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[okyokotokyo]

I am pretty new to teaching so I was hoping I could find some advice here. I have about five adult private students. I would say their English is "intermediate," meaning we can have conversations although I have to speak slowly and repeat or rephrase often. All of them are very good at reading (though they have to reread the sentence a couple times before they actually comprehend it). They mostly need help with listening comprehension and speaking more naturally and more quickly.

All of them have requested homework from me, so my question is, do you have any ideas of homework I could give them? Right now, I do not use one specific book because I have not found one that's satisfactory (you can offer suggestions on that, too, if you have any). Instead, I present lessons from different books at each lesson, use short newspaper articles for reading/pronunciation practice and discussion, and converse.

In addition to speaking and listening, most of them want to work on their grammar too. I'd really appreciate any ideas you have for homework I can give them. Thanks.

[furiousmilksheikali]

If you're using newspaper articles as you say you are then give these out to the students to read for homework and provide plenty of comprehension questions for them. Suddenly, thrusting a newspaper article on a student who hasn't had time to think about the topic of the article means that they are going to have a very hard time understanding any of it at all.

The usual format for this is:

a) provide a "global question" which helps the student get an understanding for what the newspaper article is broadly about. Erase the headline and ask the students to read through it initially and think of their own headline, for example. If there is a picture then ask the students "Who is the girl in the picture?" "How did she become rich?" (depending upon the subject of the article, of course).

b) then provide some "closed" questions. These are usually true/false questions or other multiple choice qs. Eg. "She won the national lottery in Mexico T/F" or "Were her parents happy/sad?" etc...

c) then a few more questions involving rereading the article and having to write full sentences. For example: "What did she do with her winnings?" Try to write the questions in different words to the article otherwise it is too simple for the students or they may copy out answers without having to understand them. A question such as "Which charity did she give her money to?" is a bad one if the sentence in the article says "She gave her money to a charity called Free All Terrorists Abroad, Now!" A better one would be "What organization benefitted from her lottery win?" so that the students can look up the word and think about interpreting the article in some way even if they are unfamiliar with words such as "organization" or "benefit".

d) Have some discussion questions ready for the lesson so that after you have marked her homework you can ask the student "What would you do if you won the national lottery?" etc...

Alternatively, you can have Ss write diaries at home and then bring them in for you to mark and also discuss the things that they wrote about. This is particularly good for getting to know what the students are interested in and you'll find that they learn a lot more vocabulary that is relevant to their lives.

[alexcase]

Even if you haven't decided on a textbook for them (they sound Pre-Intish to me), if they need a mix of skills a workbook with CD from a textbook course might be your best bet. For general English I particularly like the English File workbooks. Headway is also okay.

[gaijinalways]

[alexcase]

It's a good tip to use stuff the students pick themselves and are interested in, but under no circumstances use authentic texts like newspaper articles with any class lower than genuine Intermediate (not Pre-Int, and certainly not false beginner!). They won't get a good range of skills and language, you will hit their confidence, and any language they learn they will never be able to use in the correct way. More of my views on this here:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/archives/155

[wintersweet]

Get some appropriate graded readers (I think Oxford and Cambridge both have online placement tests) on topics that they'd enjoy reading, and have them start reading these at home. They can give you weekly diaries or something (i.e., brief comments on the story, not graded for grammar or anything).

[alexcase]

That is much more like it, but make sure they get the CD too if they need listening practice and give them some advice and maybe practice in class of different ways to combine the two listening and reading components.