Job Discussion Forums

[JZer]

I am looking for advice or other people's experience on creating a theme or focus for an EFL class at a bilingual school. The students already have an English class to prepare for their university test in Mandarin. I am working in Taipei. I teach 7th graders 4 hours a week and 8th graders two hours a week. Any advice on what kind of class room I might consider creating for next semester.

Note: I was given this job two days before the semester started. There is currently no curriculum for the course. Basically I discuss a certain topic for several weeks. I am currently working on a unit about travel. After that I will talk about fashion.

For this semester I plan to discuss:

Travel
Fashion
Sports
Teenage Problems
Movies

[naturegirl321]

Music
stars (movie, music, etc)
Free time
Jobs

[spiral78]

To make whatever authentic texts and materials you choose on your themes as effective (and sort of long-lasting as possible) you might want to 'recycle' some of them. For example - first have students read or listen and discuss the basic meanings. Another go at the same stuff for new vocabulary, then another for discourse structure, and a final go-round to produce a similar text themselves.

I've been successful at times in making one article or short video the focus on an entire week of useful stuff. You might think students would get bored (and at high levels they would) but research shows that, with the initial burden of deciphering meaning out of the way, it's easier for students to focus on other elements of a text. Anyway, my student feedback supports the value of recycling the good stuff...