Korean Job Discussion Forums

[dcrayne]

Just wondering what's the best way to teach a Freshman English class? Students are not good speakers. The University classes are 3 hours long. We have a textbook and I've been putting them into groups of 4 to practice.

[laogaiguk]

[dcrayne]

why do you ask? the hogwan life not as great as you expected? I got the job like everyone else. I interviewed for it. I'm just looking to get some other ideas about how to make the classes as interesting and fun as possible.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I suspect that it's not that different from high school. The trick is to try to make a game out of whatever you can. Divide them into a few groups and get a bit of competition going. That always helps the time fly by and keeps everyone's attention.

[Hanson]

I'm teaching mostly Freshman classes, and I find short-to-medium length activities with a bit of physical movement thrown in works best. By short-to-medium, I mean activities ranging from simple 5-minute activities to 20-minute activities. If the activities are too long, my students lose their focus and the effectiveness of the lesson decreases. By physical movement, I mean mingling, standing, running dictations, and the like.

As far as speaking goes, mingling activities work great. Getting students to find out information from other classmates in a controlled manner gets the job done nicely.

For example, if you are working on invitations, as well as accepting and declining an invitation, you could get students to invite each other to do things with them and fill in the information on a pretend weekly planner. You could do this activity in stages and break down the lesson into mini-activities; 1- Making an invitation (as a class, write up on board), 2- Accepting & Rejecting an invitation (brainstorm), 3- Prepositions (on Friday, at 3:00, in the afternoon - Fill in the blanks), 4- Time (a quarter past seven, half past five - game/activity), 5- Mingling activity (students talk to each other, inviting, accepting, declining invitations), 6- Recap, share students' information found during the mingling.

Groups of 4 can be good, but it can be limiting as well. I like to mix it up. Group activities, class activities, pairwork, etc.

The most important thing is to make the students want to participate, and mixing things up works well for me.