Job Discussion Forums

[Kealo]

I am 'teaching' two middle aged females with an excellent grasp of English. I spent the first lesson speaking with them for an hour and I only noticed a few minor mistakes.
I asked them what they wanted to learn. They told me they wanted me to decide. What should I do? Play games? Teach them slang? Any ideas?

[mozzar]

Use real English as your source material: newspapers, magazines, soap operas (Eastenders for example), maybe choose a subject (history, geography, etc.) and teach a little of that.

[riverboat]

I definitely second the "real English" thing. I use lots of clips from TV shows and sometimes films with my advanced students, and do LC and vocab type questions with them. It's a real challenge for them when there are strong accents, lots of slang or fast speech. Because I teach a lot in business contexts, BBC's "The Office" is something I use a lot.

Another idea: if you have access to speaker-phone facilities, and phone bills aren't a problem, you could get the students to phone real hotels/tourist attractions/travel companies/shops in the UK/US/Australia and give them specific pieces of information they must find out from them (e.g. for a hotel: what kinds of room are available at the hotel, what are the prices, what are the local attractions etc). This way they are having real English conversations in very real contexts - but obviously they don't need to book anything. After the phonecall you can give feedback.

Other than that I'd say that yeah, idioms/slang, phrasal verbs and vocab expansion would be your main areas to focus on. Good luck!