Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nevermindb]

How should I go about teaching conversational English? I'm not sure how to organize my lesson plans. What material should I use to teach conversational English also? I just have no clue how to plan it out. Help please!

[nevermindb]

Oh yeah...I'm teaching beginner English college students.

[MarionG]

There's a series of English language teaching books by Raymond Murphy and published by Cambridge. They're wonderful, although the one I have is English English, not American English. Look them up on Amazon.com just to see which ones there are, and the order. You can buy them in Korea.

In Korea English seems to be considered to be several different subjects, grammar, writing, reading, vocabulary and conversation. These different "subjects" are seldom, if ever, coordinated.

My boss considers Murphy's books to be "grammar" therefore inapporpriate for my conversation classes. I've used them anyway, copying pages from my book, with considerable success.

[PRagic]

Will you be teaching at a university, or just teaching college students? If you will be teaching at a university, it's interesting that you actually got the job!

Good luck.

[yingwenlaoshi]

Use your mouth.

[spliff]

Wow, what sort of "teacher" doesn't know how to teach.

[tomek1]

Just pick a topic and talk about it.

[yingwenlaoshi]

[makemischief]

[yingwenlaoshi]

[mistermasan]

how many per class?

[makemischief]

[yingwenlaoshi]

OP,

I don't know the level of your students or how many you have in the class. I makes a difference. But the following link should keep you going for a while if you have intermediate of higher level students:

http://www.tefl.net/esl-lesson-plans/esl-worksheets-tp.htm

It's really hard to say. I don't know about those sites offered earlier in the thread. First of all, they're really hard to navigate and nothing jumps up at you. It's like you need a magic ring to find anything on that eflclassroom site.

Anyway, don't jump ahead of yourself. Just get a feel of what level the students are at. Keep it simple if their levels are low. Really low level adult students should be learning what the kids are learning: English Time and Let's Go. But they'll be too embarrassed to or something. It's really quite ridiculous at times...

[The Hammer]

Use your arms. No!
Use your mouth. No!
Use your brain. Yes!

[jinks]

OP:
Korean students like "free talking". Choose an interesting topic for your first meeting, but more importantly choose some key phrases and vocabulary and bang away at them. Create as many opportunities as possible for your students to listen to and to say the key words over and over.
A successful lesson will have a clear outcome - not just a chat session - students should be charged with a specific task such as: ranking discussion items in some kind of order ( e.g. what's the best type of vacation: camping, foreign travel, luxury hotel, relaxing at home, road trip?), reporting back to the class, challenging another group's opinion etc.
You could invite the students to suggest topics for the next week's lesson, but remember free talk alone is not enough, there has to be an acheivable outcome and a clear teaching point (grammar or vocabulary), even if your boss or students insist that it is just a conversation class.