Job Discussion Forums

[Mr. English]

I'm teaching a group of seven, all employees at a small company that exports kitchen and bathroom accessories from China to anywhere in the world they can find buyers. The language of discussion with most of their potential buyers is English. Most of the work is done via email but when they get close to consummating a sale the finish is sometimes done via telephone. All seven are in their early to mid-20s, five are women, one of the women is married with one child, the rest are single. Their English skills vary � from about elementary to intermediate. I do 2-hour classes and they want half the time spent working in a textbook and half free talking. The free talking can be difficult due to their language levels, but they insist on it and it actually goes fairly well.

The question I have is about topics for the free talking; they and I are continually struggling to come up with next week's. Examples of what we have used are:
* Should there be age limits for gymnasts in Olympic-level competitions?
* What have you noticed with respect to cultural differences between Chinese and foreigners in China?
* What is your opinion of the healthcare system in China (used newspaper article about doctor who had been attacked and perceived problems in China's healthcare system as starting point) and use of traditional Chinese medicine?
* Students to report on weekend visit to two factories they toured so as to know more about products they sell
* Transportation costs in China � reasonable or too high?
* What do students think of Chinese marrying foreigners, and if a foreigner pursued them would they be interested?
* Which is more important, economic development or environmental protection?

If anyone has some good topic ideas I am interested in hearing!

[Cool Teacher]

Hi Mr.English. Cool Teacher here!

I like topic tlak in class but I think sometimes too many teachers assume something meaty and controversila is the best way to go when most of the time people like talking abotu other things for example:

where would you like to visit on holiday,
what food do you like,
what can you cook,
if you could learn to cook something what would it be,
if you could go to university and study something then what would you study?


What I sometimes do is use a graded reader which might have some topics in the story and then try to make some questions about those topics and then make some more that are a bit related to their life etc...

Two things I try to be careful of...

1) Making topics sounds more complicated like "What have you noticed with respect to cultural differences between Chinese and foreigners in China?"

Maybe, "What is cultural differences are there between Chinese people and foreigners?"

BUT...

2) Try not to make it sound like a negative judgment on Chinese people.

I think it sounds like, "Wow! You're athletes are too young. That's child abuse!"
"What's up with your funny healthcare system?" (I can see theres a negative judgment there but I don't know what)
"Why do Chinese girls not want to date me? Are they racist?"
"Why is China polluting the EArth just for its own benefit? Don7t you think those proirities suck?"



So, maybe you could reforumalate toget the answers your looking for such as,

"If you lived abroad what would you miss about China?"
"What is your opinion on the environment?"
"If China and Japan went to war over those pebbles in the sea who would win?"

---I'm just kidding about the last one.

[Glenski]

An hour of free talking. Hmm. I used to hold conversation courses along that line in a conversation school. You just can't keep on the same topic for that long. Think about it. In your own language, native speakers drift and drift, and they know the vocabulary.

Perhaps one way to go is to provide them with newspaper articles to read in advance. Or as one of my classes did, each person could come to class with an article (they read the headline and have 1 minute to summarize the news story, whether everyone else knows it or not, and then discussion ensues). The problem is not just vocabulary, but in how the class is held. If they insist on just one person in the group talking, then the others waste valuable time listening. With a small group, they may not perceive this to be a problem, but I'd ask for a secret ballot to be sure. You could also just have them talk in pairs for 5-10 minutes, gauge whether they are really staying on topic and enjoying things (or their partner), and then switch. Some partners will hog the conversation, though.

When you feel everyone has discussed the one person's topic enough, change topics. Perhaps the best thing the teacher can do is monitor, take notes on vocabulary, guide students when they don't know how to say things, etc. End the free talking with a wrap-up on vocabulary and questions about the words from the students.

You could also give students tips on evaluating the news stories for credibility. When a wine company reports that wine is good for the body, should we really believe them? When a politician says X, why should we believe them? Are there really 2 sides (or more) to every story?

As for topics, there are as many as stars in the universe.

[jonniboy]

Lots of websites you can use. esldiscussions.com has lots of topics to get you started. I tend to agree that you don't have to always have the topics meaty and heavy but at the same time students do get bored after a while talking about travel, free time, hobbies, shopping etc so a bit of variety is needed

[santi84]

[Cool Teacher]

[Shroob]

[santi84]

I'm sure most would argue that Hitler was a charismatic politician, but I'm not sure the man had great leadership skills. Part of being a good leader is listening to your many experienced generals who can see the (Soviet) forest for the trees.

