Teacher Discussion Forums

I am a first time teacher and I will be teaching university students (classes of 40) conversation english in Korea starting in August.
I received the position through a friend and have absolutely no experience preparing lesson plans or lecturing. My teaching experience is limited to assisting (marking and answering questions) in courses that were already outlined by a professor.
Apparently I have no textbook to follow and it is up to me to prepare my own lesson plan.
I am not arriving until a few days before classes begin so I don't even have a feel for how well people in Korea speak english and what they are looking for when they want me to teach "conversation english".
I have seen that some people recommend textbooks like jazz english, but I can't seem to be able to find a copy of that book around here.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get ahold of some good structured lesson plans? I'd really like to have a solid outline of what I will be doing in class before I get there.
Most of the things I have found on the web don't have a whole lot of structure, and many of the game suggestions seem below the level of university students to me.
Thanks so much!!

Well, I think it is very difficult to plan a lesson if you don't have any idea about the group and the requirements of the course. In your situation, i would start searching the internet for some speaking activities but I would wait till the first class before doing any detail planning. Maybe you can prepare a survey for the first class in which you can ask the students what their expectations for the course are, their interests, etc. I suggest a multiple choice quizz with the possibility of adding whatever information they want. Then, you can prepare your syllabus based on that.
I hope you find this useful

Thanks so much for replying I think a survey is a great idea. I would still like to be somewhat prepared when I get there, so hopefully I can find some better resources online or a good textbook, but that will definately be a good way to get an idea of what the students think of my ideas and to make sure that they get the most out of the class.

I'm glad you find it useful. Good luck with your teaching.

Go to this page:

http://www.geocities.com/allhou/lessgames.htm

and scroll down to the section that says "lessons". The webpages you find there have a lot of lesson plans. You might want to print them out to get some ideas for lesson planning.