Teacher Discussion Forums

Ok, today we had the last class. I brought a list of words learned with example sentences for every student and we went through it. Then I showed the lesson plans I made when preparing lessons. I brought some drinks for everyone; at the end everyone read out some Chinese sentences from my Chinese te...

For today's lesson I decided to use 'job interview' as the topic. We sketched a list of an ideal employees qualities, and then I wrote down 2 similar lists that I found on internet. We compared them and extracted qualities that are present in at least 2 lists, thus creating an even more comprehensiv...

Last class there were no debates, no meetings. I was going to bring a movie about China in English, as my students suggested, but couldn't find the one I wanted to (The Year Of The Yao). I downloaded short videos from different movies and brought a laptop. First, I showed several videos without soun...

We agreed to have a business meeting class on Tuesday. Today there will be a debate about housing in China, whether it's better to rent or own. We decided on this topic together beforehand, so I hope everyone will be a little more prepared with their arguments. Please always feel free to share any i...

Last time we had students helping each other choose a topic for next presentation. This lesson I had a lot of unplanned free time, so I tried several new activities. The speakers-listeners game was boring, everybody said. I think they didn't understand what's the point of it, maybe it was too hard f...

Looking for things in the room is something we played in my Chinese class, I'll try it.
I also think that correcting mistakes has many disadvantages, it takes a lot of time and seems not to be useful and can make students uncomfortable; so, yes, better for others to ask interesting questions.

Today students presented their presentations' outlines. Then we tried several tongue twisters ("I sank you and you thanked me."). We also had a discussion on why there are so many road accidents involving bicycles in China. Teams gave their reasons in turns and got points in return. Then I took Crai...

This Tuesday I made my presentation for the class. It turned out to be not as good as I planned. I feared my presentation will be too complicated or too boring, so I was maybe too serious with it. Today the students will make their presentation drafts and we'll try to correct their mistakes together...

Thank you everyone for your ideas and comments. Sally, I found some tips on building a presentation and realized that I have a lot of work to do for my own sample presentation! I plan to hand out a list of hints on creating a presentation, go over it with the students, explain everything they are no...

Sally, I want to go into the projects area, so I maybe need some ideas on its details. One of my students plays a classical Chinese instrument, so she could cover it in her presentation, and I've been thinking of giving a quick example presentation for an acoustic guitar, so she could see the simila...

Yes, thanks for giving out these ideas, I'll think them over. If anything else comes to mind, please post it here, it's the more the better for me. Today I wanted to go over the grammar point of unit 1 in their book, which is 'I like it, when...', 'I'd prefer someone, who...', etc. Again, it took mo...

Ok, I see; yes, there's a 15 minutes break that every teacher has to have during the 2,5 hours. I also want to ask if you could advise on what activities would be suitable for when I divide them by interests, like Sally suggested. For example, I have a couple of students who are working with electro...

Thanks, James,

just one question so far: what do you mean by splitting them into two groups? I understand I'd have to split them into several if we play games or having a discussion, did you mean something else?

I finished the first class today, and it was much better than I expected. Students are young, around 20-30 years old all of them, and there were 10 people in the class, which felt like the perfect number. We introduced ourselves for the first hour, than discussed the poll hand-out in pairs, like Sal...

Hello, I am an English teacher in China, with previous experience of teaching children 5-15 years old only. This Tuesday I am starting a new 12 lessons course of adult conversational English. I looked through ESL Cafe's forums and found some activitiess I might use as an unexperienced adult ESL teac...