Chinese) in the predominantly non-Asian sport of basketball to display what kinds of stereotypes people may have in the sports realm.
- Travel: Early in the week, students learn about travel-related vocabulary and idioms. In groups, students perform research on a country of interest and create a travel brochure. For advanced students, each person will represent a different role to present unique details during the final project (i.e. tour guide, travel agent, recreation director). Students can present their findings using a poster and/or PowerPoint.
- Jobs and Careers: Students learn job-related vocabulary and idioms. After building this foundation, they participate in a mock "Job Fair" in the classroom that helps students practice asking relevant questions to employers.
The following themes can be adapted (in terms of content and level) to fit your students' needs:
- Technology: Lessons using Twitter, Facebook, Blog sites.
- Charts and Graphs: Analyzing current trends. Use trends-related terminology (rise, increase, fall, decline, slightly, moderately, rocket, etc).
- Environment: Conservation Project.
- Lifestyle: Daily habits, food idioms, etc.
I hope you find this information helpful. Strive to implement engaging and hands-on academic content to keep the conversation going!
No comments:
Post a Comment