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[xiaolongbaolaoxi]

I don't know if you are a credentialed teacher, but tapping into published standards/curricula/offerings from various teacher's organization can be a wonderful idea (I loved the Internationals Reading Association and a related site called www.readwritethink.org). For example, I looked for something at the first grade level... for my uni classes (I found that their independent learning skills rarely approached fifth grade level). The vocabulary was extraordinarily easy, but helped make the students feel comfortable talking (which can be a major battle). If they are already talking, but not necessarily well, you can use very low level materials to help with speed/accent reduction (if they speak faster, but not lightning fast, it helps reinforce suprasegmentals=saying things as phrases with appropriate intonation with out sounding out every letter, which does absolutely nothing when they are tasked with pronouncing dipthongs, blends, etc.) Various homeschool sites will have all kinds of stuff foryounger native speakers.readers, and I found that they tended to have a great selection of realistic stuff.

Stealing shamelessly from another teacher, this became, "say this thing in this style..." such as Beijing opera, newscast, detective show, dance group, etc. Helps to explore various ways of saying things, really lowers the affective filter, and will probably keep you awake in class.
Another advantage of using very low level materials in an oral English class was that it opened up opportunities to work on independent learning skills, namely, I would expect a nine year old native English speaker to be able to carry out this task, which was invariably beyond the "copy the answers from the board" that my students were used to. The line I copied (from the same teacher) was "This will help us say what we know faster and better and allow us to learn more later."

This led to the debate(s)/presentations mentioned by another poster. If you have not seen it yet, you will... meaningless "throwaway" phrases that are horribly mispronounced and overused that ruin the impact of whatever they are saying, such as "as is well known, " "so on and so on," and (ironically) "such as." Search for and edit some kind of rubric and make clear what phrases you don't want to hear ("If you say 'as is well known,' American teachers are going to ask you to prove that it is well known, so if you can't do that, don't say that"). Find topics that are interesting to you (that will not get you deported) then let the students pick from them and go from there. I used topics from a "so so" oral English book then spent about four weeks of class time slowly working on their presentations ranging from explicit pronunciation of isolated phonemes, idioms that would be useful for their discussions, grammar (and how native speakers tend to speak in phrases versus choppy/isolated pronunciation) and syntax. Rinse and repeat.

When I first started, I found a website that I loved, full of lowlevel worksheets, but I found that students (ranging from kindergarten to adult) simply copied that answers from another student which defeated the purpose, so I used the ideas from the same site and didn't pass out the sheets. I think it was boggleesl.com, but it changed its name to (and automatically forwarded to whatever it is now). I tried to stay away from intermediate and advanced level grammar activities because I would always get "the [totally incomprehensible] Chinese professor said to write it this way" from students. So, basically I stayed away from tenses because the CTs would be beating hard and set rules into students that native level kindergarteners could have shot holes through; it isn't worth the fight.

If you have classes that seem to be very keen on studying abroad you can do a straight lecture on what you would expect young children to do and expand that up to uni age levels. For example, American second graders are expected to be able to do these academic things/standards but also display these problem-solving skills, while American university students will be able to do these other things regardless of their major (including asking questions of the professor, which can be a huge taboo for some Chinese students). This actually led to less lesson planning as the students realized it was not just enough to read from index cards in front of the class. Another teacher was reamed in front of her class for not providing all of the available answers for "What is your favorite color?" to students who were supposed to enter an Australian university in two months, so there was a huge disconnect between the expectations of the FT, the extraordinarily spoiled students, and the Chinese university. Publicizing "this is what you need to do if you leave China soon" can help to address realistic expectations while simultaneously opening up creativity and making your class more serious (you mean we can't just copy the board in classes outside China?).

Caveat, I only really went whole on the hog in terms of independent learning skills with about half of my classes because they were "populated" by students who had the means to actually leave China and study elsewhere, while the other classes didn't have the means or motivation to do more than glorified substitution exercises. If you have students who seem to pick up tasks extraordinarily fast or give answers that are wonderful and clearly are not copied from someone else, you have a student who went to school outside of China for a while. Those students tend to be very comfortable talking with FTs and also tend to be great sounding boards for ideas (but would never dream of doing this with CTs). I had one student who had been in Canada for only six months as a young child tell me that he had never done an activity I really wanted to do in Mandarin, much less in English. Was a good reality check in terms of not just linguistic complexity but the disconnect between expectations of the social abilities of uni students in the west and in China.

End of ramble.

Aloha,

XLB