[johnslat]

Dear santi84,

Being not insane is also probably an asset to good leadership.

Regards,
John

[artemisia]

(Also not being a psychopath. I recently read an article about a study by Sydney�s Macquarie University on participants� olfactory ability. It suggests psychopaths don't have a good sense of smell due to impaired frontal lobe brain activity: the same area that controls impulses. I gather distinctions are made with people who might have impaired olfactory ability for other reasons).

On topic: Yes, as Cool Teacher says, you can reduce the complexity of the questions or rather the topics.

[Mr. English]

Thanks all for the input. I will be looking at the suggested web pages. A few comments:

Of the topic I mentioned above two were created completely by the students: the one on cultural differences and the one on environment versus development. I have found that topics such as what food you like or where you would like to visit on holiday don't generate a conversation that lasts long enough. On the athletes, the class was about split on age limits; there was no acrimony, zero. The one about marriage and pursuit was excellent, kept going for a long time and generated significantly different ideas from the men versus the women. I mostly listen and work on correcting the English; I don't take strong stands on the issues, though if too many people are arguing one side I will raise questions from the opposite point of view to keep things going.

Agreed, you can't hold to a topic for an hour, and we don't, but I need something with a little meat on it for starters. Newspaper articles would be great, but I have gotten only a little cooperation on the concept of homework from this group, even as easy as reading a short article. Part of the problem is that meaty issues are mostly discussed in articles that have vocabulary beyond what they can deal with. They could also use some work at home and in class on their grammar besides the quick correcting and occasional extremely brief lecture that I slip in, but they only want to speak and are stubborn about what we do.

Yes, difficult sometimes for these students to express their thoughts, but they INSIST on an hour of free conversation, and if things are going well we sometimes go over the hour and short the text time, which happens in the second hour.

Surface area, yes, though for whatever reason this group has resisted being paired up, want to work as a group. At the first meeting I did just this, paired them and then had them report back on their discussions, but they did not like this format. They told me it felt too much like school, and they don't want school.

Also, we did discuss the rocks last week. They ask me what I thought. I said I thought the protests were not productive; they agreed. They said that they believed that long-term residents of Guangzhou were completely against the protests as to them, the long-term residents, it was nothing but a disruption (and it was a significant disruption to traffic in parts of the city). They thought that many of the protesters were from out-of-town, perhaps many were from Nanjing, and that they were mostly "loafers and students". As to more recent arrivals in Guangzhou, there was a heated discussion in Chinese about whether people who have hukou but have not been here so long should be considered long-term residents. They said that they were disappointed that they couldn't get more news about the protests and wanted to know if I knew where some good videos of the action could be found on the internet. One of them, a woman about 22, said that she "hates Japanese". I have heard this from a number of Chinese, though I have heard the opposite as well, including from people as young as 11.

[Glenski]

Why do you think they INSIST on using half their time for unstructured (grammatically, pedagogically) free talking? Do they hate your regular lessons, for example? Are they that high level free-thinking armchair philosophers that they feel they can do it without your intervention? Perhaps if we had some insight into this, it would prove interesting.

If they are just the type who want to blabber on with whatever ability they have, that's their choice, but if I were you I'd insist on them showing (to themselves) that they are getting something out of the process other than expressing words on a topic. Like someone wrote above, if you can show them how something they said is improper for polite society in some way, great. If you can show them how to rephrase something, cool. If they come away with a bigger vocabulary that actually stays with them (only through practicing, of course), all the better.

Talking for talking's sake is nearly a waste of time, IMO.

If they cannot cooperate and bring in articles or read ones you assign before class, then bring something to class that is short enough to read in 5 minutes and do the prep there. It will be more work for you, but even stuff like a Dear Abby column is something to talk about. Anything with a moral. Maybe even politeness hints from Heloise, or relationship quizzes from Vogue magazine would be stimulating.

[Mr. English]

They insist on the free talking because they think that this is what they need (they want to be able to talk on the phone to potential customers in English) and they want a format that is not, in their minds, like "school". I have made a couple of suggestions about how to do things differently, but, as I said, they are stubborn about what they want to do, so I have for now at least given up on trying to change the format. Something is getting accomplished, but I certainly agree that they could get more with something more structured. Bringing in short articles is not a bad idea.

[Cool Teacher]

Hay! I just had a thought. Why not do this as a presentation format with a discussion afer or a debate?

[artemisia]