Conversation Strips in the Language Classroom

I must admit that I use a lot of worksheets to supplement English lessons that I teach. Grammar activities, conversation scenarios, reading passages, I have seen plenty and used a variety of printed resources. However, I am definitely wary of wasting paper in this Go Green environment, especially if I print things that I never use but keep in a "just-in-case" folder. Before I go print crazy with the abundant resources on the Web, I am now thinking of ways to reduce paper and in theory, increase more student engagement in the language learning classroom. Instead of looking down at the assigned papers, students will be looking around at each other!

One activity (strategy) that is highly adaptable to fit any class level and lesson theme is the use of conversation strips. You can fit about 25 strips on one piece of paper by creating a Table template; all you have to do is write appropriate statements/questions for the class and cut them out before the next lesson. For more advanced classes, you can even have the students write relevant topics on the strips as a warm up activity! In a listening or conversation class, students can go around and ask each other questions or tell each other quotes from the strips, expecting a detailed response from classmates. In a reading class, you can have students pull out different writing prompts from a fun bag, container, or a silly hat; they will each have to write about the topic they chose for a certain length of time, and to change things up, they can swap papers and read aloud (or edit) each other's work. There is room for lots of variation on how to use conversation strips.

I think that relying less on printable handouts in the classroom and more on student input is definitely one way to improve your teaching skills!

TEFL World Wiki: Ice Breakers for New Students

Reflect on the first day of attending a new class. It can be any class and any grade – elementary, junior high, high school, even college. You’ll probably remember the new faces, new teacher, new everything. More likely than not, the teacher facilitated some kind of ice breaker to have all the students mingle and get to know each other better. By the end of the class, some students have already found their best friends for the academic season, and more importantly, teachers have a better idea of the students’ social and academic prowess.

Ice breakers used in an ESL classroom range in content, purpose, style, and creativity. Some activities are solely created to entertain the students, while others are already subtly teaching some linguistic aspects of English without the students’ knowledge. You may be thinking that ice breakers are all about having fun and will be a piece of cake to facilitate on the first day with little to no prior preparation. After all, how hard can it be to motivate students to meet each other and have fun while doing so? Well this is true to some extent. Ice breakers are meant to ease tensions among student-student and teacher-student interactions, so it should definitely be light hearted. But it should also be informative and goal-driven. You can only make a first impression once, so adequate preparation is crucial to have a smooth ice breaker that the students will remember for a long time. If there are any gaps or hiccups in the activity flow, students may feel like it is not useful or a waste of time. As a new teacher, there are many important factors to consider before choosing which ice breaker to use for the first day. How many students do you expect to show up? What is the fluency level of the students? What should the students learn from this activity: new vocabulary, forming complete sentences, asking questions? How much class time will the ice breaker take? Do I need any extra materials or props?

There are 3 specific steps that you can take to make sure the ice breaker goes as planned. First: Explain the rules in detail so that the students can easily perform the task. Remember to use simple language and speak clearly. Second: Demonstrate an example for the class. Choose a student to help you reenact the ice breaker rules. Third: Be the first person to start the ice breaker. Students will likely imitate what you do and feel less nervous. Encourage students to speak and participate by providing positive comments.

TEFL World Wiki offers several different kinds of ice breakers, including Brief Reminders, Guess Who, Sherlock Holmes, Trading Places, and Truth and Lies. Students must ask each other questions and guess about each other’s lives to find out more details to share with the class.

I would like to share a fun ice breaker that can be adapted to different levels and themes. This activity works best for smaller groups of students, since it involves a good deal of memory. The goal is to have every student add on to what the previous person says, and continue the chain until the last person repeats what everyone has shared. Let’s take the theme of favorite foods as an example. Teacher: My name is Sally, and my favorite food is pizza. How about you? Student 1: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. My name is Tina, and my favorite food is sushi. Student 2: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. Her name is Tina, and her favorite food is sushi. My name is Ben, and my favorite food is chicken. Student 3: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. Her name is Tina, and her favorite food is sushi. His name is Ben, and his favorite food is chicken. My name is Paul, and my favorite food is steak. … and so on… By the end of the drill, everyone will know each other’s favorite food! Other themes relating to ‘favorites’ include: color, animals, movie/TV shows, books, ideal job, music, sports, hobby, author, biggest fear, etc. The more creative and wild the theme/content is for the ice breaker you choose, the more memorable the activity will be for everyone!

TEFL World Wiki: It all starts with Grammar

The other day, I was browsing the web for grammar teaching tips when I came across this website: TEFL World Wiki (TWW). As you may know, the original Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia which allows people from all over the world to edit and add information to the extensive articles on the site. Not only is it a great resource to enhance your teaching experience, but it is most importantly a useful learning tool.

