Englannin keskustelukurssien oppikirjat on suunnattu opiskelijoille, jotka haluavat kehittää suullista kielitaitoaan ja saada lisää itsevarmuutta kielen käyttäjinä. Kirjojen kappaleet sisältävät runsaasti mukaansatempaavia keskustelutehtäviä, jotka aktivoivat suullista kielitaitoa tehokkaasti. Lue oppikirjailijan vinkit englannin keskustelukursseille!
Whether working in the physical or virtual classroom, with some careful planning and good materials, it is easy to hold fun and inspirational lessons that will keep your students motivated and coming back to class week after week. Check out these useful tips on how to encourage and inspire students in English lessons.
The following exercises are from two English textbooks – Catching Up and Way Ahead – which both offer thoroughly inspiring learning material for conversation classes. They are aimed at students who want to develop their conversational skills and move beyond normal language course topics.
The tips shared in this article can be practiced at any conversational English classes.
Keep the groups small
Keep the groups small, especially at the beginning of the course. When students don’t know each other and lack confidence in their spoken English, they will feel more at ease talking in groups of three or four.
If working online, create break-out rooms for each group. Make sure the students have both their microphone and camera turned on when they are in their smaller rooms. Also, pop in at regular intervals to see how they are doing and prompt further discussion, just as you would do in the physical classroom.
Limit the length of time of each exercise
Limit the length of time that each exercise takes. Whether your students are eight or eighty years old, 15 – 20 minutes is about as long as anyone can concentrate on one topic. By all means have a theme for the whole lesson but break that down into a series of smaller parts. Here we have a short, fun exercise to engage the students’ attention followed by a slightly longer, more in depth exercise on the same theme – office spaces.
Introduce new areas of grammar and vocabulary
Consider the choice of topics that you cover in class. The topics need to be interesting to the students, yet at the same time they need to push the students into experiencing new areas of grammar and vocabulary. Think outside the box and find areas that they wouldn’t have covered at school.
I hope you find these exercises useful in your classroom! Many more motivating exercises can be found in Catching Up (B1 level) and Way Ahead (C1-C2 level).