Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi guys,

I recently did some volunteer english teaching in south america and I'm thinking about getting my certification and teaching professionally overseas. For now, though, I'm back in the USA for a few months. I told a friend in colombia that I'd teach her enlish using skype, messenger and email and I figure this would be a decent way to get some more experience. I don't have a problem coming up with activities and stuff, and with one-on-one lessons I'm sure a lot of the time will just be spent in conversation. What I'd really like to have, though, is some kind of sequential online textbook that we could both look at that would provide some structure - ie the first day we talk about greetings and salutations, the next day regular present tense verbs, etc... She has her own book there but I can't see it so obviously can't plan anything around it. Can anyone suggest something along these lines?

Thanks.

Hi Luke! I have a feeling that you'll ultimately have to pay (i.e. get an actual printed textbook) for detailed or really usable content, but you can get a fair idea of at least the "syllabuses" of certain textbooks from searching ELT publisher websites - for example, this from/for the Interchange series:
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/catalogue/ ... d-Sequence

You might also like to try searching for the posts by Lorikeet (our Mod) which link to an ESL syllabus she or others followed in teaching ESL in the US.

You may perhaps need to look up a few of the grammar terms (if so, try http://folk.uio.no/hhasselg/terms.html ) and obviously do some thinking to convert such relatively sparse contents pages and/or syllabuses into more relatable (teachable-learnable) contexts, however!

Then, there are a number of ELT textbook titles/ranges that seem to be becoming previewable, at least in part, on Google Books.

Wouldn't it be more fun to get a split screen and both have a news format on one of them, like BBC? The tests are usually based on English English if your friend is going to take one, so the BBC is good for vocabulary. Chose a story that you are both interested in and then take it apart, first for vocabulary and then for structure and explain anything the student doesn't understand or look it up and teach her how to do that. Then write a similar story together to understand the overall structure and how items of that genre are composed.

Hello,

When I have taught online ESL to individuals I used http://manythings.org. This site covers all major grammatical areas and there are activities. Good luck!


Andrew Lawton
http://drewseslfluencylessons.com