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philinkorea
Joined: 27 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 5:03 pm Post subject: teaching freetalk, need good ideas |
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hi there
i teach adults at my school. Im looking for some good sites to teach the highest level free conversation. Usually we just use some article from the newspaper. Also I managed to get some stuff from a friend with prompts for different topics. That was kind of cool as I guess it wasnt as daunting as just giving an opinion on a newspaper article. Anyway, useful info would be appreciated
Please check here in the FAQ section....Mod Team |
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chronicpride
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 10:28 pm Post subject: |
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Phil,
I'm in somewhat the same boat with some of my adults. For my high level students, it depends on if they want to broaden their business english, sink their teeth into contemporary english and slang, or just keep their current knowledge base, sharp and up-to-date.
If you are just free-talking, then you can always check http://iteslj.org/questions/ for good conversation themes and questions.
For my business english classes, I have a business english conversation book that covers many different scenarios and I use that as a foundation for lesson planning.
If they want something with a lot of meat and are ready for contemporary slang, sarcasm, and innuendo, do a search and print off scripts of Friends episodes. There is so much in one episode of new vocab and dialogue to go over, comprehend, role-play, review/test, that it will take you several classes just to get through a thorough reading and comprehension, let alone application and role-play of the new vocab. I have some advanced classes where we are doing that. I'd buy the Friends DVD with Korean subtitles. Watch it once in Korean, then a 2nd time doing scene-by-scene breakdown with english subtitles. Make up a vocab list of the episode and focus on key words and phrases. Get them into building sentences and conversations using the new words. Then, watch the DVD again with no subtitles. The first time in Korean, they laugh a little. In english, they laugh a little less. But once they comprehend the material and have applied it on their own, they are laughing hysterically when watching it the final time.  |
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manlyboy
Joined: 01 Aug 2004
Location: Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
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| Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:56 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| i teach adults at my school. Im looking for some good sites to teach the highest level free conversation. Usually we just use some article from the newspaper. Also I managed to get some stuff from a friend with prompts for different topics. That was kind of cool as I guess it wasnt as daunting as just giving an opinion on a newspaper article. Anyway, useful info would be appreciated |
Ahhh....advanced level free conversation. Totally, totally different from garden variety ESL. "Taught" it for a year myself, but thought of it more as being a facilitator than an actual educator. Learning conversation, in any language, is more an art than a science. Even the greatest art teachers can't make their students great unless there's some natural talent for them to harness and point in the right direction. Of course, theory-saturated Korean language learners expect you to provide them with a math-like formula, and consequently improve their conversation skills like you would their TOEIC skills.
"Teaching" conversation, IMO, is also more an art than a science. I saw more than a few teachers, myself included, take the blind ally of a primarily academic approach. Chronicpride's idea is very cool, but at my old, rather amateurish hagwon, the students would have turned their noses up at anything denying them as much speaking time as possible. No "materials" can make someone into a good coversationalist. Conversation is organic, i.e YOU are the material. They need a real live native speaker to interact with and model themselves on.
I guess I'm saying that, in a free conversation class, focusing on the quality of your performance is way more important than focusing on the quality of your materials. I never saw a lesson plan that, in and of itself, generated a lot of great conversation.
Ummmmmmmmm..........sorry for completely not answering your question. |
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Zenpickle
Joined: 06 Jan 2004
Location: Anyang -- Bisan
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| Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 1:39 am Post subject: |
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| A co-worker asked me a similar question, and I directed her to [url]Fark.com[/url]. It helped her a lot for topics. |
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bits
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
Location: Daegu, South Korea
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| Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 5:41 am Post subject: |
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| Bogglesworld.com has some ESL Adult teaching material as well. |
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