Oh my, there must be as many answers to this question as there are ESL teachers! I teach a noncredit CALL class for adults at a community college in the U.S. My students range in age from 18 to 75, and come from many countries (Asian countries include Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Thailand, others include Mexico, Columbia, Russia, Ukraine, Eritrea, France, well, you get the idea.)
I teach the class ten hours a week as part of my full-time load. Two days a week we go to the computer lab, and they work using the Internet, doing quizzes and going to websites and answering questions. This portion is individualized, so students who can go faster do more, but everyone starts in the same place.
The other three days a week are a regular ESL classroom. In our school that means we teach a little of everything. I don't use a book per se, but I have them all buy the same ESL dictionary (English/English). Each of the three days has one exercise using the dictionary. It can be one where they work by themselves, or where they work together. One set of exercises has worksheets that ask questions about information found in the dictionary, to help them realize it is much more than just looking up meanings (especially the ESL dictionary, which has some extras). Another set of exercises involves pronunciation and understanding the symbols in the dictionary so that students can figure out the pronunciation of words by themselves. The third one is a card exercise they do in pairs. (They call this a "game.") The card exercises are either a match of prefix, root word, and meaning (information from the dictionary prefix list and looking up the root words), a match of sentence and word (they look up the word to see which sentence it fits in), or a match of two-part conversations in which one of them has an idiom (they look up the idiom and see where the other part of the conversation is).
I also give one dictation a week, in which I give them a worksheet with one word from a sentence already listed. They listen to the dictation of the sentence three times at regular native speaker speed, and write what they hear. All of the usual reductions and liaisons are kept. Then they compare with another student, and I read the sentences again 3 more times--fast, slow (with all the reductions and liasons, etc., but very slowly) and fast. Then we check it together and I mark what strange things happen in spoken American English.
I also do other exercises. Some of these include taking a long conversation (14 parts, for example) and cutting it into strips and having them put it back together while working in pairs; having students work in pairs to unscramble a sentence. (Sentence is cut so each word is on a single piece of card and put in an envelope along with two words that are extra. They have to make the sentence by dumping out the words and putting them together, leaving out two words. When each pair finishes, they return the words to the envelope, return it to the desk and take another envelope until everyone has done each sentence. Then we correct together and discuss other possible answers to the one the teacher thought of.)
I also give grammar explanation sheets and grammar homework which they are supposed to do at home, but which I check at the beginning of class the next day.
I also have them discuss different topics on one day, and then write something about the topic on the next day. I've been putting my student responses up on the Internet. (They have the option of telling me it's "private" and then I don't use it.) At the end of last semester, when I had them fill out an evaluation, I found they all thought this was very interesting and they said they really enjoyed reading what the other students had written. (I correct obvious errors, but leave in the "flavor".)
Hmm well, this is getting kind of long (That's what summer vacation and 33 years of teaching experience gets ya.) If anyone is interested in looking at what my students did (and if you could stand to read this far), you can check my webpage at
http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried If you click on Student Writing, you will see examples from last semester.
