How do I plan lessons that focus on conversational English? My student says she just wants to practice speaking but I think it is important to have a lesson plan, what do I do? I work with an advanced learner and am not sure what to do with them during our tutoring sessions? These are common questions that I have heard from tutors this winter. I would like to take a moment to share a few online resources that are helpful in working with intermediate to advanced learners on conversation, listening and speaking skills.
Talk Time
A great resource to start with for conversation is an online curriculum called Talk Time. This site has topic-based lesson plans for intermediate to advanced listening & speaking lessons. Included are topics such as weather, culture, food, health that learners get excited about. It provides an excellent platform for conversation practice, vocabulary building and questions to get learners talking so that you can get to know each other better.
Here's what one of our WLC tutors had to say about this curriculum "Talk Time is great. The curriculum from Eastside Literacy is accessible to the newest of tutors, and formats each topic in a comprehensible way. There is enough material in each lesson to facilitate good discussions that are applicable to the lives and interests of the students."
http://www.eastsideliteracy.org/tutorsupport/ESL/ESLTalkTime.htm Breaking News EnglishNewspaper articles can provide up-to-date and interesting topics for a tutoring session, but depending on the level of the student, they may be written at too high a level. The Breaking News English website includes short, two paragraph news articles designed specifically for English language learners. Along with the written text there is an mp3 file for each article that you can play from your computer with just a click of the button to provide listening practice. Each story includes a lesson plan with activities such as true or false, fill-in-the-blanks and follow up discussion questions about the article. The narrator has a British English accent, but he speaks clearly. This is a great resource for lessons for an intermediate or advanced learner.
www.breakingnewsenglish.com This I BelieveThis international essay writing project offers a website with materials for reading and listening, plus resources for educators and the opportunity for learners to write their own essays for submission. This is a great resource for advanced proficiency learners. Some essays may be controversial so work with your learner to find one that might be of interest.
One WLC tutor said "We used This I Believe as a listening exercise, and then discussed the issues raised from that particular essay. The learner chose the essays to listen to based on the essay titles of what might interest or intrigue her. The learner has an advanced grasp of the language and comes up with great questions for us to discuss. This resource provided an opportunity for the learner to try to understand the varying American viewpoints, and my (the tutor's) personal views, and put them in some context of her own personal and cultural experience. Then she has gone home and continued the discussions with her husband and mother-in-law in English, which provided further practice."
http://thisibelieve.org/ Be creative about listening and speaking tasks. Talk to the learner about how they need to use English in their daily lives. What do they need to be able to do over the phone for example? Depending on the learner's needs you could create specific activities, such as have the learner call an automated phone message such as the public library to get directions or a grocery store to find out the hours that they are open. Or to simulate a phone conversation during a tutoring session sit back-to-back and roleplay - this will make the practice more realistic as the learner will not be able to use body language clues to support understanding.
Please
contact me if you have questions or comments about these resources. If you know of other resources or have an idea or that has worked well for you please let me know so that we can share it with other tutors.
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