Korean Job Discussion Forums

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If your local bookstore stocks the book series called �Can you believe it?� at all 3 levels, you�re in for a treat and easy way to get students talking. These books are based on little 6-picture cartoon-like stories. All you have to do is photocopy the picture stories and laminate them. If you do this with all the stories, you�ll end up with about 60!

Now of course in the book, these picture stories are designed to assist the learning of idioms and listening. I really recommend using the whole book proper with your students, but be careful. Lots of students have private English teachers with whom this series is very popular so they might have used it before�

However to possess a wad of these laminated picture cards is priceless. So many speaking tasks involve reading difficult and confusing instructions first for both you and them but here you just have visual prompts! Just give a picture story to each small group and get them to talk about what the story should be. Then they have to tell their story to the rest of the class. Next of course you can let the others see the pictures which each group had to work with and see if the others would have told it differently!

You should of course sit with each group in the prep stage and give useful vocab/structures. At the end of each performance, you can get each group to teach the others any useful language they learned from you. It�s also great if you can encourage the students to incorporate dialogue and acting in their storytelling!!

Finish off with language feedback (error correction) and Bob�s yer uncle.

Although this series is great source of picture stories, it�s not the only one and you will be able to find picture stories like these from many sources.

The main point is, this is a great and easy way to induce speech at any level, it is collaborative and allows the students to use what language they have to tell the story and is therefore a form of task-based lesson. What I mean is it is a welcome break from PPP where you teach the language that you want to get out of them first and then hope they will be good little Pavlov dogs