Even though TWW is primarily directed towards language professionals who teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) in a variety of international countries, the abundance of interdisciplinary articles and adaptable language activities makes this Wiki page applicable to all language educators in the fields of TEFL, TESL, TESOL, and English teaching.

TWW provides a wealth of teaching resources that are categorized in different themes. The categories include:

Teaching (tips), Grammar Guide, Forum, Employment & Finding Work, Skills, Books & Materials, Linguistics, Glossary, and even TEFAL (Teaching English for a Laugh).

The TEFL World Wiki Grammar Guide emphasizes the importance of English grammar as the “glue” which holds words together and gives sentences contextual meaning. Grammar represents the set rules we use in any language to create and understand meaning through written or spoken modes of communication. Thus as teachers, we have an important responsibility to help our students build a strong foundation in grammar, not necessarily with tedious drills, but integrating grammar instruction into meaningful learning games and reading/writing activities.

If you don’t exactly remember how to explain determiners, the future perfect simple, gerunds, imperatives, modals, participles, subjunctives, or subordinate clauses, the Grammar Guide is the perfect place to brush up on your grammar knowledge!

Keep the Conversation Going: Communicative Themes

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!

Communicative Lesson Plans: About.com

No matter how busy you may become with your teaching responsibilities, there are plenty of excellent resources to make use of... at the click of a button! Although the Internet offers a rich and abundant collection of teaching materials, it may initially seem overwhelming to find reputable websites, or figure out even how to find the relevant materials.

Over the past few years, I have found many gems in the arena of valuable teaching resources and would like to share one in this post: esl.about.com.

If you are looking for exciting variety in teaching a wide range of ESL classes, including conversation and/or pronunciation classes, Kenneth Beare offers lesson plans that are perfectly suited for the busy teacher. The lesson plans are organized as follows: introduction to the activity, step-by-step teaching guidelines, and printable student worksheets (to effectively supplement the lesson). The best part about a good majority of Mr. Beare's lesson plans is that they are adaptable to all levels of ESL: beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. While beginning students may need the most emphasis on vocabulary knowledge and repetition of English dialogue patterns, advanced students can create their own dialogues using the lesson content.

If you happen to think of a unique vocabulary activity that you would like to share with other educators, you can easily submit your response here... and see your work get published online!

These teaching materials are freely accessible and can be easily adapted to best fit the needs of your students. Whether you are looking for conversation, reading, or writing activities, esl.about.com is bound to get your creative ideas rolling.

Sometimes Less is More

One thing that I have realized about teaching English to lower level students is that less is more. It is wishful thinking to expect college age exchange students to learn and remember all the vocabulary and grammar structures in a short amount of time - living in the Bay Area with so much to explore, who has time to study?! Attention span is one thing, the right motivation is another. Rather than bombarding them with lists of vocabulary words to remember and too much homework where nothing seeps in, much like tossing them into a lion's den (figuratively speaking), it can empower students when they begin to remember/memorize the definitions of just a few words in real-life authentic contexts. Tailoring to the realistic expectations of your students, no matter how little it may seem, can boost your students' confidence and motivation levels to use what they are learning in useful contexts.

Sometimes less is more, especially in the language classroom.

Getting Organized

You may have just finished an intensive teacher training program, and are now getting ready to teach the first ESL classes of your career. This is definitely an exciting time, but possibly quite overwhelming as well. Being a teacher entails not only teaching a class, but also lesson planning, creating supplemental curriculum, helping students during office hours, answering emails, and grading homework, tests, and other assignments. Perhaps the most important skill to develop during your early teaching years is organization.

Here are some ideas to keep things organized:

Teaching Portfolio. Create a personalized portfolio of the handouts you distribute to your students. A basic 3-ring folder will do the trick. I really like using plastic sheet protectors for some documents that you will photocopy the most, instead of punching holes into the original copies.

Lesson Plans. Plan out the number of minutes for each part of your lessons. How many minutes do you expect to take attendance? Give explanations? Assign class work for the students?

Observations. After each class, reflect on how the class went and write down some notes. Did the class go as planned? What materials did you use to teach? What did you do well? What can you improve for the next class? Did the students participate enthusiastically during activities?

Resources. Make a list of helpful resources that you can easily refer to when you need it. Take advantage of the excellent ESL websites that you can use for teaching ideas as well as engaging audio materials. It might help to 'bookmark' the sites that you use the most to save time. I will share some useful websites in the upcoming posts.

Activities and Games. Print out some language activities that you can use during class, and add them to your portfolio. You should try to add some variety to the kinds of activities you will use, for example using grammar activities to supplement reading assignments, or short language-related games if you have a few minutes to spare before the class ends.

Teaching is not always easy and can be an energy zapper at times, but if you follow some of these ideas to stay organized, you are on your way to becoming a great teacher!