Korean Job Discussion Forums

mo · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2003 2:17 am Post subject: Low ability conversation classes.

As part of my new winter schedule my director has given me 'conversation only' classes with the dunces.

You see at my school I only teach the top kids, and the Korean teachers teach the dunces (no misuse of the term, belive me). Anyway, now I am being given two hours a day with classes of 13-15 year old teeneagers who can barely scrap a sentence together, and it's to be solely conversation ('free-style' as my director loves calling it).

My director doesn't grasp how difficult this actually is. He's dumped these on me before and just says 'Bichael Bichael, go talk, question answer question answer'. As I'm sure you can recognize, this lasts about 5 mins before they're bvored and I've run out of questions for them to look blankly at me for.

Getting to the point, does anyone have any advice on what to do for these classes?

SweetBear · Joined: 18 May 2003

I've had similar challenges. What I did was find a basic text book that has a lot of grammar in it. Get together 1 2 or 3 for example. I modeled my lessons around that in Q&A format or disguised as free talking ,as well as downloaded a bunch of stuff off the net, like from bogglesworld. I don't know how long your lessons are but if you teach them a little grammar and then throw in a few games or " activities" or vise-versa it may be less painful for both of you.
Take a look at the text books your hagwon already has lying around on hand, that can help.
Hope this does,
Sb

Mr. Pink · Joined: 21 Oct 2003 Location: China

You can't get blood from a stone.

If you must do free style, and no book here is what I might do:

Make a plan that involves conversation sentences you might use.

Then make a bunch of those and have them first learn how to fill in those sentences. For example, Where are you from? They have _______ are ______ from? or Where _______ you ________ ?

Now it might be boring, and hard to motivate them, but trust me 13-15yrs love bribes. Just bring some candy to class and make a game out of it. The person, or team them in pairs, so team that makes the most correct sentences/uses the most correct sentences gets the candy.

Once they get this into their heads, you can go with mini conversations and the pair that does it best, again gets a prize!

Eazy_E · Joined: 30 Oct 2003 Location: British Columbia, Canada

I'm in a similar situation: working two hours of overtime per week with strictly conversation classes. The kids are about the same age as yours: about 13. My boss asked me to evaluate them and separate the two classes according to level of English. Nothing about "dunces" though.

I've been at it for two weeks and I've actually found them to be my easiest and most enjoyable classes. We use a book explicitly for ESL conversation: it's published by Longman, can't recall the title except that it had "English Conversation" in it. It has a syllabus with a new conversation topic for each week, and ideas for activities. The book pretty much spells it out for you, and it's not hard to fill up a 50 minute class. My prep time is almost nil.

What I usually do is hand them the photocopy from the textbook so they can have a look, explain the topic in my Konglish, have them practice the conversation with a partner and then present to the class. I can say that they're already becoming more confident in speaking English with a native speaker. Most of these kids have studied English from books in public schools so they have some knowledge, but they've never been obligated to actually start speaking it. It also helps that they seem genuinely interested in speaking English. That might not be the case with your "dunces".

Holyjoe · Joined: 03 Mar 2003 Location: Away for a cuppa

What you could do is prepare some sort of conversation worksheet - ie write out a dialogue between 2 or 3 people, and have them roleplay it several times.
If you're using the bribe scenario then award points for volunteers or people who do it really well. Hopefully you should be able to spark sufficient interest in enough of the kids to carry the class from there.

Also an interview section goes pretty well too. I make similar worksheets for my conversation classes, and I have a section where I make 5 questions that they have to ask to another student in the class and get answers. Then I get them to present their answers to the class without saying who it was they interviewed (ie "the student likes playing computer games" / "the student wants to be a doctor" etc) then award points to whoever guesses which student they interviewed. An alternative is to get the student to read out the entire interview ("Jack likes soccer" / "Jack wants to go to New Zealand") and then ask memory questions ("where does Jack want to go?"), the first person to answer correctly gets a point.

Even just find a picture from the internet or from a movie and have them make up captions or to guess what the people are saying/doing can work well.

It's not strictly free-style but it gives you set situations which can often spark off different discussions, and more importantly it can get the students talking.

weatherman · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: Korea

Set up some easy information gap activities. If need be, you can give them the answers to go long with it too. Group work, where they have to ask their classmates various questions. Then go back and feed them some of the grammar hit during the exercises. Put up with the noise and confusion, do the exercises with them too.

coolsage · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004 8:26 am Post subject:

I don't envy your experience. From my hagwon zookeeper days, I recall that strucure is paramount. Yes, bring in a textbook, and the 'Let's Go' series is as about as good as it gets; lots of interactive stuff, music, chanting-- . If you must teach kiddos (and I stay the hell away from that gig these days), you need decent materials, not to say preparation. But that goes for any level of teaching.