Job Discussion Forums

[7969]

we've read some dialogues in the text book and now i want to give my students an exercise where they create their own short dialogue. we will discuss further, what a dialogue consists of and i'll give them some possible situations in which they might find themselves. then i will ask them, in groups of four or five, to write a short dialogue.

however, when i try something of this nature, i have visions of most students staring at a blank piece of paper and doing nothing. does anyone have any ideas on how i can reduce the chance of failure here?

one last thing, i tried to keep the situation options simple, but i could only come up with a half dozen. the rest i thought would be too complicated.

warmest regards ~ 7969

[Burl Ives]

Chinese college students must be pleased to be so bored. I'm not kidding. Anything you can do to reinforce their chronic boredom will keep them in their comfort zone. Why not give them the following and tell them to make a dialogue where the first line is the question asked. It's a critical thinking exercise and the goal is to find as many answers as the sweethearts think possible.

Four hundred employers of young people in five major American cities were studied. The study drew this conclusion: "When recruiting young employees, employers consider in order of importance: appearance and dress, language and speech mannerisms, references and previous work experience. They rely primarily on appearance even though lack of reliability, not lack of proper appearance, is their major complaint about youthful employees." Why would employers place such an importance on dress?

Don't waste opportunities either. Circulate the text on one piece of paper and require each student to read one line while the remainder write. Who knew being tight with photocopy funds was a teaching plus!

If Vincent Ryan Ruggiero is out there watching, you wrote a good book, dude: The Art of Thinking.

And if that damn book becomes widely used in China, all y'all aerosols stay out of my city.