Teacher Discussion Forums

My girlfriend and I will be teaching conversational English to 25-30 Malaysian Adults, from 9pm-11pm, 5 days a week, for one month. We are doing this as volunteers, and the program we are working with is offering the course free of charge and is not affiliated with any educational institution. The first night of class is March 6th, which leaves us about a month to prepare ourselves, our plans, and our materials.

According to our contact the students have a basic knoweldge of the English language, however details about the students themselves and our facilities are still pretty vague to us. Our contact person has taught English before and we were told that she was gathering some materials for us, but I would like to have some backup materials, just in case. The course is being geared towards the eco-tourism industry, so that the students will have better opportunities to obtain emerging jobs in the growing industry.

While i'm searching the boards and the Idea Cookbook for, well, Ideas, I'd like to hear from those in the field who may have helpful ideas of their own. With only a month available to teach and a desire to really help the students I want to do all I can. Any ideas? Thanks.

Hello GlobalKSP,

Welcome to Dave's!

One thing from your post jumps out at me - and that's the hour of the lessons. Do these students work during the day? If so, the biggest challenge will be to create a learning environment when what they really want to do is go home and sleep!

So, it would be good to prepare lessons with a good variety of activities. for example, listening, reading, discussion, presentations, role play, etc, etc. Have a few short 'wake up' activities ready in case the pace begins to flag.

There are lots of teacher's sites on the internet, make sure you search with keywords like 'tourism ESL' or 'environment teaching ESL', etc.

Please lets us know how it goes!